Managing the Emotional Fabric of Story
Suzanne Kelman wrote a post the other day about falling in “love” with a character. It got me thinking about the emotions that go in and come out of a Story and how we manage that emotional fabric. Now, you may not have fallen in love with your character, but chances are, you’re pretty close to your lead ones. And you should be. The relationships we form with characters have an emotional intimacy to them if for no other reason than the deep trust that exists when characters choose us to tell their stories, then rely on us to help them make it through the telling. Where I digress with many is in the nature of these characters. I do not believe that we “make them up.” I believe characters exist in their own realm.
Whether or not you believe characters are real or made up makes a difference in how you manage the emotional fabric of the story.
Characters Who are Believed In, Are Believable
It’s our job as writers to manage the emotions of the story so that we give audiences something to respond to. If you hold that you are the one “making up” what your characters’ story is, what they do, how they react, who they are, who they used to be, what they say, and ultimately, what they feel, you are missing the real blessing of being a writer (not to mention, working way too hard). You are coercing a story into being. Coercion, even subtly done, leaves a mark of fabrication.
You are also denying yourself the opportunity to let your characters change you. (You aren’t still thinking that your character’s the only one being changed in the story arc, are you?) If you’re making your characters up, you’re keeping them at arm’s length. That’s not where they need to be. Characters need more freedom and respect than that. They need to be able to get into your heart with a realness that isn’t burdened with the constant denial of being “made-up.”
Characters who have your full trust and faith do extraordinary things. Characters who are believed in, are believable. If you suspend your disbelief and let them exist, you’ll see that they guide and direct the story, they respond emotionally and authentically, they decide what they are going to do, when and how. They say what they want to say, far better than you can say it. And they know who they are.
This lends itself to stories that are authentic, that flow, that ring true to the human spirit.
Isn’t that what we want? It’s what we are called to deliver. Emotionally-authentic stories that audiences respond to. Characters so vivid that actors and audiences feel them as breathing, living beings and remember them for years to come.
If you give your characters the sovereignty they need, they’ll give you the story you need.
Move from Controlling to Trusting Characters
If you move from controlling characters to trusting characters, you change the dynamics of how you receive and interpret stories. It becomes less about you, less about writing and more about listening and relating. You move into collaboration with characters. And that’s where you want to be. That’s where the gold is. That’s where your story takes on “a life of its own” because it has a life of its own. You become a witness, a listener, a counselor and therapist. You champion them, you don’t let them take the easy way out, you keep pressing them for more. (And trust me, they’ll push you, too.) You spend a lot of time letting them express themselves, letting them breathe through the hard stuff, letting them take breaks when it cuts too deep, and you listen, listen, listen. (Yes, I know, you’ve heard me say it before. You’ll hear me say it again. It’s the most important skill a writer can have.)
What all of this is doing is allowing you to receive the story. Not create it. Not make it up. Receive it.
It’s fully formed, out there. Your characters know it, though they may not reveal it right off the bat (that’s what the real work of revision is – digging deeper). You receive the story. And because you’ve received a more powerful, authentic story in the first place, you have the emotions you need to guide the story to its most powerful expression.
Manage Emotions on the Page
Managing those emotions on the page comes down to managing which scenes to use in the story. Which dialogue. It’s as much about what not to include as it is about what must be on the page. It’s a judgement call. One you need to seek guidance on from the characters. You have to trust what you know is the heart and soul of the story. Emotion comes from what one longs to express, but doesn’t. It’s not about animating character’s expressions, but knowing what’s in their heart and what they aren’t allowing themselves to reveal. That’s what you put down.
Emotion runs the risk of being too tampered with during revision. Again, you have to know going in what is sacred and untouchable to the core of your story. There are scenes that if changed will change the entire story. It’s like surgery. You cut out the heart, brain, lungs or liver and your patient may be “cured,” but it will also be dead. If you’re collaborating with your characters, they’ll tell you what’s sacred. They’ll work with you to come up with the best way to get the point across. They’ll keep it authentic because they’ll be authentic and you’ll be trusting them for what the story needs.
