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My intention in all my writing, from my most ridiculous travel failures to my most ardent fiction and poetry, is to use the space between myself and a reader to fill their heart with a passion so present and pure it ignites a similar emotion in their heart.
Emotional impact doesn’t have to be gigantic. It’s not always about tears. Sentiment emerges from the small choices a writer makes in the narrowest of spaces, the sentence itself. It’s about the rhythm of a piece, how it combines long, lilting lines to build a tension that’s resolved at the end by a single word. Snap! It’s gone. The reader is relieved. That’s emotion. They feel the build, the climax, and the denouement. They recognize the bones. They appreciate it. That sense of quality, that sense of reward is not reflected onto the writer. It shines, instead, on their opinion of the company. Good writing builds trust, and trust is the cornerstone of a long, profitable relationship.
I have an aim not only for the story or the plot at large but for the experience of the reader. I intend to inflame their heart. How I set that fire depends on what I’m writing. Why I set that fire is always the same: the only place a writer should inhabit is the reader’s heart. Everything else is either a technique or a distraction.
Humor disarms the reader. Just the way it levels a room at a comedy club, it relaxes the reader on the page. It brings them into confidence, into trust, quicker than anything else. Once they are there, once you have them laughing, they are vulnerable; then you can turn their attention to a raw and powerful truth.
It’s there in the midst of laughter, a person throws off their shields, the armor they use to protect themselves from the absurdity and sociopathic grind we all live in. Most people live in a dumpster fire. To survive it, they lock up. Laughter unlocks them, and while they are in that moment of vulnerability, a tiny door opens in their heart. A savvy writer will take that opportunity to sneak in with a lighter and a fistful of dry twigs. But this is beneficial arson. The shields protecting our reader also lock them out of their own authentic emotions. You get in there, and you uncover an emotion they’ve put into the cupboard; something beautiful and true, a lustrous, irreducible diamond of love, and they will treasure it. They will remember their humanity. Igniting that fire is the sacred duty of all writers, all poets, all singers. Those are the stories people carry with them for the rest of their lives.
If I do my job, I am helping you build a map. This is not a new-age sentiment. There is science at work here:
“The brain devotes a lot of effort to mapping where our loved ones are while they are alive, so we can find them when we need them.” Mary-Frances O’Connor,
The Grieving Brain: The Surprising Science of How We Learn from Love and Loss
The hippocampus builds memories and it builds that map of ourselves and other people that matters so much to our sense of self. It also maps people in the stories you love. So you may find your memories of Count Alexander Rostov from A Gentleman in Moscow as real and as meaningful as memories of your own childhood.
Your internal map grows all the time. It grows like a chalk drawing on a vast, slate floor. It is also redrawn as your life encounters new roads, new characters, and new emotions. Those emotions are like cities, and when I do my job well, some of them light up like a constellation, and you revisit them on this map, and the emotion is re-experienced. Fiction has the power to ignite a dormant passion and set it ablaze so the reader is briefly warmed and illuminated by its light. When I say I am here to set your heart on fire, that is what I mean. That is my aim.
My newsletter is infrequent and short. I encourage you to subscribe.