Author Questions: What’s the best advice you’ve acted on?

This is an ongoing series of “questions every author avoids answering” (based on this video by Dale L. Roberts) and my answers to them. I recommend every author ask themselves these same questions to better understand themselves and their art.

Question:

What’s the best advice you’ve acted on?

The quick answer:

Good writing is emotional writing.

The long answer:

There’s a book entitled The Emotional Craft of Fiction, by Donald Maass. On the back of my copy of the book, the blurb says “engage your readers with emotion” and “If you want to write strong fiction, you must make your readers feel. The reader’s experience must be an emotional journey that aligns with your characters’ struggles, discoveries, and triumphs.” If you don’t have this book, dear author, I highly recommend you purchase it and read it.

This, to me, is the one best piece of advice I’ve ever found for writing compelling fiction. It goes of other forms of entertainment, too, such as poetry, script writing, memoir, acting, composing, singing, sculpting, or dancing. Anything that uses your creativity is a place to insert your emotions.

Have your characters react emotionally. Make them struggle. Torment them. Have them claw their way out of the holes they’ve dug, only to be kicked back down and have to struggle back up and finally climb out. The reader will be right there with them experiencing the moments of struggle, sadness, and joy. Take them on an emotional rollercoaster. That’s what fiction is for, after all. It’s to experience all the things that we are afraid or unable to experience in real life, and to walk in the shoes of someone else for a little while. Keep it exciting. Never be boring.

And it needs to be emotional for you, as the author, as well. Feeling angry about the state of the world? Lonely? Happy about a success? Whatever you are feeling, pour it into your writing that day. Everything an author writes has some little bit of the writer’s persona in it. You can’t help it. So own it! Pour your feelings into your words. It will come through to the reader and bring with it a powerful impact.

Cheers and happy reading!