: Re: Getting emotional while writing, good or bad? Once in a while I get really emotional when writing. Writing about love, jealousy or even thinking about a simple scene in which a father plays

@Shanna875

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The reader is going to supply their own emotion. If you've strung everything together correctly.

But writing with 'feeling' is a slippery idea for the ages. Certainly there must be some emotion driving the writer to write the words. The fact that a thing was written is sometimes enough.

But sentimentality is the cheap knockoff that often ends up as a substitute. There is where the reader feels boxed out, defrauded from feeling, as you, the writer carry on about your incredibly harrowing near-death experience. Surely it should be exciting but it's not. Why is that?

I've written things all weepy, and sometimes they came off charged with a certain something, but often upon re-reading, it often turned out to be sappy fluff (to the reader).

However I've written other things immediately following some kind of rejection. Rejected by a lover, by society, by friends, by America, by the public, and these were often the stories or poems that had a lasting quality.

Beethoven wrote once that it was his ability to suppress his sensitivity and compassion that permitted him to compose incredible music.

There might be truth to this. But remember, the reader is approaching the story from their own perspective. They'll find emotion if the writer has provided the space to do it.

Writing with emotion and writing with sentiment are two different directions. Being able to identify one from the other is a skill that comes with time. And comes with endless writing and rewriting. I am not hardly any good at it. But I could tell you authors who are. Sherwood Anderson, William Burroughs, Italo Calvino.

I wouldn't fret over 'am I writing with feeling or not?' If you're writing, you're engaged in the phenomenon. Feelings will inform what you choose to write about. What details you show us, what angle the story takes.

Poetry is a better form for experimenting with emotions. But the novel has to have it. You'll know if it bores you. You should be able to read it over and over. A hundred times and never tire of it. There is feeling in the words.

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