Channeling Your Emotions into Your Fiction
Find that feeling that keeps you up at night and write about it.
I was attending a friend’s wedding in San Fransisco, and while sitting in the hotel with my friend and author, Mercurio D. Rivera, we watched a documentary about the tearing down of the old Yankee Stadium to make way for a new, bigger, “better” stadium on a plot next to the old one. The very idea filled me with rage. While I don’t watch much baseball these days, I used to be an obsessive fan and had attended games at Yankee Stadium (the old one) many dozen times. I even snuck into the stadium once, posing as a concession employee, to meet my friends at a sold-out game. I have a lot of memories there.
I thought, How dare they tear down this place that has so much meaning not only to me, but to so many others! It’s the literal “House that Ruth Built,” and they’re tearing it down!
I’m also, if you don’t know me, a staunch environmentalist. I became one ever since I took a philosophy class in college that made us read Silent Spring, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, Thoreau, and the transcendentalists, among others. To me, the Earth is precious and sacred, even if you (or I) don’t necessarily believe in a Deity, capital D.
The rage I felt at them tearing down the original Yankee Stadium, and the rage I felt at the literal tearing down of Earth to make way for condos and strip malls and factory farms and parking lots — all of that went into my story which became known as The Sounds of Old Earth. In the story, Abner, an older resident of the upstate New York town of New Paltz, is being asked to leave his beloved family home, of which his family has lived in for many generations, to move to New Earth, a brand new planet being constructed beside the old one. The Old Earth, the planet Abner now inhabits, is polluted, corrupted, broken, and its mass is being dismantled, sliced apart like a cake at a birthday, to be used to construct the new planet and to make more and “better” homes for humanity.
Abner doesn’t want to go. He loves his old house too much. There are too many memories there. His wife, his kids, his family. Even the frogs, which croak loud on summer evenings, call to mind millennia, even eons, of history, which is all being thrown away…
The Sounds of Old Earth went on to be a finalist for the Nebula Award in 2013. On the day it was published, January 1, 2013, Joyce Carol Oates said, “This is a powerful story that is both tragic & hopeful–unexpectedly. And beautifully written. Thank you for sharing it.”
All I did was write what I felt. I channeled my very real, very powerful feelings into a narrative, and the story connected with readers because it connected with me.
Veteran editor Ellen Datlow said, “This is gorgeous, melancholy, and heartbreaking. I highly rec it (I cried through most of it).”
You can’t fake emotion. Well, you can. In fact, writers do, and do it often. But the emotions that connect with readers, the stories that make them gasp and start and cry — these come from very real places.
No, I’ve never lived on a planet that was being dismantled to make another. But I have felt the pain at seeing beloved places being torn apart. And I took that feeling and channeled it into my fiction.
Find that thing that makes you angry, that makes you sad or melancholy or makes you scream with excitement. Find that feeling that keeps you tossing and turning at night, spinning in your mind like an electron around a nucleus, fast as photons. Find that feeling and write about it.
If it moves you, others will be moved by it too.