Every Human Emotion

If emotions are hard for us to access in our lives, they become even harder to apply to our stories in a way that makes the reader feel the emotion. Yet, creating a wide emotional highway is essential for your reader.  When you connect with the myriad of your emotions, the reader connects with all of your story. Emotion is what makes memoir believable, it’s what drives poetry and essays and blogs and movies.

Author Sam Keen reminds us that when we tell our stories “real journeys begin in the mud, the desert, the swamp, the wasteland, not in the seventh heaven.”

The best way to a technicolor life is to tell the whole technicolor of your Journey – your willingness to write about the full spectrum of life through the full sepctrum of your emotions. We all know there are no rainbows without the rain!

As writers, it’s our job to take readers on a whole journey, and to do this successfully, we have to explore the whole of the journey.

“Emotions help us determine what is of value and importance.

This involves understanding their cultural sources, their history in infancy and childhood,

and their sometimes unpredictable and disorderly operations in our daily lives.

Grief itself bears the traces of your entire history.”

– Martha Nussbuam

Emotions shape our mental and social lives, and the narrative direction of every story we write. Revisiting and rediscovering emotions in our bodies  and our stories help us access the main artery of every story, and bring life into all the stories that make up our lives.

“There are three things men fear –

the sea in a storm

 the night with no moon

and the anger of a gentle man.”

– Patrick Rothfuss

All Your History is in Every Emotion

 I had a dream last night that I was moving from room to room, and a big party was being planned.  There were holiday trees and menoras and wrapped gifts – it was very disney, even small talking figurines  under trees everyone was photographing on their Smart Phones. I kept saying, I don’t like big parties anymore, I like small groups of people.  A very, very tall man turn around and said “Are you triggered?” And there it was, that word.  Triggered. Every emotion we have in our lives is part of our emotional history.  Emotion triggers smemories and memory triggers other memories.  By exploring the landscape of our emotions, whole, complete stories emerge where we make the reader feel.

I have carefully ripped the pages of my life from my spine, my knees and my thighs.

Through writing, my spirit has come to know flight.  

But when I keep still and deeply listen to writers in our community,

every emotion they write comes alive in my body too.

All their hope and whispered bedtime prayers of their childhood

become my prayers too.  

This is the act of giving and receiving story, and I am certain it’s a Holy Act.”

– Laura Lentz, STORYquest

Guest Teacher –  to be announced!

EMOTIONS EXPLORED IN THIS CLASS INCLUDE: