Feeling It

Sometimes the hardest thing about writing is feeling it–really feeling it.

I am the type of person who cries at movies. I also cry at weddings, funerals, and other random emotional occasions. And when people close to me are crying because they’re upset, I start crying with them. Sometimes my children laugh at me (in a gentle way) for how easily I cry, but it’s the process of fusion into other people’s stories and lives, fictional or real, that moves me to emotion.

Ironically, I find it harder to cry when I’m the one who’s upset about something, and hardest to bring my fiction to a place when I’m crying along with my characters.

But it must be done.

And despite all the warnings about overly sentimental poets, who, according to nasty critics, cry at their own trite work, I find that tears can be a gauge toward getting to the heart of something–the sad but satisfying emotional truth of story.