When the Story Follows You Home

The Emotional Mirror

Sometimes it hurts to be a writer.

There. I said it.

I don't mean the familiar frustrations we all talk about. Rejection. Writer's block. Staring at a blank page while the cursor blinks back at you as though it has somewhere better to be. Those things are certainly part of it.

I'm talking about something more personal.

Something I have begun to recognize in myself.

As writers, we spend a great deal of time exploring emotion. If we want our characters to feel real, we cannot always stand safely outside their experiences and describe what is happening to them. Sometimes we have to go looking for the emotional truth inside ourselves.

What does it feel like to lose someone?

To want someone?

To be frightened?

To be lonely?

To feel overlooked?

To love someone so deeply that the possibility of losing them becomes terrifying?

To hope?

To regret?

To wait?

Our characters may be fictional, but the emotions we use to create them often aren't.

That is where things can get complicated.

I have started thinking of it as the emotional mirror.

When I dig deeply into a story, I sometimes carry pieces of its emotional world with me after I leave the page. I may close the computer, get up from my desk and return to the ordinary business of being a human being, but some part of me is still processing what I have just written.

And real life is waiting.

There are conversations.

Texts.

Silences.

Expressions.

People we love behaving in ways we don't immediately understand.

The writer's mind is very good at filling in the blanks.

We do it professionally.

A character pauses before answering, and that pause means something.

Someone looks away, and we wonder why.

A phone call isn't returned, and we begin constructing the reason.

We search for motivation. We look for subtext. We notice changes in behavior. We take seemingly unrelated details and connect them because somewhere inside those details might be the story.

On the page, that's useful.

In real life?

Not always.

Real people aren't characters in our stories.

Their pauses aren't necessarily foreshadowing. Their silence isn't always subtext. A change in someone's mood doesn't necessarily signal the beginning of Act Three.

Sometimes somebody is simply tired.

Sometimes they forgot.

Sometimes they are dealing with something that has absolutely nothing to do with us.

And sometimes, if we are carrying an emotion from the page, we can hold up that emotional mirror and see the story reflected in the people around us.

We can misinterpret.

We can redirect.

We can take the emotions we have been exploring creatively and apply them to something someone says, does, or doesn't do.

I have caught myself doing it.

That is not the easiest thing to admit.

But perhaps recognizing it is part of learning how to live alongside the thing I love doing.

Because I don't want to stop digging deeply.

I don't want to protect myself from my characters so completely that I stop feeling them. Some of the moments I love most in writing happen when a character surprises me emotionally, when a story I thought was going in one direction suddenly touches something much more human.

Recently, I wrote a story from the perspective of a dog who couldn't understand why his boy kept disappearing. The boy wasn't abandoning him. He was simply growing up. School became college. College became graduate studies. Life became marriage and a home somewhere else.

The dog understood none of those things.

He only understood that his boy used to be there, and then he wasn't.

I knew the dog wasn't real.

That didn't mean the emotion wasn't.

Then I wrote about a family discovering a box filled with objects belonging to people who had once lived in their home. A teddy bear. A model airplane. A journal. Ordinary objects belonging to ordinary people whose names would never appear in history books.

That story led me somewhere else emotionally.

Most of us will eventually be forgotten.

That's not exactly a cheerful thought to carry into lunch.

But that's part of writing too.

We visit places emotionally that we might otherwise walk around.

Then we're expected to pick up the dry cleaning.

There is another kind of hurt in choosing the writer's path, particularly when you work around film.

Sets are exciting.

There are actors, cameras, lights, costumes, locations, monitors, microphones, crew members moving everywhere and someone eventually yelling, "Action!"

You can see filmmaking happening.

Writing doesn't usually look like that.

Writing often looks like one person sitting in front of a computer.

For hours.

You can spend an entire day working and finish with three pages you're finally happy with.

Someone asks what you did all day.

"I fixed Act Two."

Try making an exciting behind-the-scenes reel out of that.

There have been times when I have looked at all the activity surrounding production and wondered whether I was somehow standing outside the exciting part.

Then I have to remind myself of something.

Before the camera, there was a page.

Before an actor could fall in love with a character, someone had to imagine that character.

Before a director could interpret a scene, someone had to write it.

Before a composer could score the heartbreak, someone had to create the moment that broke the heart.

Writing may be one of the quietest parts of filmmaking, but quiet does not mean insignificant.

Still, knowing that doesn't magically remove the difficulty.

There are days when the work feels invisible.

There are days when something you've poured yourself into receives little response.

There are days when you wonder whether anybody will ever care about these people and worlds as much as you do.

And then you open the document again.

Maybe that is another part of the emotional mirror.

Writers care first.

We care before anyone else knows there is something to care about.

We love characters before actors meet them.

We worry about worlds nobody else has visited.

We grieve losses that haven't happened.

We celebrate victories that exist only inside our heads.

We sit alone with stories and believe they matter.

That is a strange thing to do.

It is also a beautiful thing to do.

But I am learning that loving the work also means learning when to put the story down.

To recognize when I am still looking at the world through an emotion I created for the page.

To remember that the people in my life are allowed to be complicated without my writing their motivations for them.

To ask instead of assume.

To let a silence simply be a silence.

To allow real life to remain gloriously, frustratingly unscripted.

I don't think the answer is to feel less.

For me, at least, that would defeat the purpose.

Perhaps the answer is simply becoming more aware of what I am carrying when I leave the page.

Some stories stay at the desk.

Some follow us home.

And sometimes the most important thing a writer can do is recognize which one is standing in the mirror.

**

Thank you for joining me around the fire today.

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May your stories be many, your imagination endless, and your light never fade.

— Dr. AY Heath (Angel)

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