Manage Emotions in Your Heart
There are tons of books on how to get emotions across to audiences. None of them will help as much as listening to your characters. Let them reveal their story to you first before it ever gets on the page. Which leads me back to Sue’s story of feeling as if she’d fallen in love with a character. We get close to characters. We spend a lot of time with them. We care about them. They trust us with their vulnerabilities. They can have a powerful affect on our emotions. Relationships with them are no less real than any other. They’re simply governed by different laws of dynamics, different realms, different purposes, limitations. Managing those relationships is like any other in our lives.
What can be harder to manage is how character’s emotions affect us. It’s not easy to be a witness to trauma, pain, suffering, heartache. It’s not easy to walk through tough scenes with characters over and over. It’s not easy to know that you’re pushing a character for more than they may be ready to face. That you’re asking them to trust you with their emotional and physical safety. Don’t get me wrong. The stories we write should touch us. They should be hard to get through emotionally. But we serve no one if we fail to take care of ourselves.
Remember What’s Yours and What Isn’t
The lines get blurred. Story. Character. Your life. Loved ones. Past. Present. What hurts. Who hurts. We live in the Seen and Unseen worlds. We feel the emotions of both. We need to remember to differentiate emotions that belong to us from those that don’t. We are not our characters. Our characters are not us. Their pain is theirs. Ours is ours. Empathy is not becoming the vessel of another’s pain. It is honoring their pain while holding them to the truth of their power in Source. We need to let our characters and their stories touch us deeply, but we also need to be touched just as deeply by our own lives in all their beauty, grace and potential.
Ultimately, emotion on the page and screen comes down to letting Story be what is it: a way to engage with what’s in our own hearts.
A reminder that we are, like characters, Spirit.
Let the Blessings Flow
Your life is a gift. Your presence here part of the whole. You are Source Energy and you hold incredible power. You can create your life. Manifest your dreams.
And you can bless.
Yes, bless. I’m not talking about the right of the ordained to sanctify the unholy.
I’m talking about intention. Behind your work, your relationships, your interactions. To bless is to move with the purpose of bringing light, wholeness and grace to someone’s spirit. It’s rooted in the awareness of innate spiritual power, in the belief that we are one and that what happens on the exterior of life manifests from the interior realm.
To bless is to draw a circle of protection and support around a soul, to seek for that soul’s well-being and highest good. It goes beyond prayer. Where prayer asks a Divine Being to intervene, blessing asks the spirit to remember its own power, to move within its own depth of purpose here on earth. Blessing is not merely well-wishes, but a concrete act that has a direct affect upon the one you bless.
What does this have to do with creative life?
Nothing, if you don’t want it to. Everything, if you do. You have the choice to see your purpose in life (and thus your creativity) as a means to bless – or not. You can move toward your dreams with yourself as the center. Or you can move toward your dreams with an eye on how many people you can bless along the way. Either way you have the power to create your dream.
This goes back to what I have said before about how the the process of manifesting dreams and not the end product itself is where we need to create the real meaning of our work. If you move with the intention to bless, and you bless those on your path, your dream opens up an entire realm where the good that you do matters more than the work you achieve. If you walk a path where you focus solely on manifesting your dream, you lose the rich potential that existed for you to do something much bigger than that.
Dreams are part of who we are, part of why we spend these lifetimes here. They’re fun, they keep us focused on moving forward instead of stagnating. But they’re more than that. And you are more than your dream. And you have a deep source of power to weave something bigger and more meaningful in your life than what your dream itself stands for.
Look around you. Look beyond what the people who have the potential to “make your dream come true” can do for you. Bless them. Look deeper than the surface. Look not only at what your manifested dream will do, but also how the process of making it and all the people involved can be blessed. Weave that blessing in from concept to end and beyond. See broader. See deeper. Go for Spirit.
Why? Because you can. Because if you’re going to spend all this time focused on generating a dream into reality, you might as well be generous in the process. But there’s a deeper reason. When you own your power to bless and make a difference in others’ lives, you make a bigger difference in your own. You grow bigger in spirit, you open yourself to new paths of prosperity, you invite a spirit of generosity, goodwill and flow that follows you into every aspect of your life.
We are meant to bless. We are meant to remember that we are Spirit. We are meant to involve Spirit in everything we do.
Take a look inside. Take a look around. It’s not about you. It’s about us all.
