21.39: Write What You Feel

Reflecting personal history in fiction

0:00This episode of Writing Excuses has been brought to you by our listeners, patrons, and friends. If you would like to learn how to support this podcast, visit www.patreon.com slash writingexcuses. Season 21, episode 39.

0:19This is Writing Excuses. Write what you feel. Tools, not rules. For writers, by writers. I'm Mary Robinette. I'm Dong Wan. I'm Erin. And I'm feeling stuff. It's good that you're feeling stuff because... The alternative would be terrible. The alternative would be terrible. This episode, we are talking about how to take your personal history and reflect that in your writing. A thing I think about a lot is Connie Willis once wrote, I think in an introduction to a short story that she published,

0:56about how you don't need to have gone to alien worlds to write about them, that nothing is stranger than your neighbor's Tupperware party or something along those lines, right? That your lived experience can truly inform anything that you want to write, no matter how speculative, no matter how much of a reach it seems initially. You can take the experiences that you have in your life, which I promise you are interesting. I know a lot of people think their lives aren't that interesting or think that they're boring.

1:26But the internal emotions that you feel, the experiences that you have are translatable and legible to other people through fiction in ways that I think are very affirming and joyful and fascinating. So, I kind of want to talk this week about how do you do that? How do you take your lived experience and put that into your work? I find that there's a couple of different ways that I can approach that. One is that I can take an actual event that has happened. I can take emotions that have happened.

1:58I can take a place that has happened, that I've been a person that I know that... Why did you look at me when you said that? Howard, you're definitely not in any of my stories at all, anywhere. I would never do that. And that these are all things that are accessible to me. And as Connie Willis says, you know, that they are things that are... My normal is somebody else's weird.

2:30Like, my family has a Christmas Eve talent show. That with, like, fourth cousins that are there. And growing up, that was completely normal to me. And the older I get, the more I'm like, oh, no, that's really weird, actually. It's not something that most people have. And so, I can take that and I'm like, well, what is it like to have a big family get together? That is, you know, we're having our... I think it's... This year will be our 70th annual Christmas Eve dinner.

3:03Wow. Right? Yeah. And that's weird. As you heard from the reaction.

Describing physical and emotional pain

3:10I take... I take a different approach. I look at the actual things that I'm feeling and I try to wrap words around them. You know, my back hurts. Well, that's not enough. Use your words, Howard. Describe the pain. Describe how it makes you feel about what needs to happen next. You know, I don't want to get out of this chair. Not because it hurts to stand up. Because it hurts to twist. You know, just putting that much effort into describing what I'm actually feeling.

3:45Now I have a whole bunch of words to help the reader feel what I'm having the character feeling. One thing you see a lot in media, whether it's movies, books, games, whatever, is this idea that you need to appeal to the broadest audience. That you want to reach every reader that's out there. However, in my personal experience and what I find interesting in fiction, what I see succeeding as a narrative experience for people is specificity. The more specific you are, the broader you can actually be in your appeal.

4:17Because when you're specific about an experience in an emotion, a relationship, that is legible to people because people are also experiencing similar things all the time. And that's what lets you write about fantastic worlds or unusual situations is the very normal, relatable feeling that somebody is having over experiencing pain. That might be because you threw your back out getting out of your office chair or because you got shot by a spy, right? Like, the emotion you feel is going to be somewhat similar.

4:48There's things you can find there that are relatable. And the dynamics you have with the people around you are legible. Yeah, a lot of times I like to think about, like, the specificity of, like, not just what I'm thinking or what I'm doing, but how I have thought through things at a specific moment. For example, you know, if I'm writing about a character who is deluding themselves about something, I love to kind of re-seat myself into a moment when I had a crush on someone and convince myself they were, like, in love with me, but they weren't kind of thing.

