This month, Janet and Marianne join JP and Crys for another book club, this time reading The Emotional Craft of Fiction by Donald J. Maass. They discuss hot takes, useful advice, and how they will incorporate this book’s lessons into their writing craft.
Question of the week: What were your hot takes from The Emotional Craft of Fiction by Donald J. Maass? Share your answer here!
Don’t miss our weekly check in on Patreon (it’s public!) where we talk about what we’re currently learning, any thoughts we missed in last week’s episode, and our plans for this week!
Show Notes
The Emotional Craft of Fiction by Donald Maass
Transcript
Crys: Hello, friends. Welcome to the Write Away Podcast. It is a book club week. We are recording this on Wednesday, December 8th, 2021. And it’s hard to believe that we’re in the last month of the year, but here we are.
I’m your host, Crys Cain, with my cohost…
JP: JP Rindfleisch.
Crys: With our special guests…
Janet: Janet Kitto.
Marianne: Marianne Hansen.
Crys: This month we read The Emotional Craft of Fiction by Donald J. Maass. And I don’t think any of us are emotionally ready for any conversation tonight, but here we are. So this book’s name is self-explanatory. It is about the craft of writing emotions. And I am curious what everyone’s hot takes are on it before we get into details.
JP: I thought it was pretty good. Parts that I liked were pieces where it’s, what was the title I’ll get there, give me a second. What’s happening when nothing is happening. That was a fun portion to read about, because there’s always that question of, how do you move a scene forward and what can you put into it?
And I have a strong opinion that emotion is a pretty strong factor in writing. And I think that even when nothing is happening, there’s always something, some type of tension. So it was a reassuring to read that piece and know that like my opinions are similar.
Marianne: I think I have a mixed opinion. I think some of it was great. And then some of it, I think it was great except for the times when he says, “stop your book, stop listening, and go to your book and find a scene and do this.” And I just thought, so am I supposed to piecemeal this or is this something that I’m supposed to go back and do in every single scene? Because if all of a sudden there’s all this emotion in one scene and then not the next scene. To me it was more of a general use book then a do-right-now-those-exercises-that-were-in-it book.
Crys: Yeah. He had 27 different little, I can’t remember what they call them, but it was basically the practical part of it at the end of each chapter or whatever, where you put into practice whatever that you’ve been talking about.
Janet: Yeah, he called them emotional mastery and there was 34 of them. And this was what I was going to give for my hot take that I really liked them. And it was because it didn’t matter whether he was asking you to stop and take something out of your work in progress or put something into your work in progress, it was just like all the questions that offered me a chance to do a lot of self reflection. I came into this thinking, I can’t control what others think. Like we have no control over what other people think of us. And it was the same to the writing, like I really can’t control what experience the reader brings.
So these exercises helped me to find ways of putting that work into my work in progress, like the actual digging into what kind of layers am I going to put in there. It gave me a lot of ideas of actually how I can control in some ways that reader experience.
Crys: Yeah. I really liked them and I liked that he, or whoever formatted the ebook version, linked directly to all of those in the very end. Because I skipped over them in the reading, but what I want to do is pull them all out into their own printed document to create my own checklist of exercises, to reframe them in a way that works for my brain.
JP: Yeah, I totally agree with that. Like when Marianne says she didn’t stop in the middle of reading this to go do that and to actually go look to her scene. Like I didn’t either. And maybe if this was surrounded by some type of class or workshop, that would make sense. But I think that like Crys’s approach of going through it and then coming back around, pulling the pieces that she wants out of it. Because I really liked the questions that are asked in those sections. Nothing that I actually took a scene to, but something that I definitely want to come back at and ask those questions when I’m reviewing a scene.
Marianne: I think this book, if you want to do the questions as you go, I think it would be perfect to do with a short story. And then do you like the whole short story. And I think that would not be overwhelming and would teach the different sections that he has.