So bless and let the blessings flow.
Overcoming Fear
Okay, so let’s talk about fear. And, more importantly, how to overcome fear. “Fortune favors the bold” – I hold true to that. I also hold true to the purpose of this blog, which is to inspire and nurture the human spirit – particularly, the creative’s spirit. I’ve written about fear before, yet sometimes in all of the positive, be strong, own your power stuff, the underside of creative life gets lost. And it may leave you wondering: “well, that’s not my experience, I struggle, I’m scared, you tell me to be bold, but I don’t know how.”
First off, we all struggle. I’m no exception. I wrestle with fear, self-doubt, insecurity. We all do. It’s normal. And, most likely, healthy. It keeps the challenge and the joy of achieving dreams a tangible thing. It reminds us that we’re stretching, growing, expanding, reaching for more. It reinforces the fact that the process of creating – and not the created product – is where the dream is actually lived. It’s in the trenches, muddied down with fear, doubt and the reality that our great big dream is actually a great big dream, where we come face to face with…our greatness.
Greatness scares us more than anything else, it seems. It tempers us from putting ourselves out there in a big way. Keeps us shrinking, contorting ourselves back into confines we’ve outgrown.
I could go on, but no matter how you define fear and the things that scare you, ultimately, it’s what you do about it that counts.
And this is where we struggle. It’s not the words that scare me, but what it means if I am the one that says them. It isn’t the work itself, but what the work means.
What we really wrestle with is our potential. Our beliefs about who we are, our worth, our purpose, our ability to do something that seems (on the side of not having done it yet) so much bigger than we are. We’ve been taught to be small, keep the status quo, stay invisible – because that keeps us safe. But dreams never come true in safety. Dreams come true when we start to believe that we are more powerful and larger than the dream itself.
So what do we do about fear?
There’s no magical wand to poof it away. What fear comes down to is thought. It’s a battle of the mind. And it can only be overcome by identifying what it is that we’re scared of (what feeling we don’t want to feel), untying the knots of thought that lead to fear, then being willing to release them. You can’t will your fear away (not long-term anyway). You have to dig it out, uncover it, let the light of day shine on it and then choose to believe different thoughts than the ones that lead you to fear. It’s work. It takes time. It takes self-reflection.
It also takes being willing to live without fear.
It means being willing to let things be easy. To let yourself be successful. To let yourself shine brightly.
That’s not a popular stance in our society. It’s not popular or well-thought of to have an easy, happy, enjoyable life. It’s not even really acceptable to actually be happy. People enjoy the commiseration of misery, struggle, complaining – why? Because it keeps the belief that life (and art) is hard, should be hard, has to be hard, and thus, we shouldn’t really expect too much from ourselves. Stay small. Stay invisible. Stay safe. No, there’s not much chance of greatness. Try being happy and letting life flow easily and pretty soon people get annoyed with you. Why? Because you’re challenging their status quo. You’re challenging the belief that life doesn’t have to be hard. If you can achieve happiness, then their excuse for not pursuing what lights them up, rubs at their self-awareness. And they take it out on you.
We hold those who “have it all” on a pedestal. There’s a reason for that. A pedestal keeps them out of reach, right? And that means we can take comfort in the distance between us not pursuing our dreams and the obvious fact that they have achieved theirs. This is true dis-empowerment, folks.
No, we have to fight for our dreams. We have to fight our own smallness to let our spirit expand into the greatness it knows is possible for us. No one can fight the battle for us. It’s up to each of us to stake our claim on happiness and own it.
Don’t beat yourself up for the fact that you struggle. As you can see, there are layers upon layers of conditioning that keeps fear alive. Don’t think that you’re alone. Or that those who have walked the path before you have it any easier. The journey to become bigger, to expand, continues at every stage of success. Facing fear is part of it. Claim the blessing of fear, choose to say yes to your dream, to being happy even if those around you aren’t, and think, think, think yourself into faith.
I’ll be right here, fighting the battle alongside you.