5:18Which is, like, an experience many people have where you're like, oh, they, like, shifted in their seat two inches towards me. It means something. It means nothing. But I, like, thought that in that moment I was very caught up in it. What happened? I was hyper-aware of them. So that hyper-awareness of another person's physicality is something that then I can take whether or not they're aware that the person next to them is an alien or whatever is happening. It's about the, like, the specificity of the emotion. What is the way in which I have experienced this? What is the way in which I'm feeling this and how can I put this on the page?

5:51One of our guests in the past, Desiree Birch, who's a phenomenal stand-up comedian, said exactly this thing, which is the more universal, the more specific you are, the more universal it is. And so with emotions, I do the same thing.

Tracking somatic details and emotions

6:04And I will, like, since we are very much tools, not rules, let me give you some things to think about consciously. The next time you're actually experiencing a big emotion, this is how you can tell you're a writer, is that you're going to sit there and go, can I use this? But think about, like, what are your muscles doing? What is your heart rate doing? When you think back to that emotion, how does the temperature, you know, that moment when the room is suddenly, you're blazing hot or you're suddenly cold, those people record those because that's a thing you experience.

6:37How sensitive do you become to sound or touch or lights? What is your breath doing? And then, like, your thoughts, you know, what are you paying attention to? Do your thoughts feel smooth or are they skipping around? How is your memory attached to this? I think all those somatic things are really, really wonderful. That's such a way to render the experience of having an emotion. I think it's also important to understand what the feeling is. And so there's a tool that's called the feelings wheel that can be very, very useful here.

7:11And that will, it is sort of three concentric circles or maybe two concentric circles. I can't remember off the top of my head. But the feelings wheel is very useful because it has the broad feelings of, like, anger or disgust. And then it, as you narrow down, you can get to more and more specific slices of what those feelings actually are. And you get to be able to be incredibly concrete and specific about it. So, honestly, when I'm playing D&D, I have the feelings wheel on the table for anyone to look at. And that can be a prompt for people to be like, oh, this is what my character is going through right now.

7:42Here's how I can be specific about that. And I think you can do that with your characters, with your writing, or even, I mean, honestly, it's a therapeutic tool. If you're struggling with understanding your emotions, keep the feelings wheel around. Keep it pulled up on your phone. It can be really, really helpful. This is completely bizarre, but you just reminded me of something that Elsie, my talking cat, does, which is she does not have a word for excited. And she will say, scared happy. And I'm like, yeah, that's actually it. Yep, that is excited.

8:14Making notes about the things that you're feeling and how you're feeling them, you know, the refining of the feelings wheel. I haven't actually looked at the feelings wheel, but I remember that discovering it decades ago that I had two kinds of anger. There was an icy anger that was, like, deep in my heart, and there was a hot anger that was in my, the heat was in my forehead.

8:46And they were, those were very visceral feelings for me.

8:51And, and just that refinement, it's not just the emotion you're having, but there's a, there's a metabolic aspect to it. We had a conversation at my house a couple of weeks ago about trauma and how trauma isn't a thing that happens to you. Trauma is a metabolic state. And describing the traumatized in terms of what their metabolism is doing is one of the ways where, I mean, maybe you've never had PTSD.

9:22Maybe you've never had a full-on panic attack, but you probably had your heart race. You probably felt worried that someone was going to jump out and get you. And so by using some of those things, a person who's never had the experience can read what you've read and can assemble that experience for themselves. When we come back from the break, I would love to talk about the experiences themselves, how to reuse those. Years ago, I changed my diet to include lots of fresh foods.

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Four modes of using real experiences

13:08All right. Now that we've had a little bit of a break, I want to talk about when there's like a really cool experience that you have had or an event and you're like, oh, this would make a great story. Or you don't, you know, sometimes you can use it, sometimes you can't, like sometimes you think about it immediately. But I think there's kind of four modes, and I'd love to think of what your opinions are on how to use an experience. You can use the exact experience, just import that entire thing exactly as it happened into your story. You can use an analogous experience.

13:40So, for instance, I have never done, I've never been in an actual space suit in the neutral buoyancy lab, but I have been in a swimming pool, I have done puppetry, and I know analogously what those gloves feel like. You can do an exaggerated version, which is like, you drop one plate, your character drops 15. And then there's the what if, which is what if, you know, those, especially with the, ooh, that was a close call. What if it went the other direction?

