by Katherine Reay, @Katherine_Reay
I’m deep into a first draft. It’s an exciting time and a tough time. But, let’s be honest, as rewarding as writing is – and I don’t believe I could not do it (double negative intended) – it can be and is often tough work.
It’s tough because it needs to be real. If we want readers to follow our characters, believe our stories and trust the journey our characters take them on… We’ve got to go deep – and that’s hard.
We must expose real emotion, pain, hurt, happiness, anger – whatever it is we are chasing each and every moment in a story. Because we are chasing something – we’ll talk about the tension and conflict of that in a later post this year.
But back to the point… The emotions we lay out on the page must be authentic and, I’ll go so far as to say, they’ve got to be the real raw stuff. We need to “bleed on the page.”
Now notice in the first line, I didn’t write if we want readers to follow us, believe in us… We don’t want that. I read once that good writers show you their characters, bad writers tell you about themselves. So while I say we’ve got to “bleed” on the page and be authentic, that emotional outpouring must be organically woven into our characters’ experiences. It equates to the Uta Hagen acting method – where students “transfer” their own experiences into the experiences of the characters to portray them authentically on stage or screen. We are transferring the tension, the emotion, and the vulnerability that is authentic to us into our characters so it becomes organic to them.
So as I stand at my desk today, writing away, my goal is to be brave – and be vulnerable.
Experiment with it. Have fun with it. Your rich characters will thank you! (Your readers will too!)
See you next month!
Katherine
The Printed Letter Bookshop
Love, friendship, and family find a home at the Printed Letter Bookshop.
Katherine Reay is the national bestselling and award-winning author of Dear Mr. Knightley, Lizzy & Jane, The Bronte Plot, A Portrait of Emily Price, and The Austen Escape. Her next novel, The Printed Letter Bookshop, will release May 2019. All Katherine’s novels are contemporary stories with a bit of classical flair. Her first nonfiction work will release December 2019. Katherine holds a BA and MS from Northwestern University, and is a wife, mother, former marketer, and avid chocolate consumer. After living all across the country and a few stops in Europe, Katherine now happily resides outside Chicago, IL. You can meet her at www.katherinereay.com or on Facebook: KatherineReayBooks, Twitter: @katherine_reay or Instagram: @katherinereay.
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