Emotions: Before, During and After

Today I am pleased to publish my fifth guest blog post. You too can have a post published on my blog. Just read the guidelines HERE. In the meantime, enjoy...

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Emotions: Before, During & After
By: Karen Einsel

I have come to believe that writers are very emotional people. With emotions that run the gamut of intensity. (I went to dictionary.com just to make sure I was using the right word and was excited to see the example sentence they used!)

Gamut [gamut] noun 1. the entire scale or range: the gamut of dramatic emotion from grief to joy.

Every once in awhile another writer will post a picture on Facebook of a bloody knife with a caption something like; Make me mad and I will write you into my next novel just so I can kill you off. We are a sweet bunch aren't we. :-) In fact I shared one of those a couple of weeks ago and received the usual comments; I want to be in your book, you can kill me off in the book, etc. One comment I got was from an old friend that I recently reconnected with and he told me he wanted to be the guy that rides in on the white horse and whisks the girl away. I told him I don't write westerns or knights in shining armor, so we settled on a lime green '71 'cuda with a hemi as his white horse. :-) Thing is, I had a BIG crush on this guy when we were teenagers. Now I need to find out if he wants the story sweet and mild, sexy, or sizzling! I will keep him in the loop the whole time I'm writing, to make sure he approves of the story.

All through life we are told to write. Young girls keep diaries. "Johnny smiled at me today."

If we are dealing with problems, we are told to keep a journal, "How did you feel when this happened? What was good about your day?"

If we are trying to lose weight, we keep food diaries. How many calories did we consume?  What did we eat? How much exercise did we get? And so on.

Writing emotions and feelings play a big part in our lives. They can either push us forward or hold us back, but for writers they seem to be even more prominent.

When we first get that idea for our next story, we are excited. Our enthusiasm overflows as the characters, dialogue, and scenes start forming in our minds. We sit down and can't type or write fast enough. The story in our heads has a mind of its own, and then... we hit a snag. Our muse has gone into hiding. We bang our head on the table, we throw our notebook across the room, we lie down on our bed, and we scrub the floor, and vacuum the entire house trying to find it. There it is hiding in the corner! We grab it! Kicking and screaming we drag it back to the table and we write. We cry with our characters. We laugh with them and at them. We get angry and stand and fight with them... and then comes those two little words, "The End" The end? How can it be "The End?" We have to let our baby go. We've nurtured it. We've helped it grow and now it's ready to go out into the world. We feel the empty nest syndrome. Now what? Depression and sadness set in.

But wait! You're a writer! You look at the clock, the dog sitting there wagging his tail, you hear a car screeching its tires... Excitement takes hold of you, you've got a new story. New characters, a new plot, another way to hide the body, or fall in love. The emotions flow.

Now a question for you. Do your emotions affect your characters emotions? If you are happy, are they? If you are having a bad day, do you find yourself writing your characters in a crabby mood?

Or let's take a look at the other side of the emotional spectrum. If your characters are angry, do you find yourself irritable? If they've lost a loved one, do you find yourself walking around depressed? If they are excited and happy, do you walk around grinning from ear to ear and people avoid you, because you are just weird? LOL! Okay you get the point.

I'd love to know how your emotions relate to your writing and vice versa.

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About Karen: The idea of being a writer never crossed Karen’s mind, but after closing her gift shop in 2011 she found herself with too much time on her hands, and a story in her head. Taking pen and paper in hand she found a whole new world open up to her and she’s enjoying it immensely.

Karen's Blog: karensdifferentcorners
Karen on Facebook:  facebook.com/pages/Different-Corners
Karen on Twitter: @K_Einsel