I have been listening to half of these books and reading half of the books. And I enjoy listening because I can speed it up and I can listen to more books that way. But when it comes to these types of books, when it comes to craft books, I’m starting to wonder if I’m cheating myself in that way. And I haven’t really decided yet. I can listen to more than I can read, so I get more information, but I’m not doing as much. So it’s like a interesting balance that way.
Crys: Yeah. I also like going back and forth between audio, depending on what my life and brain have space for. There are certain books or certain sections of books that I have to read with my eyes and certain sections or books that I can read with my ears.
I did want to pull us back just kind of to the importance of emotion because this is something I believe strongly. And it’s his armature, if you will, his argument that he’s making throughout this book. He phrases it and I have it highlighted, but I don’t have it pulled up in front of me, but basically that without an emotional journey, a book doesn’t have an emotional journey for the reader.
And I 100% agree with that. And that is the kind of fiction that I’m really focused on deepening and developing for myself because I’ve written what to me feels like potato chip books for the romance. And that’s great. Like I love potato chips. I don’t really love potato chips. I love tortilla chips. So I love chips. And clearly my readers do as well. And there are definitely some stories that have inadvertently, through no particular attention of my own compared to any other books that I’ve written, hit those emotional bits for certain readers that dig down and lodge themselves in their head and have made them feel seen and made them really connect to that book. And that book has become one of those books that he talks about that have left them with a lasting memory.
And you had mentioned, Janet, like you can’t control what the reader feels. But I really liked that he had this focus on writing to the reader’s journey versus just the character’s journey. Because I think that when we do give a little bit more attention to that, that we are far more likely to intentionally reach those readers who we are intentionally writing to, who we mean the story. So often other versions of ourselves are who we’re writing to. Our younger self who needed to hear the words that we write in our book. He doesn’t say it this way, but he basically talks a lot about the writing process being therapy for the author. Even though he didn’t put that way, that’s how I took it.
Marianne: Did he use any examples of like more lighthearted, maybe comedic books? I felt like he used a lot of classics and a lot of really intense books. And I wanted him to use like a comedy, like a Nora Ephron book or something to that extent.
Did he do that?
Janet: It’s not coming top of mind if he did, like you’re right. I’m thinking about all the classic examples he gave.
Crys: I was thinking, I was like, I almost feel like he would say those are the less meaningful books, but I’m going to pull it up and just glance over because I think he did like a full bibliography at the back of books he referenced.
Marianne: Then I would argue against him because I think that you can get to a lot of truth in comedy that you can’t get through just other ways.
JP: Yeah, I agree. I think that this is one way of doing it and one person’s opinion. And I think that, like for me, I really like to approach using comedy to get at the heart of certain things. And yeah, I think that there’s a way to approach it in that method. Maybe combining the thought and idea from here, but I think that there’s something to comedy that should be touched on.
Crys: Yeah, I just gave a glance through and the two lightest hearted books I see him referencing were Twilight and Bloody Jack, which is a young adults history book where a girl disguises herself as a pirate, as a boy pirate. Not exactly super lighthearted there.
Marianne: And I’m not sure twilight is trying to be a comedy.
Crys: I said the lightest hearted books he referenced. Now, if I were to pull out one of, I think the wittiest lighthearted and sharpest deepest knowledge books, or plays rather, that I have read I just think of The Importance of Being Earnestby Oscar Wilde. Story hits on so many truths and it’s very memorable and it’s very funny Shakespeare’s comedies, but I think what we have in those particular circumstances that a lot of really popular commercial fiction does not often do is the contrast between dark and light.
But also in modern fiction right now, specifically because we have such a plethora, which is excellent in my opinion, of authors, of types of stories, there’s very few stories that actually rise to the quote unquote top of the pile to transcend their genre readership that would become the blockbustery style that he was pulling from for his examples.
Like there’s going to be amazing books that are romcoms, but if you’re not a romcom reader, you’re just not going to know about them.
Marianne: Yeah. And it could just be that these are the types of books that he represents as an agent. And therefore that’s what his reference is. But I would’ve liked a little more variety.
Janet: With comedy, do you have examples of like how a comedic situation has shown the characters grow?
