A dear friend presented me with a copy of The Right to Write by Julia Cameron. This morning, I read a passage in which Cameron talks about using emotion as fuel for writing. I know just what she means.
Every day can’t be a great writing day. We’re only human and easily derailed. A song triggers the memory of a traumatic event and upsetting images flood our minds. Muscle tension from overworking makes our heads ache. Someone we love suffers hard times and our mind repeatedly veers towards worry like a shopping cart with a wonky wheel. The harder we try to put these thoughts from our minds, the deeper they entrench themselves. Why fight it when we can harness those emotion in a productive way?
On such days, I take up a pen and journal devoted to notes for my novel in-progress, and journal in the voice of a character. What scene can I write in which their worry, sadness, or uncertainty match my own? To paraphrase Cameron, it’s easier to get it down instead of thinking it up. The effective approach is to write about pain when you’re in the throws of it as opposed to conjuring it when feeling cheerful and carefree. Some of my best prose have come from such moments. Author Natalie Goldberg says, “the writer feels and through her words awakens those feelings in the reader. The writer takes the reader’s hand and guides him through the valley of sorrow and joy…”
Another source of forward propulsion is my morning reading practice which allows me to borrow on the emotions of others. I spend at least an hour each morning with nonfiction books relevant to my writing projects. An intriguing fact or true-life event can spark a new idea for the page. For instance, I recently learned that in the late 1800s through early 1900s, Nova Scotia’s rural and urban poor suffered malnutrition and a host of related illnesses. Smallpox, diphtheria, and whooping cough killed many children. Authorities crammed homeless people into penitentiaries, farmed out able-bodied children as cheap labour, and imported England’s ghetto children to fill extra demand. What will I do with that?
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Gwen Tuinman 
November 5, 2021 at 8:35 am
Gwen, good advice for “writing through tough days.” Sometimes we, as writers, forget there’s a life outside writing which is filled with distractions, as you said it, “derailments” in our writing journey. Harnessing the emotions that derail us is a great way to inject new life into what we’re writing. I love your journal approach!
November 5, 2021 at 12:52 pm
Hello Vince! It’s so nice to hear from you. I just watched a (Netflix) movie called The Lady in the Van, based on a memoir written by British author Alan Bennett. The movie shows him in the movie living as an author. It’s so interesting. They film him as two identical people living together in the house. One of “him” is the writer who never goes out and athe other “him” is the part of him that goes out in the world, meets people, deals with problems and then reports everthing back to the writer “him” who processes experiences and writes about them. You might enjoy that film:)