EMOTIONAL-LETTING

As Papa said…

Papa Hemingway, that is:

“There is nothing to writing.

All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.”
And no, I’m not comparing my writing to Papa…

But I do understand what he means.

I got a critique back recently…

Yeeow!

What does she mean my characters are cardboard?

And my protagonist doesn’t have enough emotions?

So I took a deep breath and read…

And reread….

And reread

What was the problem?

I understood exactly what my character was feeling.

(light bulb goes on here)

Um yeah…‘I understood’ being the operative words.

Obviously, what my character was feeling wasn’t obvious.

And so I sat to rewrite…

And I sat…

And sat…

And sat.

Damn this is hard.

I mean, c'mon on!
I think short thoughts.

I write short sentences. (duh)

But emotions I guess, shouldn’t be short.

I don’t know if it’s AADD…

Or I block emotions…

But it’s hard for me...

To stay with feeling too long.

But blocked emotions are not conducive..

To writing emotional stories.

So I put on a Rick Braun CD…

And allowed myself to f e e l.

Half way through the CD, I was balling my eyes out.

Jeeze! Why? His music never seemed sad before.

But I stuck with it…

All the way to end of chapter one.

Lord! This was harder than I thought.

And if like Papa…

I have to bleed to write...
I'm going to need a  transfusion...
To get through the whole manuscript.

What about you?

How deep does your prose go?

How hard do you suffer for your characters?

Or do you?

Always, Em-Musing