Marianne: Going with, instead of books, movies, just in case more people have watched the movie, I think that it’s often be not necessarily in one scene, but in overarching scene. Because you have the Money Pits, which is aging me, but with Tom Hanks, where he just sticks all of this money into this mansion and it causes havoc with his marriage. And it’s continual comedy and it isn’t until all of these humorous, but horrible things happen that they see what really matters in life and what they’re developing. And even with When Harry Met Sally, I think is a pretty funny movie, but you see the characters growth through it.
Cause when you said, you know, what scene? Like the first scene I thought of was Meg Ryan in the diner. I’m like, I think there’s a lot of growth there because all of a sudden, Billy Crystal is just like, oh crap. It’s embarrassing for him. But then it’s even more embarrassing because he realizes that he has no idea how women have felt when being with him.
JP: I think that comedy is just a lens that one can use, but there’s always like that deeper emotional story in the background. Because like for the serial that I’m working on with Jeff, like we’re talking about themes of grief and how to process grief, but we’re using comedy as the lens in which we’re telling it so that we can hit the heavy subjects, but still make people feel good when they’re reading it. So I think there are instances where using that lens is really the difference. It doesn’t really take away or change the emotional journey, it’s just the perspective of the story being told.
Janet: You can still build the tension with it.
JP: Definitely. Yeah. And break the tension with it, which is I think if there was like a scale or a weighting of it, I think that’s where comedy does the best, is they help to break the tension so that you have these rising moments, but then they keep breaking it so that you can have that stronger undertone. But you still feel like a little bit more relieved when you’re reading.
Crys: He uses, he does reference comedy as a tool or lightheartedness as a tool when he references the Silver Linings Playbook, even though that is more of a drama. And when I think of Robin Williams, I think of comedy, even though he was in so many different genres of movies and he always brought up pathos and a truth to even his most outrageous comedic roles.
Marianne: As I was listening last night, I was also thinking if this style was more for a literary book, or if it’s possible with mass release? I think once you get into a habit of writing with more emotion, I think you can write it faster, but I’m unsure if you can really do it like in a mass release mode, starting off.
Crys: You’re talking about like fast release and like writing things really fast?
Yeah. So I think that there are definitely authors who are simply very gifted in writing emotion. My co-writer is one who is by default gifted at writing emotion. That is what has drawn her readers to her to start. And that is something that she has worked on developing.
So she’s gone from good to great in the style that she writes in. And I think that a lot of us writers, he mentioned this a few times, are actually quite afraid to put powerful emotion on the page because we’re worried about taking it overboard and going to cheesy. And I really like that like he just gives you permission to be cheesy. That readers are rarely going to ask you to step backward. I’m almost always asked to put more, to push more emotion onto the page. And for me, it actually really helped when I think more of like less what is happening for the characters and more of what’s happening, my interpretation of what’s happening, for the reader journey, because that focuses like what I’m going to tell.
And I have had a lot of practice with that with the romance, because they want to feel a lot of emotion. And for anyone who is reading the book, he talks about three ways of writing the emotion. And that’s inner, where you are talking a lot about what’s going in. So it’s a lot more of the telling. Romance a lot of times really wants this. They want to know what their characters are feeling explicitly. And then there’s the outer, where you’re just showing the effects and kind of encouraging your reader to infer the emotions from what’s happening. And then the third mode is other, which is trying to craft the reader’s emotional response.
And he does say you can’t control exactly what they’re feeling, but you can control when they’re going to have a strong response. And I really like that. That works really well for me because it puts the focus where I personally want to be looking. Like how is this going to affect my readers?
Yes. I want it to be true. And I want to mix of inner and outer, depending on what’s happening in the scene and what I need, but it’s the reader’s journey that matters most to me. And I couldn’t have done this one book in, five books in, starting out writing. I have 60 plus books. And the reader’s journey is far more tangible to me now than it would have been at like any other point in the journey, for me as a writer.
JP: Thinking about that and then like my soapbox about theme and how it’s kind of this, ultimately you’re basically bringing your reader from one state to another and this a lesson that’s being learned throughout. And I’ve been reviewing a couple of books and getting ready for like looking into what that theme looks like and how each scene plays a role in how that scene develops or how that theme develops. And it’s interesting seeing some of these like masterworks by well nominated and awarded novels and seeing these scenes where the character isn’t having an emotional journey per se, but there’s a lesson that is learned for the reader that progresses the theme.
So for example, if the theme is all about preparing a child’s legacy so that a legacy of a parent so that the parent can go and the child can move on, adulthood, et cetera, there are some scenes where nothing is happening to them per se, but it’s a lesson that we learn about like, okay, in order for them to progress this way, like we have to understand that this is important. This is a lesson that must be learned. And it’s interesting just tying that concept into this like reader emotional journey because there are a lot of scenes where it’s just a lesson and it’s not an emotional peak for that character, but it’s one for the reader.
Marianne: What this also brings to mind with emotion, is that this Christmas for a charity, the people who own the Home Alone home, it’s not even, like the home inside is different, but it’s just outside Home Alone and you’re greeted by the guy who plays Buddy, the brother, Buddy. And he has pizzas and a live tarantula, and it’s one night for four people. I’m thinking $7,000 for that night or some bizarre price, and it was all going to charity. But I remember thinking, whoever does this, besides probably having more money than I do, probably has a more of an emotional tie to that film. Because I’m not sure, I thought it was a great film, but it didn’t hit me enough to want to go to that person’s house.
And I would request a dead tarantula. And not that I am into animal killing whatsoever, it is simply tarantulas are not my like groove. Although they do cause emotion. So if that is what they are trying to do, that would bring a lot of emotions to the surface for me.
There’s some website, I don’t really know, somebody was telling me about it, where you can stay at different houses that movies have been filmed at. They cost more, and I think that’s to do with the emotions. They know that people will pay more in order to like feel like they’re reliving what they felt.
Does that make any sense? That last sentence.
JP: The whole bit. Yeah. Agreed.
Marianne: I would be okay with going with somebody else who’s paying. I just want to put that out though.
Crys: Yeah. The book I read on crafting communities and crafting experiences, I think it’s called You’re Invited. And it talks about how much more something means to people when you craft an experience to them and you tie meaning into it. And one of the examples he gave that stuck in my brain because it did mean a lot to the people, is he invited a bunch of people and what it was is it was an advertising for a Florist to arranges bouquets and stuff. But rather than just being like, oh, look at these beautiful bouquets, they invited a bunch of people to one of their, he called them influencer meetings. So they all get to know each other, but they’re only allowed to use first names and they’re not allowed to talk about what they do. And then they’re like, we have crafted this exclusive experience so they take small groups into this other room where, they were then taught how to make their own bouquet.
And then they took those bouquets and returned to that group to the group and took out another small group, taught them to make bouquets. And then they started texting back pictures of them delivering those bouquets to their loved ones, the bouquets they had just made, and crafted this amazing experience that had emotion, that meant something.
And so in a very similar way, but completely different circumstances, we’re talking about using emotion to route these stories, the story of whether it is your own life or whether it’s a book you’re reading, deep into your brain. We’re past that surface level of just consuming.
JP: Definitely. If you think about what has really resonated and hit with different communities. Twilight, the reason people love it so much is because of the relationship of the romance. People go to, I can’t even remember the place, like Forks, Washington, because they want to feel a part of that. They want to feel that emotion that they had when they read it.
Harry Potter, the whole concept is these parents who are no longer there still love him so much to the extent that it protects him. That’s the emotional resignation that plays throughout the whole story. And because of that emotion, even though there are things happening there, crazy lights and fancy things, et cetera, like that’s the reason it hits so much. And I think that there are similar books that try to do the same thing, but they do it in action and less in emotion. And then they’re forgotten more or less.
Crys: This is an example that I’m not a huge fan of, but it’s still a powerful one. The Office, there’s very little really strong emotion generally shown by the characters in that show. But that show is all about manipulating the viewer’s emotional experience. It is the reason I can not watch that show because of the dissonance, right? Like for me, I feel such strong secondhand emotion for what the characters ought to be feeling, and they are not. And that dissonance is far too great for me to enjoy watching that show.
