Salisbury.Fake writing

I Feel That: a small opinion piece on Emotive Writing

I was going to do a book review today and while I do intend to post book reviews on here eventually, I had a discussion with myself the other day while I was watching some stuff. First, I’m not an expert, so please don’t take my words as true advice. Second, it’s important to develop your own thoughts on how you approach writing. I see on writing forums the endless thread creations of “should I be a writer?” “How do I start writing?” “What makes a good writer?” And the eons of variations. Writing is so subjective. There’s no right or wrong way to do it. Not everyone is going to want to read your work, and that’s actually preferable. Then you can get a perspective from outside those who appreciate your style. It can help you grow as a writer and a person to hear from people who don’t necessarily jive with your jimmies. There are limits, of course. People end up being rude just because they can, and those people don’t matter to your growth. You are worth exploring your interests and you are capable of separating the shit from the shine.

So, that disclaimer/weird pep talk out of the way, let’s get going. I think a lot of people are faking emotion, or presenting something in a way that’s emotional without having the reality of the feeling behind it. Hold on, we’ll get to why, but let’s be real here. With the amount of distractions and the way the world is these days especially, not many people are able to tell the difference between what they’re feeling and what they think they’re feeling. If we’re not paying attention to ourselves, we can start to associate certain things with feelings instead of actually just feeling the feeling.

This might sound confusing, so let me try and go a bit further into it. Two things I came across recently for this: a video about how a singer wasn’t able to actually emote the feeling behind the lyrics of the song, and an episode of Criminal Minds from the earlier seasons. In the video with the singer, the commentator said it sounded like he was trying to make it sound emotional. “There’s something that comes across as very thought through. . .it’s about the dynamics of the singing. It just seems like he’s trying to make you feel something instead of feeling it and getting it out there with his vocals.” (Semi-quoted from this video here: https://youtu.be/ddUBW9Ms0mA link opens in a new tab) While he’s talking about a song I secretly like (don’t come at me, Justin Bieber can really sing when he puts his mind to it), he’s 100% accurate. Maybe there are some preconceived expectations of Mr. Bieber because of his history as a person, and perhaps we’re not really sold on how true this song is to him because of that. That idea is a completely different post, however, so let’s move on.

I’m not putting a spoiler warning here because Criminal Minds has been out for over 15 years and so if you haven’t seen it, that’s on you, not me. In one of the seasons, a character, Elle Greenaway, gets shot by an unsub (unknown subject–cute, yeah?) and while she’s in surgery, she sees the light at the end of the tunnel and her deceased father is waiting on the private jet to take her to heaven. It sounds like it would be an intense, emotional moment, right? But it wasn’t. Maybe it’s how the actress did her job, or maybe it was the writing of the scene, but it fell flat and pissed me off because it was forcing me into an emotional moment I didn’t believe in. This is also a pretty common trope in television series, but within the same series a few seasons later, Aaron Hotchner is in the hospital fighting a wound/scar tissue issue, and he sees his murdered wife and the guy who killed her. This was a far better use of the trope because we’d had time to learn about Hotchner and we’d had time to appreciate him.

All of this leads me to the topic today, emotive writing. I’m not talking about books that make you ugly cry, not completely, but I’m talking about writing that makes your readers feel something other than “I am here reading this book.” When I think about my favorite books, they’re designated as such because I usually had an emotional response to them. Again, not the kind that made me cry. Tana French’s In the Woods is a mystery and the entire time my anxiety built and by the end, I was ready to never set foot in woods again because of how intense the emotion was. The Green Rider series by Kristen Britain is one of my favorites because I have an emotional connection to the main character as she does her best to help keep her home safe. Through her challenges and failures, I am invested in what she does. I feel like I’m right there with her as she fights off the bad guys. Neil Gaiman plays into the part of me that still tries to be a kid full of wonder because of how imaginative his writing is. He grabs onto that and runs with it so by the end of the book, I’m ready for another adventure.

I think it’s impossible to list all the ways writers can work emotion into their stories, but the idea is it has to be genuine. It has to be real and honest. If we’re writing a death scene for a beloved character, have we really given the audience time to invest in them enough for this death to matter? Or are we playing on what we hope they’re bringing with them to the reading? This is getting a bit into some literary theory, which one day I might do a series of commentary on that, but for now, I think trying to reconnect to the characters we’re writing, the stories we’re telling, that’s what we should focus on. Yes, writing for a market is always the driving force, but even while doing that we can write for ourselves, too.

When I get too bogged down by “this plot doesn’t even exist” or “how many times has this person looked at someone with a glare” or “I’ve used these words too much in the last twelve pages,” I remind myself of this: remember why you started.

But Carla, that’s such a silly thing to think when you’re telling me to be more emotive in my writing. Is it? Why are you writing the story you’re working on, then? Is it because you got excited to tell it? You … felt … excited? Hmm? That’s a stretch, and I know it is, but there’s a level of truth to it. We write for ourselves first, and then the audience later. We’re telling stories we want to share, and if we don’t believe in them, you can sure as the wind blows bet your readers won’t either.

If you made it this far, thank you. I hope it wasn’t too disorganized and wordy. Stay safe and good luck to you and yours during the upcoming holiday season.

Salisbury.Fake Life, writing

Romance Novels are Dangerous

Bear with me. I’m not about to go trashing a genre that makes billions of dollars. Very clearly it’s a market people want and are all about. But I do want to discuss it a bit.

Let’s take a moment and think about what romance novels are at their core. They’re meant to be distractions. Fantasies about what we want, or think we want. There’s lust. Not a lot of actual romance before we get to the end, and somehow the main characters are in love and ready for their future together. It’s one of those things where we expect to be entertained without going too far into why we’re entertained. It’s time to break into that a bit.

My biggest issue is that the genre presents lust as love, without considering the impact of leaving out the love that gets left behind. Potentially. We don’t really get to see much of that past a happy ending. It’s all wrapped up. Nice little package. But love isn’t always happy. And I’m not talking about the overly drawn out dramatic confrontation that comes right before one of the protagonists realizes that the other is all they’ve ever needed in love. I’m talking about the fact that eventually the quirks that draw you into a partner sometimes might become annoying and not so cute anymore. The nights when trying to be a household feels like an impossibility because you’ve got your own habits, and they have theirs.

Romance novels all have the same basic plot, too, in what I’ve seen from the ten I read in preparation for this post. Boy and girl meet, have a spark, they can’t stop thinking about each other, there’s something holding one of them back from fully accepting feelings, they have wild sex multiple times, one thinks they’re not good enough somehow for the other, big dramatic event happens, the one who tried to leave realizes just how much they love the other, rush to find them/save them/tell them, they get married, and the woman is usually pregnant by the end of the story.

This isn’t a bad plot. But after reading so many in a row, it got tedious. The man is usually incredibly wealthy, completely ripped and fit, handsome as hell, and a loner of some sort. Bad boys are even better. The women are curvy in the right places, but still manage to have a trim waist. Long hair with perfect waves. Career or family driven, never both (there was one rare exception I read), weeps beautifully. The standard impossible people. Some of the main character traits for the men were a bit disturbing. The women consumed their every thought and lives until it was all they could do not to see them. I know the feeling of being in love for the first time with someone and it’s rather difficult to tear one’s mind away from a new love, but the level of . . . intensity and dedication was borderline obsessive. They were overly protective, actively committing violence against a perceived threat to the woman they claimed to love. Jealous. Almost abusive.

The women are typically submissive, even when they’re described as being take charge and full of vivacity. They’re still dominated by the men in the stories, which tells me there’s not much originality in the thought that goes into these things. They’re also consumed by the thought of the man, usually after they’ve had wild sex that stays on their mind for a few days until they can do it again. They snap at the characters around them until one of their friends says something like, “you haven’t been yourself lately, what’s up with that??” and there’s a realization that the woman is in love. But she can’t be in love! They only just met! How could she possibly have feelings for someone she just met? /sarcasm

The level of superficiality in most of these relationships is incredibly off putting to me. There’s not much substance to back up the supposed feelings of the characters. The chemistry they’re meant to have just doesn’t exist. Typical story: they’ve known each other for years, haven’t ever done anything about it, friends pit them together and suddenly they realize they’ve been lacking for seventy years.

What I want from romance novels is reality. I know that doesn’t sell, and maybe I’m an outlier here, but what good are these novels if they perpetuate problems? Women are the main target audience for these (I unfortunately don’t have enough experience reading any LGBTQ+ romance to have an opinion on this, especially when there are others who are much more capable of discussing that topic), and while I appreciate the attempt to have books designed specifically with women in mind, it makes me question what the actual gain is here, and what authors believe women really want.

Sure, the sex scenes are hot. But is that really all the novels are for? I feel like I might be missing the point of these novels. You might be wondering why I’m so interested in this, and the reason is because I’m in the process of writing my own. I read quite a few last weekend all in the name of research, and it discouraged me from wanting to proceed because of how vapid the whole thing is. And maybe that’s the point! That they’re strictly for entertainment purposes, which is fantastic. They are pretty entertaining. But as a reader, I want something more than just a kinky moment in someone’s bedroom. It feels disingenuous and like I’m looking in on something I shouldn’t be. I’m well aware there are plenty of softer romances out there–I read those when I was younger, hoping for inspiration that way–but it still leaves much to be desired in my opinion (no pun intended?).

I think I’ll leave this here for tonight. I do have more to talk about when it comes to characterization problems I have, but that’s a different post entirely, I think, because it’s less related to romance novels. If you made it this far in my ramble/rant, thank you. I would love to have an actual discussion about this kind of thing with writers to see if I’m not quite catching the purpose of this genre. It would be an interesting conversation.