It occurs to me that I’ve been writing for about a decade now. It also occurs to me that that feels like a long time. I’m sure older-me will get a good kick out of that. And as thoughts race through my mind at midnight right before the end of a vacation from work, that all got me thinking on the nature of writing - what makes good writing. Under the characters, under the conflict, under the through line. At its very core, what is this all about? The answer: Emotional Truths
Non-fiction is for conveying factual truths, fiction is for conveying emotional truths.
Being able to enable someone to experience terror and physical strain as they’ve never known before stepping through page after page of the process of sinking and drowning in Sebastian Junger’s The Perfect Storm. Enabling them to experience that haunting indescribable dread of the unknown as they’re confronted with the unexplainable in Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves. Feeling hope and generational rage that you didn’t know you had in you pouring through Pierce Brown’s Red Rising. At the end of the day, what these books convey is something that in many ways is more true than basic facts ever can be, how it feels. All of it, everything, anything, how life feels, how things that will never happen feel, all of these aspects of ourselves we wouldn’t have the privilege of exploring otherwise. The words on the page might convey fake dragons, unrealistic spells, contrived conflicts, and a-bit-too-convenient dialogue - but laced between them, underpinning all of these components, is a nugget just as real as any text book.
A small note and warning to the reader. This post might be a bit more zoomed out and ranting than my usual posts. I write it because I do still think there are a lot of concrete things to say, and realizations that are worth putting words to, even if they aren’t quite as actionable as usual.
This is why contradiction works so well in writing and characters.
People are good at feeling emotions. If you haven’t noticed, we do it quite a lot. Anger, Happiness, Sadness, Bravery, etc. Or hell, let’s be even more specific. Feeling what it’s like to poignantly stand victorious on a battlefield after giving it your all. Feeling what it’s like to see and depart brain-shattering wisdom that no one else in the kingdom had considered. Feeling what it’s like to actually be able to solve all your problems in life. All of these little truths, these emotions, these moments - writing is almost always more than delivering them in a clean and distilled fashion.
You’ll laugh when I say this, but most folks know what it feels like to valiantly slay a dragon. They already know how it feels to poignantly die on a field in delicate snow after losing a duel between champions. They know what it feels like to feel angry and mad. There is already a glorious amount of media and art out there, and it has already covered the basics. As kids, we already ingested all of this growing up from a young age, and rightfully so, it’s awesome! But now we want more, we want better. We crave, no demand something more. As authors, we create that in interesting ways when we blend these truths.
Specifically, we authors hit these notes best when we provide the unexpected, when we serve up the repugnant awful truths that underpin our mundane lives, when we speak to the indignant that we all pretend isn’t there. When that cardiologist pushes aside all logic to go smoke behind the dumpster on his lunch break because it feels fucking good. Yes, he has shame, but inside of that there is a seed of carnal satiation, of satisfaction, of relief, acceptance, and contentness in this routine. It’s his quiet time, his salvation from a noisy world. And deep down, he loves it. When a wife decides after years of torturous debate to divorce her husband. Yes they’ve been drifting for years. Yes, she’s heartbroken herself to watch herself inflict this pain on someone she used to love. The tears are streaming, the emotions are flying… but it also feels damn good. There’s a seed of joy in there. Knowing that, without someone to hold his life together, Robert will completely fall apart. He will no longer have a safety net, and all of his bad choices and decisions will blow up in his face. He’ll absolutely forget to pick up his mom’s medication from the store in three weeks, and he’ll get that concerned silent phone call from her a week later when she isn’t feeling well. And then he’ll finally realize it’s his fault. He won’t do his laundry for work because he’ll be plopped down throwing back beers watching the big game. But when he goes to work looking like a slob, people will know his true nature. The truth will get out, and everyone will know that Samantha had been the one thing holding him together this whole time. Tying all of that complicatedness, all of those stakes, to real world, relatable, things. Here, let’s do one with some of the highest stakes the human race has ever faced, literally. It’s not a novel emotional truth to plunge someone into feeling Truman’s moral confliction after his tragic decision to drop the atomic bomb… but what about under that, deeper? The fact that he felt good about that decision. I’m serious. He felt content and satisfied. He publicly defended that decision for the rest of his life (almost certainly he was publicly glossing over some more complicated emotions there, but sticking to the example here…). Plunging someone into his mind, into feeling content with green lighting one of the worst tragedies humanity has ever known, as horrifying as it is in all of its emotional truth.
