Introducing Emma’s Angle!

We’re thrilled to launch Emma’s Angle, a new column exploring the art and craft of creative nonfiction written by book inc’s intern Emma Moriarty. A two-time winner of the Williams Prize in nonfiction, Emma will share her insights on craft techniques, breakthroughs in writing, and the lessons she’s learning as an emerging writer.

I have always been the type of person to wear emotions clearly on my face: I cry when I see a stray cat wandering the street for food, grab the tissue box every time I watch It’s A Wonderful Life, and don’t even get me started on roadkill. Seemingly small things elicit big emotional reactions from me, which is a blessing and a curse.

When I started taking my writing seriously and exploring creative nonfiction, I was paranoid that my essays would sound like soap operas. I didn’t want people to think I was recalling my trauma with no reason other than to elicit attention, or to sound like I was complaining or ranting with no message.

In order to prevent that, I thought a good solution would be to deprive my work of verbiage that hinted at being emotional. I stuck to a skeleton structure of describing events and what I took away from them, avoiding content that I thought would make the reader ‘feel bad for me’ or in my opinion, want to stop reading.

During my senior year independent study in creative nonfiction, my professor would constantly leave comments on my work, trying to pry more emotion out of me. “How did this make you feel?” or “Tell us more about how this affects you,” she would comment. I felt like I was in therapy.

“I can’t seem to get it right,” I told her during our weekly meeting. The walls of her office were painted light purple, a stark contrast to the old brick that dotted the rest of Lehigh’s campus. Her office was on the fourth floor of a tall building with no elevator option (to the dismay of ADA regulators), leaving me still out of breath. “I think I am afraid of abstraction.”

My professor chuckled. “Then show the reader how you feel. Make the personal, impersonal. Sometimes, that works better than spoonfeeding the reader and explaining how you feel, but can help them understand just the same.”

In one of my favorite memoirs, The Year of Magical Thinking, Joan Didion conveys her abstract feelings of love, grief, and sorrow in a way I found harrowing and moving. And the part that shocked me: she did it all without telling the reader how she felt in a straightforward manner. 

Didion writes about a particularly traumatic time in her life involving the sudden death of her husband, John, and the hospitalization of her daughter. She calls this time “The Year of Magical Thinking,” sharing some of her fantastical thoughts about death and her husband. When discussing her grief on page 215, she writes:

“I keep an annual December dentist’s appointment and realize as I am putting the sample toothbrushes into my bag that no one will be waiting for me in the reception room, reading the papers until we can go to breakfast at 3 Guys on Madison Avenue. The morning goes empty. When I pass 3 Guys I look the other way.”

Didion is reporting actions and plain facts, with no mention of her feelings on the matter. However, this passage portrays the gravity of the emptiness she feels so beautifully, without once using the words “I feel.”

On page 117, she recounts, “I cannot count the days on which I found myself driving abruptly blinded by tears.” Instead of telling the reader that she felt sad in sudden moments, she used a more concrete example of a time when this happened. In a way, this serves as evidence or proof to support the claim of sadness.

It is not that telling the reader how you feel is always a bad thing; there are times when an “I feel” statement can be immensely powerful in portraying important information for the reader. After all, the emotions of the author are important to a meaningful piece. However, sometimes showing the reader a scene that demonstrates that feeling can be all that more powerful.

My advice is that if something isn’t sounding right, ground your reader in a scene that demonstrates how you feel. This tactic has strengthened my writing and tends to pull readers even more into the piece’s underlying message. Instead of saying “I love dogs,” write about a scene that will let the reader know that you love dogs without even having to say it. Don’t be scared of abstraction — just show your reader instead of telling them!