{"id":3014,"date":"2013-08-23T21:14:33","date_gmt":"2013-08-24T01:14:33","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.old.caraghobrien.com\/book\/?p=3014"},"modified":"2013-08-23T21:14:33","modified_gmt":"2013-08-24T01:14:33","slug":"no-hearts-gulps-or-sighs","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.caraghobrien.com\/book\/writing\/no-hearts-gulps-or-sighs\/","title":{"rendered":"No Hearts, Gulps, or Sighs"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"heart\"Today I wrote the first draft of an awful scene.\u00a0 It\u2019s scary and sad and troubling to me, and I hadn\u2019t seen it coming, either.\u00a0 It evolved naturally in a new chain of events I was trying in Project Next, and then, bam, I had to be responsible to my characters and expand a full-blown, agonizing scene.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s hard to write about emotion and have it work on the page.\u00a0 It\u2019s tempting to throw in tears, beating hearts, gulps, and sighs, but although those feel important and powerful when we\u2019re feeling them, they read almost always as distracting clich\u00e9s on the page.\u00a0 They usually fail to summon a responding emotion in the reader.<\/p>\n

Yet, without those physical cues to express emotions, I struggle to write them.\u00a0 I feel like I need to discover how to write, all over again.\u00a0 Instead of describing their feelings, I have to live the trouble with my characters, through all their not knowing and confusion.\u00a0 They stumble through inadequate attempts to talk to each other, or comfort each other, and I inch forward with them, just wishing I could walk out of the room and not have to be there.<\/p>\n

I\u2019ll go back to revise, of course.\u00a0 I\u2019ll take any distracting heartbeats out of the prose, and then I\u2019ll check my own heart as I read to see if it\u2019s doing that cringe thing in response to the failure, or the helplessness, or the longing.\u00a0 In the end, it will wring me out, if it\u2019s any good.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Today I wrote the first draft of an awful scene.\u00a0 It\u2019s scary and sad and troubling to me, and I hadn\u2019t seen it coming, either.\u00a0 It evolved naturally in a new chain of events I was trying in Project Next, and then, bam, I had to be responsible to my characters and expand a full-blown, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[246,326,37],"class_list":["post-3014","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-writing","tag-project-next","tag-revising","tag-writing-2"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.caraghobrien.com\/book\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3014","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.caraghobrien.com\/book\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.caraghobrien.com\/book\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.caraghobrien.com\/book\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.caraghobrien.com\/book\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3014"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.caraghobrien.com\/book\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3014\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3017,"href":"https:\/\/www.caraghobrien.com\/book\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3014\/revisions\/3017"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.caraghobrien.com\/book\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3014"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.caraghobrien.com\/book\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3014"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.caraghobrien.com\/book\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3014"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}