14:13Well, I really like that framework in terms of those four sort of different outcomes. The other way I think about it, and I think these work together really, really well, is there's a difference between feeling, thought, and action. Those are the three layers that kind of go into any decision you're making, any moment you're experiencing. So, you can also play with those levels of where the similarity is. They could feel the same things, they could think the same things, and make a different choice. They could feel the same thing, draw a different conclusion from what you did in your moment, and then make a choice based on that thought, right?

14:48And if you separate those out, and in your moment when you're experiencing something, if you can look at your feelings wheel, find where you are on the feelings wheel, and then decide, okay, what thought am I having now? What conclusion am I drawing from this? And then, what choice am I making? What action am I taking? That gives you levers to play with to draw on your experience, but have your characters end up in different analogous situations, like you're talking about, Mary Alvinette. I think action is one of the really interesting pieces of this, because I think there is a lot of, like, cultural beliefs about how we act in specific situations that are, like, the way that characters have acted.

15:25So, it's like, I just got dumped. I'm going to go eat ice cream. Everyone does this. This is a thing we all do. And it's like, is that true? I don't know. Maybe you just eat ice cream on Sundays and it has nothing to do with your emotional state. And I think something that's fun and that you can get to if you're journaling or just if you think about it or, like, what are 10 weird things you've done when you were mad? Like, what are just, like, what are six odd things or normal things, whatever, what are six things you do when you are sad? Because I think sometimes in the moment, it just feels like it's hard to parse it, but later you can look back and figure out what those actions are, and then you can use those actions as you're talking about to connect the feelings to the actions.

16:03I feel like sometimes those get disconnected in a certain way because we don't always act the way we wish we had, especially when feelings are high. And so, we revise back what we think we did, and we actually erase the real human truth of how we acted in that moment. You just made me remember a thing that you said many episodes ago that I always go back to, which is identity as a verb. And that's very much, I think, in this, what we're talking about with this is that the actions that your character takes, because they have a different identity, may be different than the ones you took in that moment.

16:39Well, and you talking about this has reminded me that there's also a fourth layer that you can think of, which is belief. And it's belief or instinct kind of, if you think of it as a stack, it's like belief slash instinct is below, feeling is above that, thought is above that, action is above that, right? And, you know, the belief or instinct, whatever this ingrained societal expectation is, which could be as concrete as you eat ice cream when you're sad, is a thing that your character is going to instinctively respond to.

17:10And then they're having the feeling on top of that, and then thought. So when you're playing with the belief layer, what you're playing with is your world building, your societal level, and your cultural level, right? The fundamental belief of an East Asian culture is going to be different in some cases from a Western culture. So how somebody responds to a stimulus is going to be a different feeling, thought, and emotion. The feeling might be something that you can relate to, but then think about how does thought and action differ? So, using a very concrete example from some of my writing, Elma in The Calculating Stars is a mathematician, and so her comfort thing is to reach for math.

17:50Math is very far away from being my comfort thing. It is like zero. So what I would do is I would think, okay, here's my comfort thing, and then I would swap it for something that made sense in hers. I think that when you're – I would also do this because she is Jewish, and I'm like, and I am not. And so here is my comfort based on the lens that I grew up with. What comfort would she be reaching for in a similar thing? And I think that if you've ever read or watched something and felt like, you know, some of the characters, secondary characters especially, were two-dimensional, you know, spear carriers, cardboard cutouts,

18:33you apply this exercise to one secondary character, and someone who did this really well, and it was in, been so long, Red Storm Rising by Tom Clancy, we POV switch a lot. And we get people who are functionally spear carriers who are only on the page for – only in the book for, you know, a page and a half, but we get to see how they feel, what they believe, what they're experiencing. And it makes – one of the reasons Clancy was such an effective novelist is because his entire worlds felt real.