That is an experience that speaks to so many other people, because they are so powerful at crafting the experience of watching an episode slash the entire series of that show.
Janet: That’s interesting because I hear about everyone that talks about The Office, and I understand all the jokes from The Office, but that’s not a show that I’ve ever watched any episode more than once because I don’t have that same experience.
And my example is, you think about the Disney version of Cinderella. Like for me, it’s not about her finding the prince, it’s about how she deals with this dark period of her life and how she connects to the natural world. So like everyone’s going to have their own takeaway and for me, Cinderella is about the birds and the mice.
Crys: But was it explained for you, JP? With The Office?
JP: So I had a lot of friends growing up who really liked The Office. But I think, to Crys’s point, like I have lesser, but still that same feeling of, there are occasions where it feels like you’re in those shoes of that character and whatever they’re experiencing it, it hits too close to home and you feel that discomfort. For me, I don’t like sitting in that. And so I will only watch a few episodes here and there or I’ll skip to the ones that people tell me are really good. But I have not sat through and watched all of The Office, just because it’s not for me, it’s for someone else who likes that sort of feeling, likes that sort of emotional journey.
I think even a couple episodes of Schitt’s Creek I was having Crys watch and I had to tell her, you have to keep going. I know that these episodes are going to cause that same feeling, bnut there’s a story here that I need you to see, I need you to unveil. So there was a few times where I was like, Crys, just keep watching. I promise. It’ll be okay.
Crys: I had to fast forward half of the MLM episode, for sure.
Janet: This whole conversation about emotions just reminds me that I don’t want to talk about my emotions. I don’t want to talk about writing my emotions. I want to have that experience in the privacy of my own head.
Crys: I think that’s what I’ve struggled with most. And what’s kept me, before romance writing, kept me from writing stories that, one, I was able to hold a long through line on slash finish because I personally pulled back from the emotions and couldn’t continue where the story was logically going. Or two, I was writing really interesting scenes where there just weren’t a lot of emotions to connect to. And my readers would be like, yeah, this is really cool, but so what?
Marianne: I was thinking that the reason why people, I think people want emotions in books is so that we can experience emotions by ourselves. And if we start having an emotion, like anger or crying, and we don’t want to talk about it, we can say, oh, it’s the book. I usually like to, a couple of times a year, I want to go to a really sad movie so that I can cry in the dark with strangers.
JP: Very true. That’s the whole point, I think, that stories play a role as people to live vicariously through other characters and experience emotions and events through a different person’s eyes so that they can process that in their own mind without having to do anything externally.
Crys: I was telling Janet earlier that I watch Budweiser commercials when I really need to cry.
Janet: Yes, exactly.
Crys: Yeah. Like the ones with the horses or like the ones with the dog where you’re like afraid that his owner just like drunk drove and died and then he comes home and the dogs so happy. I bawl. I just absolutely bawl my eyes out.
Marianne: I get ticked off on Instagram when I’m following like golden retriever accounts for happiness and all of a sudden they show some really sad one. I’m like, no.
Crys: One of the things that he pointed out that kind of unlocked something for me, and I’m still trying to figure this out because as I’m trying to figure out what people come to books for specifically, like what specific emotions they’re coming to books for. And I think about things like horror and what emotional experience people are coming to a horror story for. It’s not necessarily one. I understand. I don’t particularly enjoy scaring the pants off myself.
But I really liked that he put the comment in there towards the end of the book about, regardless of what emotional catharsis people are coming to books for, they are looking for a positive experience. I also think that’s a very Western expectation because Russian literature is depressing as hell. And I don’t know that really plays through unless you also feel like life is terrible, but at least it goes on is really positive because I feel like that’s the message of a lot of Russian literature. At least there’s vodka. I don’t know if that’s a positive enough message for me. Russian scholars, please correct me if I’m wrong.
But I do think that for the Western audience that we tend to be writing for having a positive even within a tragedy is generally the experience that we are looking for. That they’re like, and you said this earlier, JP, that there is a lesson the reader has learned even if the character has not.
JP: Yeah. And I think to bring back to horror, multiple reasons people read it, but one is to experience the fear and the terror in the safety of their own mind without having to actually have a risk of death. There’s also that sense of hope that a lot of horror, but not all horror has, where either someone usually makes it out of there.
And so there’s that overcoming one’s greatest fear and knowing that there’s a light at the end of the tunnel. Now, of course, especially in movies within the past 20 years, a lot of those movies don’t end so happily for anyone. And I think that’s also just a different experience as well. I can’t think of what it is off the top of my head, but yet again, I think it’s all just that base level of feeling the sense of survival and knowing that you can shut off the TV, you can close the book and walk away without having to actually feel or be scathed.
Crys: And I think that this is possibly an appropriate kind of caveat, is that Donald J Maass is referring to popular enduring fiction and not necessarily experimental thought provoking stories, because when I think of the only episode of Black Mirror that I have ever watched, which is the first one. And if you have ever watched that show, you know exactly the episode I am referring to. There’s no positive learning. There’s no positive uplift at the end of that. It is a shocker. It is shock fiction. It is thought provoking. But it is meant to make you think, what would I have done in this situation. Which is what most of that series is for, is not necessarily to provide you with an ending, but to prompt you with a question to write your own ending in your head of how you would have done it differently. I think I would say that’s how that’s structured and that’s not necessarily the kind of story that is addressed in this book.
JP: I don’t know though, because if you think about it, what did that show do to you?
Crys: It made me stop watching it.
JP: One, it made you stop watching it, but two, it also provoked thought. And I would presume for some people, it led them to certain actions. Like I would not want a world that was like this. So if I start to see things that start to point in this direction, I’m going to actively speak out against it. Or, like thinking of things that are a lot around this like cerebral type of storytelling, where the ultimate goal is to provoke the person into an action by tugging on their emotions, by making them feel disgust, by making them feel fear, so that they’re able to do something at the end of it is the idea. That would be my thought.
Marianne: Everything isn’t going to evoke emotion or the emotion you want it to for everyone, that’s just impossible. And so I think we have to remember that and you are talking about it, so there’s something there. But I don’t know. I saw the first 10 minutes.
Crys: I also talk about the book that I’ve never read called, My Girlfriend’s Haunted Vagina, but that didn’t really have any positive emotion, but it sure as heck does have me talking about it seven years later.
JP: Is it because the title incited an emotion of humor and you felt the need to share it with others?
Crys: Shock. But yeah, but I think that the positive ending emotion or the positive experience, like ending experience, is not necessarily going to align with every kind of story’s purpose, but that it is a very modern commercial fiction journey, and going to be the one that most readers look for. I think is what I’m saying is that there are exceptions, but they’re not going to be popular, they’re not going to make you a ton of money, but they can have completely different goals.
Janet: Yeah, and this book isn’t telling us how to write all of those books that are out there. It’s just telling us how to write more of the story beneath the surface. Just pulling that out of the title here, I think that any book like we’ve been talking about you can’t control what emotion that person takes with your story, but it’s putting enough in there so that your reader experience that they have something when they walk away from it. Even if it’s just like a shock or disgust with the title, like we’re talking about the emotional connection and it’s like when you make that with the reader, they’re discovering something about themselves that maybe they’ve been thinking one way all along, and your story found the truth for them that they couldn’t find themselves.
So I don’t think every book out there is going to do that, but here’s a book we can read to try and do that with our next work in progress.
Marianne: Yeah.
Crys: I think he does provide, especially with the questions, and I read this as the book itself was the overview and the questions for the practicality. And I do think that’s how he intended to write it. And I do think that he provided a lot of really good, thought provoking ways of looking at our story and how we’re telling it to help guide people.
But I also think that this book would be overwhelming for most authors.
JP: Definitely. Especially if they wanted to go through and they paused each time that he told them to. Like, that’s too much.