Fortune Favors the Bold, So Be Bold
We talk a lot about fear. Doubt. Wondering if we can achieve the great big dreams we set out to achieve. As artists, we’re inclined to discuss these issues, because they are part of the fabric of creative work. And don’t get me wrong, fear serves a purpose. If nothing else, it reminds us that what we are attempting to do has importance – to us and to the world. If it didn’t, then they’d be no reason to fear failing to do it, would there?
Yes, fear is a driver of development – in the artist and in the work.
But where we often stop short is in being bold.
I mean the kind of bold that flings you out into an unknown universe where you either fly or fall. Or learn to fly as you’re falling.
Bold. Taking on more than logic deems sensible.
Bold. Taking a chance on the fact that you just might be more than you’ve ever been.
Bold. Imagining. Saying yes. Doing.
Stepping up in a self-confidence that’s not arrogant, but built on a solid understanding that you embody the Universe in every cell of your being. That ‘worth’ is a man-made measurement, because everything present in this world carries the spark of the Universe at its core. How can anything not be worthy? Worthy compared to what?
Bold in believing we are enough. More than enough. Powerful.
Bold in owning our work, our emotions, our results.
Our future.
Fortune favors the bold. Why? Because “the competition” is much, much less than we lead ourselves to believe. Because few people are bold enough to step up and deliver excellence. Because few people actually think they can. And then act like it.
Fortune favors the bold because the human spirit recognizes itself in boldness.
So be bold. And rise above the crowd.
Meet Carl Falk – Songwriter/Producer for One Direction
One of the blessings of my work is the opportunity to connect with artists across genres and learn about their creative journeys. Recently, I had the joy of interviewing Carl Falk – an LA and Stockholm-based songwriter/producer who’s been behind some of the biggest pop hits of the last decade.
A behind-the-scenes kind of guy, Carl’s unassuming confidence, humility and quiet grace are unmistakable. You get the impression that listening is one of his greatest strengths – and one of the keys to his long-standing success. (Carl’s written and/or produced for One Direction, Nicki Minaj, Lawson, Taio Cruz, Labrinth, Nicole Scherzinger, Lindsay Lohan, Dani Minogue, Journey South, The Backstreet Boys, Westlife, Darren Hayes, The Wanted, David Cook, AJ McLean, Clay Aiken, Russell Crowe, and more.) In addition to songwriting, Carl also has his own band – “Pilot” – that performs mostly at private events.
Here are some excerpts (and sound advice for all creatives) from the interview:
Fear and faith are issues that every artist has to contend with on their creative path. How do you handle fear?
Fear is the worst thing to have the room, in writing a song, to be afraid to speak up. When you get started as a songwriter in a writing session you may be afraid to speak up. The more songs you write, the more songs you produce, the more confidence you gain, I think that’s the best way to handle fear. To be really prepared. If you say something, if you have a vision, and you speak up, you never know, sometimes it’s bad, sometimes it’s good. Either way, you have to speak up. How do you handle fear? Be prepared, believe in yourself, have confidence in yourself, and realize that what you bring to the session, is going to be something good.
How do you know when the song you’re working on is working?
If a song you’re working on is just okay, but doesn’t feel like magic, find something else. Don’t waste your time on writing. It may seem like a great song, but you need to aim higher than that, and accept that sometimes it takes weeks to write a song. When it’s done, everything in the song feels like, ‘that is what it should be, three and a half minutes.’ That happens because you worked on every little detail.
As a producer, you are at the forefront of the business side of music. Given your experience, what would be the most important advice you would give an aspiring songwriter?
Looking back at my career, I think the best advice is this: it doesn’t matter if you write the best song in the world, the biggest mega smash in the world, if the right person never hears it. You have to surround yourself with people who are creative, inspired, but also have the contacts to get the songs out. There are so many fantastic writers, but they don’t have the connections to get their songs to the right people. It doesn’t matter what your song is until the right person hears it.
You collaborate with other writers, particularly Rami Yacoub and Savan Kotecha, what is the key to a successful collaboration?
I think the first key is to put people who aren’t doing the same thing in a room. That is what true collaboration is. Not three doing the same thing. We bring different things to the table. We are all doing different things, but wanting the same results. That is the most important thing for collaboration or co-writing — to work with people who bring something you don’t.
Read the full Q&A interview here and follow Carl Falk on Twitter at @carlfalkmusic.
creative inside out 