Weblog Entry - 09/26/2002: ""

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09/26/2002 Entry: ""

It has been raining for twenty-four solid hours, a cold sullen rain. I woke up this morning with heartburn, after a night of anxious dreams, and immediately started stressing about a whole emotional strand in the WIP that is not really working at all, and how I can make it work convincingly. I got up and made coffee and drank an Instant Breakfast to settle my stomach, turned on the computer, and the first thing I read was torch's piece on wallowing and emotional exposition. And it was one of those perfection-of-pain moments, because I realized that a thing that's been driving me crazy all along with this story is that it is, in fact, one big fat wallow, 700K of wallow.

So I had a micro-breakdown, and then drank coffee and had a smoke, out on the back deck in the cold rain, and regrouped. Because, OK. The story really is just Fraser looking back at a relationship that crashed and burned, and there's really no way you can do that without a certain amount of wallow. And Fraser is not one to do anything half-assedly; even though I don't think he wallows often, when he does, he's going to make a comprehensive job of it. Perhaps there's an inverse relationship between the reserve/reticence/stoicism with which someone like Fraser leads his external life, and his need for interior wallowing. And there's the fact that while torch seldom if ever writes first-person, I seem increasingly drawn to it, and emotional exposition of some sort is hard to avoid in first person. I rationalize, I rationalize...

There's a part of me that thinks that if I were a better writer, I could find a way to write this story more -- exteriorly? (which is not a word) -- more as just a sequence of events, scene ... scene ... scene ... and let the fracture lines in the relationship simply show, and widen, and let the whole thing come apart, without all the talking about it.

I'm not that writer, though. I don't know if it's a question of skill, or simply of choices made two years ago, when I was first putting this thing together, and which I'm now too tired to go back and remake.

And really, as torch points out, it's not a matter of all one or all the other, it's about the middle ground, the balance between stuff happening and characters reflecting on it, the right choice of what really needs to be there, vs. what is merely writerly flab and self-indulgence.

So. Stuff to keep in mind. And in the meanwhile, if I'm going to do anything today about that emotional strand that needs fixing, I'd better open up the document and get cracking, because I need to leave for work soon.

Replies: 7 comments

I just read torch's post and have been thinking a lot about this too. The funny thing is, what I worry about is that I don't put enough emotional exposition in my stories--I worry that there's nothing there to grab the reader, to draw them into that emotional geography. When writing I always ask myself, "but how do they *feel* about this person/situation," and I'm usually left with, "hell if I know" *g*. Then I worry of course that the exteriority of my stories doesn't reveal the underlying emotions the way that it ought to.

There's a part of me that thinks that if I were a better writer, I could find a way to write this story more -- exteriorly? (which is not a word) -- more as just a sequence of events, scene ... scene ... scene ... and let the fracture lines in the relationship simply show, and widen, and let the whole thing come apart, without all the talking about it.

I think the benefits of emotional exposition has to do with the middle ground you and torch talk about; but more importantly for me they have to do with the skill in which that exposition is handled. Skill and maturity. Emotional exposition that reads as, "he'd never desired someone so much before; he felt as if he were going to die," makes me roll my eyes; it's vague and says nothing about the characters themselves. But specific and thoughtful emotional exposition can be incredibly powerful, and in many ways is more likely to stick with me and have me rereading those stories than those that follow a more exterior...presentation, I guess.

What I'm really leading up to here is that I *do* think the emotional exposition in your stories is extremely powerful, insightful, and specific, and that's a large part of why I reread your work quite a lot. I don't think it's a matter of one approach being objectively better than the other; like everything else related to writing (in my opinion), it just has to do with how well it's executed and presented. Perhaps bad emotional exposition is just more painfully obvious than emotionally-dead exterior writing.

But then in thinking about that, what concerns me (or at least potentially--I haven't really thought it out that much) is that our distaste for raw emotion comes from an association of feeling/emotion/want/desire with immaturity and weakness. One of the things I like about fanfiction, and slash particularly, is that this seeming weakness can be transformed into power--that emotions and wants and desires are important and potentially empowering. And while I certainly wish for fewer romance-type, over-the-top emotional exposition, I'd rather see writers feel secure enough to explore that landscape rather than feel they have to suppress it (and just to note: I don't think this is at all what torch was advocating; one of the points I got from her post is that there is a certain responsibility of the writer to see those emotions truthfully and without the trappings of cliche).

Posted by Kest @ 09/26/2002 08:33 PM CST

Sometimes, I feel like I do nothing *but* careen back and forth between overwriting and underwriting emotion. *shakes head*

Posted by Sarah T. @ 09/26/2002 10:30 PM CST

Um. Oops? Seriously, I was just being all me me me, there, thinking about my own writing, not meaning to interfere with anyone else's. The comments I got showed me that despite Ellen's and Merry's best efforts, I did in fact come off as saying that emotional exposition isn't so great, and that's not quite what I meant. I mean, it's a tool like any other, and can be used a lot or a little, and can certainly be written well or badly--I think it's just that there's a lot of it in fanfic that does strike me as perfectly godawful. Your writing, for me, has certainly never fallen anywhere near that category. *g*

What you said about first person struck a chord; I thought last night that finding a character I can write in first person might be a way to relearn balanced emotional exposition. But while other people seem to be able to get into first person with beautiful ease, I'm not entirely comfortable with it. It seems like such an intimate step to take that I usually wait for a character to step up and demand it, to start talking in first person in my head, and it's been a while since anyone did that.

Fraser seems to be like a person who would begin by pointedly ignoring his feelings, but would then, when it seemed like the only right thing to do, go on to articulate them with as much precision as possible. That might well take 700 K.

Or to put it another way, I really, *really* want to see that story, one of these years...

Posted by torch @ 09/29/2002 03:59 AM CST

Or to put it another way, I really, *really* want to see that story, one of these years...

Posted by torch @ 09/29/2002 03:59 AM CST

also, I really did not mean to post that twice, I don't think it was that interesting. sorry!

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