On writing about feelings (or how to avoid writing about being in a foul mood)
I don’t usually write about how I feel. Emotions are hard to write about. Even good writers do a poor job of writing about them because they don’t readily adapt themselves to translation. Because of this, feelings respresented by words tend not to age well, and I hate cringing when I read back over something I wrote in the past.
One might argue that feelings should never be expressed in words, that feelings are really a function of human experience (think the writer’s axiom: show, don’t tell). So that if I write about what’s happening in my life, you might experience (vicariously) how I feel. Or you might feel something else, which I think is the genius of feelings. I don’t want to tell anyone what to feel any more than I want to tell anyone what to do or how to be. That doesn’t belong to me. That isn’t something I want to be responsible for. That is only something I’d want to unintentionally provoke.
Even though feelings are so fleeting, often so out of my conscious control, people tend to treat them with an unusual permanence, when in truth exposing a feeling is more like an observation of the weather. I would say I hate to be reminded of how I was feeling in the past—except in truth it’s really no big deal, and whoever might be inquiring probably genuinely cares about my well-being. And I wouldn’t want anyone to stop caring. I guess I would say I hate to be reminded of how I was feeling in the past if I’ve come to realize that how I expressed how I was feeling was incredibly trite, and that the actual feeling was entirely ephemeral.
And all too often, how I feel could be respresented by a simple formula involving a few variables of which sleep accumulation affects the lion’s share of the outcome.
Well, ask yourself how different giving your opinion of something is from telling how you feel about something. Your last post was all about outrage, although you never came out and said “this post makes me feel outrage.” You didn’t have to. You can show, not tell, by describing an emotionally charged situation or train of thought, and your reader can fill in the blank.
Unless, of course, you have a lot of off-limits subject matter that you can’t describe, which you do. ;)