I was asked a question in my last writing class, "How do I write less analytically?" And my answer is to bring in more emotion. For you to share an experience you’ve had that is a real-life example or moment of what we’re analytically speaking about. We can dive deep into how that experience felt to us.
This is not your classic “show, don’t tell” writing advice. This is going deeper than showing what happened by using all our senses to describe the scene. This is about describing the emotions we felt, what responses were triggered in our nervous system, the thoughts that raced through our mind informed by our past experiences.
This idea of writing analytically and emotionally reminded me of a quote from Virginia Woolf’s, A Room Of One’s Own. I share the full excerpt in this episode, but this is the main point, although lacking some context.
“Moreover, a book is not made of sentences laid end to end, but of sentences built, if an image helps, into arcades and domes. And this shape too has been made by men out of their own needs for their own uses. There is no reason to think that the form of the epic or of the poetic play suits a woman any more than the sentence suits her.”
I discuss and give examples of what a non-fiction book shaped by a woman can look like (How To Think Like A Woman by Regan Penaluna), and what one shaped by a man can look like.
And so I encourage you to write your experiences, to write what you have to express in however many words you need. You have them all available to you. And to shape them for your own needs and for your own uses.
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