There is a certain feeling you get when someone has just told you something so true, that you could not put it into words.
This can happen in any form, not only in books, it’s what art is all about. Protest signs and gravestones are often the absolute best at this, at doing this in a punchy way. When you read Leonard Matlovich’s grave for the first time, “[w]hen I was in the military, they gave me a medal for killing two men and a discharge for loving one,” you can’t help but feel a chill down your spine. A tingle washes over you. An understanding, a window into, a distilled emotional truth that is just impossible to fully speak to ever. It’s powerful stuff.
That art, reflecting things back at ourselves that are so true we can’t even put them into words, it’s impossible to fake. It’s hard as hell to come up with. But you know it when you see it. When you encounter a new emotional truth for the first time, that shit hits you like a bus. In an extremly NSFW example, I made the mistake of trying to play through Doki Doki Literature Club (a video game on Steam, which if you don’t know, is an Internet famous meme for dressing itself up to look like a stupid anime-waifu saga but actually has way deeper content that you disturbingly unlock as you press forward). [Mild spoiler alert] After being forced to make a series of decisions, and own them, for hours and hours of playing the first section - that game taught me what it feels like to drive someone else to committing suicide, and to feel 100% responsible for having caused that. I immediately turned off the computer, and was fucked up for about three days after - and I’m a pretty emotionally stable dude!
Adrian Tchaikovsky’s Children of Time book absolutely changed my understanding of this concept, or at least, he gave me the ability to put this concept that we all know to be true, into words. No spoilers here, but in that book, there is a civilization who socially has two different constructs of comprehension. And they talk about them completely differently as if they were the color red and blue, flavors vanilla and chocolate, etc. There is ‘To Know’, and then there is ‘To Understand’. To know something is to have abstractly learned it. That is to have read something in a text book, to have been told it. To understand something is to have experienced it, to innately comprehend it without the need to think or sympathize at all.
Using an abstract example as to not ruin the book, lets pretend we’re a medieval warrior having experienced a hand cannon for the first time, we just watched the dude to our left have his chest plate blown straight threw as a lead bullet tore through his plate, and chest, and dramatically exploded out of the other side. A General or a King hearing this explained to them for the first time would certainly be more grateful than not. “You’re saying some dude from the other side of the battlefield took out a stand, and leveled a spear looking thing on it, pulled a lever, and next thing you know the dude next to you was immediately run through? Wow.” But a king learning and knowing for the first time in that way isn’t really the same as understanding, is it? He doesn’t get the loud boom that goes with pulling that trigger, the cloud of smoke that pools up, the smell - the fear of knowing your shields and armor are completely useless as long as you are in sight. How close that entire unit is from routing after seeing that. The disgusting visceral wound that a ballistic projectile causes. How instant it is, and the force behind it. But our soldier that was there, he understands. Where as someone who ‘knows’ might turn to their armorer and request they make double thick armor so the bullets don’t fly through it anymore, someone who ‘understands’ would tell their soldiers to shed their armour entirely - it’s all meaningless against that, it’s best to be faster and mobile to just avoid getting hit in the first place.
I go on that entire rant to say, art is about conveying an understanding of emotional truths that facts and studies can never convey.
Science conveys intelligence, art conveys wisdom. History and science tell us what happened, art tells us why, context, and how we felt about it.
Science is a tool for us to know things, but art is a tool for us to understand things.