19:12Not just the one or two people we were following, but everybody else. And you don't have to write this for all of the characters. Just let us focus on somebody that we might not be coming back to for a while and show us that they feel. Stephen King is a master of this is what I would point out. Anyways. Yeah, and I think this actually gets to the point that you actually – you can write what you feel into anyone and everyone and any part of your story. It doesn't only have to be your protagonist. Though you are the protagonist, I would hopefully, of your own life, like, that doesn't mean – like, you could have a character that's very different from the way that you do things as your lead, but put some small element of yourself.

19:50I think it's really fun to give, like, secondary characters something in common with you in the way that you might have something in common with a friend that's very different from you. But you're like, but we both like knitting for very different reasons. Like, or we come to it in very different ways. Our action is the same, but our feelings, our motivations, our beliefs that brought us there are different. But there's something in common, and there's something that then you can have as a nice touchpoint when you are creating that character or having that character do something. And that could be any of those levels.

20:22It could be a feeling touchpoint, an action touchpoint, a belief touchpoint. Well, one thing that's really simple to do that I really like – and, you know, again, this is an improv environment, so it's a little more blunt than you might do in a novel. But just give – just have a reaction. Give your – and if you're introducing an NPC or your playing character, react to something that is completely unrelated to the main action, right? Just have your NPC like something or not like something in a way that is kind of unreasonable because it's not connected to anything, but it makes them – it humanizes them, and it lets you access a perspective that they have that is rooted in – and often because I'm the one playing it and it's instinctive,

21:00it's something I like or dislike, you know? It's like, oh, I don't like that character because they're like this, and I'll just react to that. And then that gives everyone else something to bounce off of. And so having characters do that in a moment when you introduce them, give them an emotion, a feeling, a perspective, I think can really flesh out a scene very, very quickly. I do something similar to this. When I have a character – when my character walks into a scene that is already in progress, I will often gift a secondary character with the tail end of a story that I've heard someone else tell or that I have told.

21:35And it implies this whole larger world. Like, I have a friend who is clearly – her life is clearly haunted because she keeps moving into places where there are bees in the walls.

21:51And so I have a character who – What a bad curse. That's a bad one. That's a really bad one. Yeah, it's amazing, really, also. But it's – it is so consistent, too. Um, so she – so I have this character who is not based on her, but one of my characters walks in on the tail end and all you see is the character saying, and the walls were full of bees. And everyone else is like, no, not again. And – but we don't – I do no explanation of that.

Translating difficult relationships to text

22:22One thing I want to talk about, and you telling the story kind of reminded me of this, is in drawing on your own personal history, where do you draw the lines? How do you obfuscate from pulling on your difficult relationship with your mother, let's say, and putting that into the text in a way that she's not going to be mad at you forever, right? Like, how do you find ways to draw on those emotional things that are important to you and that are your lived experience without exposing yourself or the people around you in ways they did not consent to? So, I have a toolbox that I use when I'm drawing from a person.

22:59And again, you know, you can exaggerate all of the things we talked about previously, but what you're looking at is how much of the person are you taking? So, there's mannerisms, their appearance, their motivation, their opinions, their action, their history, their skills, and their relationships. So, thinking about if you don't want – if you want to obfuscate it – I'm a professional narrator – if you want to hide it – There you go. Perfect.

23:31Editing. Then you use as few as – you swap as many of those as you can.

23:38If you want them to know, you swap as few of those. And if you want the satisfaction of just having them in a book dead, let a friend write it. Yes. There's also that Howard killed someone for me that was a problem for me. And then, in one of the purest acts of love I can describe, brought him back to life and killed him a second time.

24:04Fantastic. Amazing. I am a lot of things. I am occasionally a good friend. Yes. I was going to say, I also think that, like, especially people who are difficult, like people who you're putting in your story, not because you're like, this is just my, like, love letter to how great you are, which I think is a different issue. We – any character, you – I think you should be able to see a little bit of where they're coming from and understand them. So when you put someone who's difficult to you in a book, in a story, it's an opportunity to try to figure out why are they like that.

