Dear Flat: To Have Lived (And Suffered) Is Not Enough
Lit Salon addresses how to evoke emotion with our writing + the mysterious balance of inner, outer, and other mode + what only writers know about broken swings + why the music is more than the music
It’s almost August, the crickets are raising a marvelous racket (why are crickets so magical?), and my emotional world is, to say the least, brimming with a kind of wild aliveness.
For the many new readers of Writing in the Dark, a bit of context before I dive into this week’s Lit Salon, “Dear Flat,” which explores how we evoke emotion with our writing:
1. The youngest of my (all adult) children, Billie, is foster parent to a beloved two-year-old boy, Z, who is very likely going to become a permanent member of our family in the next year via adoption. This is beautiful and brutal in all the ways such things inherently are.
2. Billie became licensed to provide foster parent with the intent to take short-term placements of infants and babies under two. Z was their first placement almost exactly one year ago.
3. Right now, Billie and Z live with us (my husband, Jon and me), and they’ll remain here until sometime this fall, after they close on their new house, which is literally around the corner from ours.
4. The location of the new house was very strategic, as Billie is single and wasn’t fully prepared to take on full-time permanent parenthood. This is a group effort.
5. Side note: the new house is an absolute charmer. The current owners—a retired philosophy professor (who is about ninety years old) and his ethereal and lovely wife—have been there for many decades. The only pitfall is that the philosophy professor, perhaps true to form for his era, chain smokes Pall Malls. Much priming and painting will be required, along with possibly sanding and refinishing the wood floors. Also, our neighborhood is the hilliest in Minneapolis, and the house is—well, there’s no other way to say this, but it’s nestled into a bit of a cliff. Which is fantastic in terms of views and vibe; it’s the prettiest little treehouse in town! But, we’ve got some safety issues to address before a toddler can live there. Therefore, an inevitable delay will transpire between Billie’s end-of-August closing and the move in date.
6. Finally, for those who haven’t read much of my work, I was also a foster child (and later, for a few years, a foster parent), and my younger sister spent almost half of her childhood in foster care.
With those basic facts in place, here’s the truth: Z is rekindling the old embers of my own experiences of childhood trauma and parental abandonment. It’s not a terrible thing that this is happening. It is okay, and I am okay. This is just something that sometimes happens when you have these experiences in your body. You carry them, you work on them, you heal and heal and heal, but those cellular memories remain a little bit hot, just as we’ve recently learned that forest fires can remain active underground for long periods of time, even through winter, in a phenomenon called “zombie fires” as reported by Ohio State University:
New research on the exceptional Arctic fire seasons of 2019 and 2020 points to fires moving into the ground as well.
These underground fires are known as “zombie fires,” and there are a number of reasons to worry about the trend.
First, as the organic-rich Arctic soils dry up because of changing climate conditions, they can burn slowly and release vast amounts of smoke into the atmosphere.
Second, soil fires that spread underground are harder for firefighters to tame and extinguish, thus demanding more resources for longer periods of time. Firefighters in Alberta, Canada, where carbon-rich peatlands are common, have been dealing with fires smoldering to depths dozens of feet underground in 2023. Because peat fires can make the ground unstable, using heavy equipment to excavate the fire areas also becomes risky.
Finally, these soil fires don’t die easily. Recent research finds that Arctic soil fires can smolder through the winter and reignite during early spring when temperatures rise, hence the nickname “zombie fires.”
So, yesterday, Z woke hard from an afternoon nap, and was in a state similar to a night terror, except it was daytime. It went on for almost a half an hour, I think—the soulful, hard crying from somewhere deep and wild and far away. A gut-wrenching, heartbreaking pain. Billie handled the whole thing so skillfully, so lovingly, so beautifully. Jon and I hovered nearby, offering a gentle hand or word, but ultimately the only thing to be done was simply for Billie to hold him until it passed, like a hard, drenching storm. And it did pass, eventually, one little hiccough at a time.
While he was crying, though—while Z was wherever he was, feeling it all with his whole being—I felt it, too. I felt the full weight of his experience. Yes, it was amplified because of my own early childhood experiences of abuse and, later, abandonment. These soil fires don’t die easily. But that’s just one piece of the picture. Something more fundamental is also at work, something that says you cannot be an empathic person in the presence of such pain and not feel it moving through you, through your skin and muscle, your bone, your blood. Eventually, with my hand stilling the heaving of Z’s little shoulder blades and back, I couldn’t blink back my own silent tears, either.
Isn’t the empathetic response part of what makes writers capable of doing what we do?
Robert Frost said, “No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader. No surprise in the writer, no surprise in the reader." Someone else said (and if you can source this quote, please, please throw it in the comments!), that only writers see a broken swing as a symbol of a ruined childhood.
