Writing Emotionally Honest Fiction: Introduction

A different kind of writer's guide

[This essay is a proof-of-concept draft of the introduction to my latest project: a book on how to cultivate emotional honesty in your fiction. My plan is to post the chapters and writing exercises here as I draft them, which will be exclusively for paid subscribers. If you’d like to do the exercises with me, even better!]

When I was a teenager, I couldn’t read a novel through if it didn’t have some kind of romantic sub-plot. I was genre-agnostic in this requirement: I’d devour anything from genre romance to high fantasy to the latest Booker winner as long as it gave me a hint of that glory that only novels can fully illuminate, of two people finding in one another a truth that didn’t exist in either of them alone. Novels that didn’t include any romance at all, even below-the-surface, slow-burn romances that blossomed into a bare brush of the lips three pages before the end, struck me as deadly boring, hardly worth the effort of processing the words on the page. Why waste my time if I wasn’t going to receive even a hint of benediction? Sometimes I wondered if this requirement was unduly limiting my reading habits, but as I had so many excellent works to choose from, I didn’t worry too much.

I remember the moment I stopped needing romance in my fiction, though. I was in my early thirties, and my boyfriend had just dumped me. 

It was a difficult time in my life. But like many difficult times, it was also a gift. When something that I had feared and hidden from myself became my stark reality, I allowed that reality to change me and push me forward. It didn’t happen from one day to the next, but over the course of the next few months I realized that my appetite for all kinds of literature had expanded and changed. I no longer felt any need for romance to sustain me through the stories I read. I still enjoyed it, but I found the same enjoyment in many other kinds of relationships. It baffled me that I had ever limited myself to one flavor when it turned out I had a whole ice cream parlor to choose from.  

Around this time I started a radical revision of a noir novella that I now wanted to turn into a full-length novel. It was the most ambitious project that I had undertaken, and it required deep wells of introspection for me to embody the characters well enough to write them—a quality that I’m calling emotional honesty. What does that have to do with my romance addiction? 

The problem was that my addiction had predisposed me to be dishonest with that story. Not because my addiction itself was dishonest. Romance is real, and I genuinely loved those stories. But in my earlier, pre-breakup draft, my addiction had made me force the story into a shape that didn’t fit with the characters or the world, in an attempt to satisfy an external compulsion. It was only after I’d learned to let go of my preemptive need for romance that I could see the true shape of the story, which eventually became my novel Trouble the Saints. 

We all come to our stories with pre-existing ideas of the world. Let’s call this our framework.

There is nothing bad about this framework—in fact, in large part, this framework is what gives each of us our unique voice, and what allows us to cultivate the emotional honesty that I’m going to spend the rest of this book digging into. Nevertheless, our frameworks also come studded with booby traps: false beliefs, self-deceptions, compulsions, half-truths, misinterpretations, lacunae, biases, and many more. These originate in a variety of sources and stick with us for enough reasons to fill the DSM-V. No one’s framework is free of these traps, and this book is not going to teach you to rid yourself of your ego and become one with the universe (though it doesn’t sound like a bad thing to try). Instead, I am aiming my metaphorical arrow at that narrow defile where psychology meets craft: How can we, as writers, take our frameworks, build upon them, and then write beyond them? How do we craft stories that transcend who we are, where we’re coming from, or where we’re going?

We do it with emotional honesty. 

Emotional honesty encompasses a writer’s ability to look, unflinching, at the full implications of their own story, and in turn guide the reader toward that understanding. 

I will spend the rest of this book unpacking that sentence, going through techniques, both psychological and craft-oriented, that will allow us to get past our frameworks and our own booby traps and move into the space where the story lives and makes its own demands on our art. But for now, let me list some signs of emotionally dishonest storytelling, because chances are you’ve already thought of a few:

• Unexamined reflections of social norms

• Unexamined defenses of social injustices

• Lapses of plot or character logic that just so happen to dovetail with the above

• Nonsensical happy endings

• Nonsensical disastrous or tragic endings

• Characters who are stereotypes

• Characters who are stand-ins for the author and/or their enemies

I could go on. Dishonest storytelling comes from motivations that are external to the story, whether conscious or not. This doesn’t mean that you can’t write politically or philosophically or scientifically motivated fiction! As writers, we have the power to preemptively shape our stories so that they will happily fit the mode that we want to write in. Another term for this is “genre.” My romance addiction was dangerous for my burgeoning literary noir story, but if I had been dreaming of writing a romance novel it wouldn’t have been a problem.

Perhaps the first rule of emotionally honest fiction is that old chestnut from the Oracle at Delphi: know thyself. 

This book is for every writer who wants to grow and become a more expansive version of themselves as a creative artist. And if this is you, no matter your genre, no matter how little or how much you’ve written before, then let’s take this journey together. 

In this book, we will cover:

Part I: The Craft

Writing emotion
	Emotion as a holograph
	Emotion as a projection of lived experience
	Emotional dishonesty in writing emotion
Writing character
	Modeling the frameworks of our characters
	Understanding stereotypes
	Understanding prejudice and societal violence
	Embedding characters within psycho-social systems
	Emotional dishonesty in character building
Writing worlds
	Modeling the world-framework
	Understanding nationalist mythologies
	The invention of history
	Emotionally honest politics?

Part II: The Writer

Identifying our frameworks
	Cosmovision: How do you see the world?
	Identifying our booby traps
Building up our frameworks
	Empathetic bridges
	Double consciousness
	Trust
Writing past our frameworks
	Confronting the hard stuff
	Guiding the reader through the hard stuff

By the end of this book, through the exercises, examples, and discussion, you should have a firm grasp on your own unique set of booby traps and strengths that will enable you to approach your next writing project with greater emotional honesty. 

I have decided to write this book now because it is clear to me that we are living through times of unprecedented emotional dishonesty.

Most writing seems designed to obfuscate the truth to a greater or lesser degree. Some people are doing this quite clear-eyed, and this book is not intended for them. But for those of us who would like to be better artists, who feel suffocated by this miasma of falsehood but cannot quite find their way out of it, I hope that the techniques in these pages help you as they have helped—and continue to help—me.