Crys: Yeah. I think I would’ve been overwhelmed beyond kind of the first three chapters, like the intro and then the first three chapters even just a few years, like a couple of years ago. Because the first two chapters are simply kind of those overviews of what are the three kinds of showing or telling emotion. Basically inner telling, outer showing, and three, the reader experience. And I think that right there is where most people just need to start. That they just need to be aware that those are the three things and just start looking at their fiction through that lens and not trying to show everything, not trying to tell everything, not trying to manipulate the reader’s experience 100% while ignoring what the characters actually need.
And then everything after that point, it’s something that you can start grabbing onto. Particularly in the very wordy way that he approaches it. Once you feel like you at least know what showing and telling looks like for you and you start to have an idea of, this is a point where my readers will probably have a strong, emotional reaction. And my readers, the ones that I want to read this book will probably have this particular emotion. And I can’t control the ones who aren’t my readers. I can’t make them feel that. But that’s, I think, where most writers need to start because everything else in this book would just be complete overwhelm.
Janet: Especially if you don’t want to do any self-growth. Because I feel like that’s a lot of what he’s pushing us to do too is to get this greater understanding of these things that are below the surface.
Marianne: He practices what he preaches because I felt a lot of emotion reading this book.
Crys: I feel like most authors should be in some extreme therapy to be able to tell like super good stories. And that doesn’t necessarily mean like you’re in therapy every week. But writing truthfully is a very dangerous prospect for a lot of us because a lot of writers do come to fiction as a way to work through their own crap, whether they realize it or not.
I think that’s honestly where the tortured artist idea came from is that people who have rough pasts or have undealt with trauma have to find a way to express it somehow. For people who are drawn to art, it comes out in art. But I don’t think that the tortured artist is healthy. AKA let’s all get therapy.
Marianne: Yep. Yep. Hold hands and sing kumbaya around a fire.
Crys: Or fuck it all. Which is my favorite rendition of Frozen’s Let it Go.
Okay. This has been a very cussy episode from me. I’m apparently feeling it. That’s what happens when I’m tired and exhausted and over people.
JP: It’s your emotional craft for tonight.
Crys: And I haven’t been around my five-year-old today.
Did anyone have any thoughts they wanted to wrap up with before we close out this episode?
Marianne: I was just going to say, I wonder if he would work with me to help me do this better.
I’d be open to that.
Crys: You have me Marianne. You’re good.
JP: I was going to say basically the same thing, that I would love to see this almost as like a step-by-step process or like a course of some sort, maybe one that I would take. But being able to go through each of these steps and talk through each of them would be beneficial in my mind at least.
Crys: Stop stealing my ideas, JP.
JP: Then do it, Crys, and I’ll join the program.
Crys: I’m working on it. That’s why I wanted us all to read this book. Research.
Janet, anything?
Janet: Yeah, it’s going in my journal. I don’t know that it’s going in this episode.
Crys: I can cut it, but you don’t have to.
Janet: I have a lot of thoughts, but now that I have to talk about them, like they’re gone. That’s what that book did for me. It gave me a lot of insights. My whiteboard is covered with ideas. I think that my feelings have to be processed a lot before they can be shared.
Marianne: But I think we do have an out, in that we can process some emotions through our characters and therefore it’s as though we’re being more public with them. But at the same time, not, because I write characters that, feel similarly to me, but they aren’t exact. And I do write opposing opinions as well, but I think through the writing, that’s how we do get through that as well.
Janet: Definitely.
Crys: Thank you so much for joining us again through the torture of an emotional book club. My caveat is always just, this is not for beginning writers. If you pick this up as a beginning writer, 99% of you are just going to feel overwhelmed, and you ought to throw it at the wall because it is too much.
But we have not yet had a chance to talk about what our January book will be. We will be putting that poll up in the Patreon to be decided one week from now. So if you would like to have input on what we read in 2022, you can check us out at patreon.com and the link will be in the show notes.
Thank you so much to Marianne and Janet and all of you listening.
Leave a Reply