This, friends, is what I know of the feeling life of writers. This empathic response to the world makes our lives harder in many ways because, quite frankly, we feel more. However, it also allows us to write in a way that evokes emotion, to write in a way that is alive, filled with feeling, electrified and transforming. Note the verb allow. I emphasize this allowance because feeling for our story, our characters, and the events they suffer, is in itself not enough to automatically elicit emotion from readers. There is also craft involved. Evocative writing often requires technical understanding and skill (I say often because magic does happen, but I’m generally more interested in doing things the hard way, because that’s what applies to most of us). And that’s what this week’s Lit Salon explores: the hard work and alchemical art writing in a way that evokes emotion.
Lit Salon
Dear Flat: To Have Lived (And Suffered) Is Not Enough—You Must Also Craft the Story
Dear Jeannine,
Recently, a beta reader for my memoir-in-progress observed that my manuscript felt distant and unemotional. To note, my memoir is about losing my young husband, with whom I was madly in love, during our first year of marriage. He died in a tragic car accident that also left me with a dozen broken bones and a level of grief I didn’t think I’d survive.
It’s a very emotional story!
But. And this is a big but … the reader who made these observations is not only astute and kind, but she’s also a writer whose work I admire. And, yes, she said many other, much more positive things, including that my writing is sensitive, honest, and sophisticated at the sentence level, and that the story itself is important and full of potential. She said my voice is strong and confident. But her major note was that the narrative is often “”flat,” especially for such a dramatic and grief-filled story.
Jeannine, I’ve been sitting on this feedback for a few weeks, kind of licking my wounds. But recently I picked up my manuscript, gave it a hard look, and realized, to my horror, that this feedback is accurate. The process of writing my story has been very healing for me. And yet, my manuscript is flatter than it should be.
I might eventually hire an editor, but right now I can’t afford it. And I know you can’t give me specific advice on what to do without reading my work, either. But could you maybe speak in a general way about the factors that might lead to an emotionally flat story versus one that is more affecting? Because I feel like I’ve included a lot of detail about how I felt during these experiences. I’m not sure what else I can add.
I would really appreciate your thoughts.
Signed,
Flat
Dear Flat,
I’m so sorry for your loss of your husband, however many years ago it may have been. I am glad you have been able to write about this particular grief and I hope that no matter what does or does not become of your manuscript, you continue to find healing and transformation through writing.
In the meantime, I want you to know that so many readers will find this a valuable discussion, thanks to your courage in sending this question to me. I will be teaching the art of evoking emotion in our writing this fall at Stillwater Prison, by my students’ request, so this topic is top of mind. And you are, of course, one hundred percent correct that I can’t adequately address your dilemma without seeing your work. That said, two aspects of your letter stand out to me and provide me just enough footing to speculate.
First, You say your story is a very emotional story about tragic events, and, second, you say that you’ve included a lot of detail about how you felt and aren’t sure what more you can add. These two tidbits suggest two things. One, that you might be putting too much stock on the ability of the story’s content to move readers, and two, that you might be telling the reader more than you are showing the reader (that is, you might need to convert some summary to scene).
And I’m frustrated with myself right now for the oversimplified way that must feel, those adages about showing instead of telling, or converting summary to scene. Because writers hear those adages all the time. And yet, how, very specifically, is a writer supposed to implement this guidance?
I will provide some actual nuts and bolts in just a moment.
But first…
I want you to imagine yourself with a ripe yellow lemon in your hand. Imagine this lemon is slightly sun-warmed, plucked straight from the tree. Feel its thick skin, smooth but also very slightly puckered. Wrap your fingers around the lemon; feel its weight. Smell the fruit—there’s a brightness to it, like the scent of sunlight.
Now set the lemon on a cutting board and slice into the skin and the flesh of the fruit. Cut the lemon clean in half. Some juice might escape. If you have a cut on any of your fingers, you may feel a sharp, stinging sensation and need to rinse the juice off before you continue. Do that if necessary.
Then, when you are ready, take one half of the cut lemon, its juicy fruit fully exposed, and raise it toward your mouth. Now touch it to your lips and squeeze the fruit. Let the juice run onto your tongue.
Is your mouth watering a bit?
No, for real—is your mouth watering?
If it is, this is an indication of the power of your imagination, and the link between imagined experience and literal physical sensation (which, by the way, includes emotions, which we feel physically as well as psychologically).
This thing that just happened with the lemon is what happens when our writing inspires readers to feel joy, grief, excitement, suspense, etc. This thing that just happened is what your beta reader was missing in your manuscript. And there are three specific ways in which you can ensure that your writing evokes this mind-body emotional reaction in your reader. The trick is that the balance of these techniques varies from manuscript to manuscript and from story to story, so there can never be a reliable formula or blueprint for how to apply them and in what ratio. That’s something each of us must discern for ourselves through trial and error and through carefully listening into the spirit of the story we are telling for its hungers and demands. Also, of course, listening to trusted first readers, as you have done and are doing. With all those caveats, here are the techniques to consider: