How to capture and hold the interest of readers and bring them back to read your work again and again.

Emotions, The Common Thread Of Humanity
By La Belle Rouge 



No two people ever experience exactly the same situations and environment in life. All people do, however, experience emotions. At an early age we become familiar with joy, sadness, anger, love, fear and a myriad of other emotions and shades of them.

In being a writer of substance it is imperative to remember that emotion is indeed the common thread that binds together all humanity. If you can touch human emotions, you will touch souls and lives with your words and if you touch souls you will be read.

Some people go through a lifetime having never, or seldom, known the positive emotions of joy and love but I would dare to say there is not a person who has lived and not experienced pain. Pain is the most common and connective emotion of life, if you know how to release the pain you have experienced to the page, you will possibly become a great writer, and able to ascend to the heights of joy, from the depths of despair. You will be able to write the entire gamut of human emotion and make your readers actually “Feel” what you write.

If I read a poem or story and the element of emotion is missing, it seems stale and unpalatable to my mind and my emotions, lacking in connection and honestly, scarcely worth the time to read it!

Some people are afraid of emotion, afraid to feel it, afraid to express it; but with effort even those who do not freely express emotion can train themselves to feel and express it in writing. A good place to begin is to think of the most joyful, or painful, feelings you have ever had, what brought them on? Exactly how did they feel? Think of the words that best express them. Now write something reflecting the emotion. If you practice this regularly it will become easier with time to write with greater and more honest emotion.

Those who read your words will feel connected with you and the core of your writing because you are not only describing, but actually causing them to feel familiar emotions once again. They will find themselves thinking "This writer is describing what I have felt!" That common thread will keep them connected to you throughout your whole poem or story and will bring them back to read your next offering.

Description is a wonderful writer's tool but the ability to feel what you write and transfer that experience to the reader's own emotions is priceless. 

 

5/27/2004 La Belle Rouge