24:37And try to understand what is driving their motivation. Because few people wake up every day thinking, I'm going to be a difficult jerk. They think, I want things, or, like, I – whatever the thing they're thinking is, it's very personal to them. And I like to think about, from writing what I feel, what might get me to the point that I would take these actions. Because when you're talking about somebody else, you only get the actions layer. So what are the feelings? What are the beliefs? What are the experiences that might get me to take those actions? Let me try to humanize them a little bit for myself.

25:09And in that way, like, you – if you highlight someone's humanity, I think they're less likely to be upset with you. Because on one level, you're trying to understand them, and most humans want to feel understood. And I think something that you can do as a writing exercise, or therapy, depending, is if you're having trouble with that, you can flip the POV character for that scene. Write it from their POV, and then flip it back to the POV character that you're going to have for the actual book. And oftentimes, that will have the effect of having you put in smaller actions or reactions that are more humanizing, even if you don't put their interiority on the page directly.

25:50Mary Robinette, you said writing exercise or therapy this entire episode. If you are being mindful of your feelings, your experiences, in the ways that we describe in this episode, that's going to be therapeutic. Oh, basically all I've done is say things from my therapeutic process that were very helpful to me as writing advice. That's all I did this episode, so. Yeah, I was thinking about, like, how – I was thinking, now, this episode had a twist.

26:21The twist is, you're in therapy now. No, I think, like, I'm thinking about journaling, which I think is also, like, journaling can be a great way to, like, access some of the stuff in ways that you are not – you're doing it for personal reasons, but later you can use it for art. One of my favorite things to do is journal after a breakup, because when you go back, if you ever get a second breakup, you know, woo-hoo, you can go back and be like, oh, yes, I felt just this horrible. But then if you look forward, you'll be like, oh, six weeks later, I was better.

26:52And, like, you don't feel better at the moment, but you can actually see, like, there was a way out that I – there was a light at the end of the tunnel that I am in, and so now that I'm back in this tunnel, I can see where the light is. And then if you want to bring a character through that tunnel, you can actually, again, go back and look at what you have written and use that as a guide. So, not everyone should – you don't all have to journal, but I think it can be a really great way to – At least one of you does. You, listening right now, just kidding. With all of the pretty notebooks that you've bought.

27:23But along the journaling lines, the – even if it's not – let me journal all of my emotions. I find that banking sensory details is a great way to just capture things. I have literally reused sensory details from an experience 10 years after I wrote them down. And, you know, when we were talking about previously in the World is on Fire episode, banking those sensory details of journaling how you are feeling, your emotions, the things you wish you could and couldn't do.

27:58Journaling feels like a great way to talk about homework.

Homework assignment and episode wrap

28:00Yeah, I was going to say, everyone is just teeing me up for our homework this week. So, in spite of what Aaron said, I am going to make all of you journal. What I would like you to do for your homework is to journal about a significant emotional moment in your life. Pick something that was high-intensity emotion and then think about the tools we've given you. Write down the somatic details, which is what Mary Robinette is talking about. What did you feel in your body? What was that experience? Think, right – look at that feelings wheel. Write down what feelings you were feeling. What thought did you have from that? What conclusions did you take from that?

28:32And then what choices did you make? Then, once you've done all of that, rewrite this as a scene, but write it from the third person. And give your protagonist different biographical details from yourself. Take all the emotion that you put into your journal and then re-render it as a third person scene. This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses. Now go write.

28:58Writing Excuses has been brought to you by our listeners, patrons, and friends. For this episode, your hosts were Mary Robinette Kowal, Dong Wan Song, Aaron Roberts, and Howard Taylor. This episode was engineered by Marshall Carr, Jr., mastered by Alex Jackson, and produced by Emma Reynolds. For more information, visit writingexcuses.com. 151-7667-5217-799-1199- Selena Gomez. 161-799-1590-1299-1590. 171-1399-1690-1590-1690-1690-1690-1690-1690-1670-1690-1690-1690-ig1.