I’m now being a dumb stupid philosopher at 2am in the morning, I know (although I’ll almost certainly wait a while to actually post this), but having words to articulate that has helped me I think. When you look at Francisco Goya’s Saturn Devouring His Son painting, you instantly comprehend the deep pain in that man’s life. When you hear Credence Clear Water Rival's Fortunate Son song start to play, you instantly feel that disillusionment and grit (and thanks to Hollywood, likewise a ton of Vietnam Movie vibes). When you see the famous full panel manga drawing of Jojo approaching Dio for the big battle in Stardust Crusaders (Dio’s World, Part 10, Chapter 256), you instantly feel that the whole world revolves around them and that conflict in that moment, and the disdain Jojo harbors for Dio. It’s when art speaks to emotional truths like this, especially ones your craving or susceptible to, that it’s at it’s finest.
Trying to steer this towards more actionable take aways now… some emotional truths are just plain harder to write than others. An easy one for most is anger. We’ve all experienced anger. Sure, maybe there are niche types and levels of anger we have not: the anger at having your house burned down and insurance not covering it leaving you completely financially ruined, the anger of someone hurting a loved one of yours and having no power to change that, the anger at one’s self for having said that one thing you really shouldn’t have to your now ex-significant other and having ruined the best thing you ever had going for you. Yes, yes, sure, but your average young adult at that point in their lives still understands anger to like, an 80% degree, certainly enough to speak to it in interesting ways.
In my experience, two really difficult emotional truths to speak to, are anything involving wisdom or intelligence. Intelligence you can usually overcome. What Sherlock Holmes realizes in an instant might have taken an author a month of pondering to piece together. And we’ve got the internet these days, research has never been easier. This can get a bit harder if you’re playing Dungeons and Dragons and have to role play someone more intelligent than yourself in real time, but, acting snarky and always injecting annoying details usually gets you most of the way there if you’re really in a real time pinch.
However, speaking to anything involving wisdom that you don’t have, that’s hard. Writing an older character who has good insights, a veteran who’s really been through the ringer. Writing someone who’s always just one step ahead because they innately understand the subject at hand - that’s hard. That’s especially hard if you’re not old and experienced yourself. And funny enough, it’s when Wit speaks in Brandon Sanderson’s The Way of Kings that I’m most engaged, it’s these moments of emotional truths involving wisdom that I’m always most engaged with.
If you find yourself at a wisdom gap, wishing you had just that much more, so you could inject it into your work - lucky for you, there’s one place that all of history’s wisdom has been stored for our consumption: art. I’m certainly craving this. The best, and most common, writing advice you will get all of the time is to read, like, a lot. This is partially because of that (and so many other things). Immersing yourself in all of the understanding and context of all of the emotional truths you can get, especially the ones that interest you most, goes a long way to help you to write interesting emotional truths yourself. That’s certainly my plan anyways.
This is always funny advice. Good, but funny. Studying is helpful too. Just like the gym, anything that has you coming back for more to enjoy and engage with the activity is a win. But, intellectually knowing a lesson is just never as valuable as having experienced it and now understanding it. Knowledge is never as good as experience, when you can get it. But this advice has multiple aspects to it.
There is a useful nugget in there for beginners, and a useful one for veteran authors. This advice is usually told to novice authors to get their heads out of theory and text books and to just do the damned activity. Just like with Dungeons and Dragons, it is an acknowledgment that oftentimes people like the idea of them doing an activity more than having to actually commit and follow through on continually showing up and doing it. Likewise, as just stated, the best way to get better at something is just to do it a whole ton. But there’s a deeper, expert, utility there too. Oftentimes for experienced authors, they have nuggets of emotional truths sitting within them all day and night. Little things that have annoyed you, burdens you carry, chips on your shoulder you’ve been itching to address for decades. Thoughts without outlets. And oftentimes when you “just write”, you instinctively go to write what’s interesting to you, what you want to say. It’s when you’re absolutely cruising along writing at a full clip and the words can’t get onto the page fast enough to keep up with your brain that you’ve almost certainly tapped into an emotional truth - and you can tell, because it’s compelling, because the words are racing out of you and your hearts is going and you’re in the feels.
Enjoy!