If you want fiction to feel authentic, you must draw upon some true emotion in your life. It can be glancing, it can look different, it can be combined with humor and quirky characters and people so different from you as to be unrecognizable, but a current of something real must run through those personalities—at least a drop of something you’ve felt must pulse in their veins.

I’d venture to say that nobody in my novel The Marsh Queen is anything like me. But are their questions like mine? Are their sadnesses similar? Sure.

In her recent book on craft called What About the Baby?, Alice McDermott talks about “the solace of art,” referring to art that “arrests time, tames it, preserves our heartache or our outrage or our joy, our days on earth, from the dulling indignity of time’s healing, obliterating hand.”

If a writer can craft pain into fiction that is detailed enough and rich enough to produce emotion in the reader, to crystalize a moment of something that is true, then the writer has succeeded.

So, how do I do it?

• See what catches your interest: an interaction you witness between people, an intriguing bit of dialogue, something you find hilariously funny or piercingly tragic. It might be a memory that will not let go of you.

• What image do you associate with it? Is it something visual? Olfactory? Auditory? Tactile? Start there. Fill out that sensory image and see who exactly might experience it.

• How is that character different from you? Can you borrow a quirk from a person you know or observe, someone who has nothing to do with the initial impetus for this bit of writing? 

• What does this new character want intensely?

• Who is in the way?

I often say to my students, what’s bugging you? What has bugged you, large or small, in the last week? Write about that. Getting the annoyance, infuriation, or out-and-out fury onto the page, while scary, is often fruitful, because the emotion is real. A writer can lay something extremely intense and heartfelt onto a character who has a completely different set of immediate concerns, wardrobe, appetite, interactions with others, yet still has this one central thread of feeling that guides their actions.

Now, circle back to the episode or observation or snippet of dialogue that got you started, and try to analyze what caught your interest to begin with. Does it remind you of an emotion? What is important to you that relates to this initiating circumstance? Free-write into that. The analysis won’t make it into the fiction, but your understanding about what struck you as story-worthy will make you more sensitive to catching these moments of inspiration before they succumb to, as McDermott says, “the dulling indignity of time’s…obliterating hand.”

You’ve probably heard the story about the poet Ruth Stone, out working in the fields and hearing a poem coming at her over the landscape. She said it was like a thunderous train of air barreling down at her, and she’d run like hell to the house to get a piece of paper and a pencil so that when it thundered through her, she could collect it and grab it on the page.

The trick is to feel it coming—the image, the look, the sound that you have to write down before you miss it. The more you catch those impressions, save them for later, and see how they develop, the more attuned you’ll be to saying hello to them when they arrive. Even if, and especially if, they touch some point of pain you’ve held deep inside. See it, recognize it, craft it.

Virginia Hartman has an MFA in creative writing from American University and is on the faculty at George Washington University. Her stories have been shortlisted for the New Letters Awards and the Dana Awards. The Marsh Queen is her first novel. Find out more at VirginiaHartman.com.

The post Whose Emotion Is It? appeared first on DIY MFA.

Today I am so excited to have bestselling co-authors Angela Ackerman and Becca Puglisi on the show!

Angela and Becca co-founded the popular Writers Helping Writers site, a hub where authors can hone their craft, as well as One Stop for Writers, an innovative online library built to help writers elevate their storytelling. I happen to be part of their current cohort of Resident Writing Coaches on Writers Helping Writers and have been a longtime fan of their work.

They are also both writing coaches and international speakers, and their books are available in five languages, are sourced by US universities, and are used by novelists, screenwriters, editors, and psychologists around the world.

Angela and Becca’s popular Writer’s Thesauruses series is now up to fourteen books in total with their latest edition, The Emotional Wound Thesaurus, which is available now.

Listen in as we chat about their latest thesaurus, and dig deep into what an emotional wound is and how to use to create more believable characters.

In this episode Angela, Becca, and I discuss:

• Tips to find and use a character’s emotional wound to draw your readers in.
• Avoiding the research rabbit hole, finding what you need to know to write the story.
• What “show don’t tell” really means and how to do it right.
• Backstory, when to use it and why.
• The want, the wound, and the desire,how to combine them in your characters.

Plus, each of these ladies’ #1 tip for writers.

About Angela Ackerman

Angela, an apologetic Canadian, lives near Calgary, Alberta, nestled close to the Rockies. She enjoys traveling with her family, exploring new and unusual places, and is constantly amazed at how the universe seems to help her connect to the very people she needs at just the right time.

The author of 6 bestselling resource books printed in 6 different languages, Angela has a passion for writing craft. She is a writing coach, international speaker, and a firm believer that writers succeed best together. The desire to help writers in new, innovative ways is a love she shares with Becca Puglisi and Lee Powell, and together the three created One Stop for Writers®, a unique site filled with custom tools and writing resources built to help writers elevate their storytelling.

About Becca Puglisi

In her former life, Becca Puglisi was a teacher—elementary, because six-year-olds are easy to push around and the math isn’t too hard. She read roughly a gajillion picture books to her students, and it was her love for these books that originally motivated her to become an author, though she’s since moved on to young adult novels.

Now, Becca is a YA fantasy/historical fiction writer and co-author of a number of descriptive thesauruses for writers, including the bestselling The Emotion Thesaurus and it’s latest sequel, The Emotional Wound Thesaurus. She also is co-founder of One Stop For Writers®, a unique online resource containing many helpful tools, craft tutorials, and the entire Writers Helping Writers thesaurus collection (cross-referenced and searchable!). Becca is an international speaker who enjoys teaching workshops and presenting various writerly topics. Her books are represented by foreign rights agent Marleen Seegers of 2 Seas Agency.

During her free time (ha), Becca enjoys playing video games, watching movies, teaching Bible studies, baking, and adding to her stash of emergency supplies. She has always enjoyed contemplating the What if? scenario, which served her well when she lived in south Florida and will help her survive the winter now that she’s moved to New York.

To connect with both Angela and Becca check out their website at www.writershelpingwriters.net. And to gain access to their numerous writing resources (including the entire thesaurus series) check out onestopforwriters.com.

The Emotional Wound Thesaurus: A Writer’s Guide to Psychological Trauma

Readers connect to characters with depth, ones who have experienced life’s ups and downs. To deliver key players that are both realistic and compelling, writers must know them intimately—not only who they are in the present story, but also what made them that way.

Of all the formative experiences in a character’s past, none are more destructive than emotional wounds. The aftershocks of trauma can change who they are, alter what they believe, and sabotage their ability to achieve meaningful goals, all of which will affect the trajectory of your story. Identifying the backstory wound is crucial to understanding how it will shape your character’s behavior, and The Emotional Wound Thesaurus can help.

Inside, you’ll find:

• A database of traumatic situations common to the human experience
• An in-depth study on a wound’s impact, including the fears, lies, personality shifts, and dysfunctional behaviors that can arise from different painful events
• An extensive analysis of character arc and how the wound and any resulting unmet needs fit into it
• Techniques on how to show the past experience to readers in a way that is both engaging and revelatory while avoiding the pitfalls of info dumps and telling
• A showcase of popular characters and how their traumatic experiences reshaped them, leading to very specific story goals
• A Backstory Wound Profile tool that will enable you to document your characters’ negative past experiences and the aftereffects.

Root your characters in reality by giving them an authentic wound that causes difficulties and prompts them to strive for inner growth to overcome it. With its easy-to-read format and over 100 entries packed with information, The Emotional Wound Thesaurus is a crash course in psychology for creating characters that feel incredibly real to readers.

If you decide to check out The Emotional Wound Thesaurus, The Emotion Thesaurus, or any of the Writers’ Thesauruses listed below, we hope you’ll do so via these Amazon Affiliate Links, where if you choose to purchase via the links DIY MFA gets a referral fee at no cost to you. As always, thank you for supporting DIY MFA!

• The Rural Setting Thesaurus

• The Urban Setting Thesaurus

• The Positive Trait Thesaurus

• The Negative Trait Thesaurus

• The Emotion Amplifier Thesaurus

And remember to check out Angela’s and Becca’s other thesauruses only on onestopforwriters.com.

Link to Episode 185

(Right-click to download.)

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Until next week, keep writing and keep being awesome!

The post Episode 185: Understanding the Emotional Wound — Interview with Angela Ackerman and Becca Puglisi appeared first on DIY MFA.