Intelligent readers can spot a phony story a mile away. Even in a world where staged pranks and heavily edited “candid” surprise videos get thousands of likes from the easily duped, smarter folks can still discern between truth and lie, canned response and authentic discourse, and truth told and facts withheld.
We hope you want to write authentically. We do too. In part, this means creating an immersive experience for your reader, with characters and emotions that feel true to life. It also means portraying honest emotion, showing realistic struggles and earned triumphs. It means sharing a truth that you’ve learned.
But this requires more than craft work or a book on the Hero’s Journey. How can you write with authenticity? In a post on Writer Unboxed, Barbara Linn Probst explores this question, saying that authenticity “draws equally on mind, heart, sensation, and embodied memory.”
For simple tasks, like describing movement or gestures, Probst suggests acting out your characters’ movements, to see if they feel right or are even feasible. Sensations are trickier, because they are experienced internally and will differ from person to person. Again, Probst suggests trying to experience different sensations – temperature, fear, fatigue – yourself, by placing yourself in your scene. Don’t focus on original phrasing right away. Capture the feeling and its intensity first, then massage your description of it to avoid clichés.
Writing authentic emotion requires an even deeper dive. “To write about a strong emotion like grief, shame, envy, humiliation, panic, regret—or their positive cousins, like tenderness and delight—I find that I need to get in touch with the feeling, in the present, and write from the emotion rather than about it,” Probst says. “That means returning to an experience that may have been quite painful, feeling it anew, and then re-embodying that feeling in a way that’s specific to the character and scene.”
This can be difficult. No one wants to relive trauma or heartache. But to portray emotion honestly on the page, we have to stir those same emotions in ourselves. The deeper and stronger the experience you raise, the more the emotion you portray will resonate on the page. If a reader believes you have felt the joy, grief, pride, or rage you write, they will trust you as an authentic originator. “It’s the opposite of an easy solution,” Probst says. “It’s really hard. I have to be present and give all of myself to my work—mind, body, heart. And that means I have to be far more vulnerable than any of those writing manuals indicate.”
