emotion

In the summer between my freshman and sophomore years in college, I taught myself to type, and for a very good reason. I was starting my introductory journalism classes in the fall, and typing was a requirement. So, in whatever free time I had that summer (I was also working a summer job), I could be found sitting at my desk in my bedroom, following a self-instruction manual, pecking away on an electric typewriter my parents had bought for me.

I took my electric with me when I returned to college. My first day in my basic news reporting course, I discovered we had typewriters at every seat – old Royal manualtypewriters. My fingers, used to the needed light touch on an electric machine, had to learn how to pound on a manual.

Gradually, I got used to typing on a manual for journalism writing. All other writing – papers, research texts, history and English assignments – were typed on my electric in my room. At times I felt I had a bit of a split personality, but I made do.

I graduated, and my first job was as a newspaper copy editor. The copy desk used IBM Selectric typewriters, which, fortunately, I was familiar with from my father’s printing and mailing business. For the next decade, the IBM Selectric was my friend, first at the newspaper and then my work in corporate communications.

In 1984, my IBM Selectric was replaced by an IBM 286 computer, with a floppy-disk drive. In the days before email and networked computers, I could copy a document to the dick, hand the disk to a secretary, and watch her print what I had written. For someone like me, with speechwriting and regular revision of texts was standard operating procedure, that IBM 286 was something close to miraculous. We bought our first home computer, an Apple IIGS, in 1988.

In the late 1980s, I was working on a speech. It wasn’t just any speech; it was one of those groundbreaking speeches that would likely change a lot of things. (It would eventually turn an industry upside down and become known as “the speech that refused to die.”) And I was having trouble – how was I going to bring the speech to a close? Up to the last two pages, the text moved and soared – and then went completely flat.

I had seen a program on PBS whose subject related to the subject of the speech. We obtained a copy of the program, and I brought it to the television and cassette player in our conference room. My desktop computer stayed where it was – on the desktop (this was before laptops had appeared). I watched the program, and I suddenly knew how to end the speech. With nothing to type with, I started writing by hand.

And I learned something. I wrote differently when I wrote by hand as opposed to typing on a typewriter or computer keyboard. The revelation startled me. Could technology affect how I wrote?

After typing the new conclusion to the speech and sending it off to the executive for review, I took a hard look at the text. And, yes, I could see the difference. The most emotional part of the speech – the part that packed the biggest wallop – was the part I had written by hand.

I tried this with other speeches and other kinds of writing. And it held true. From then on, if I needed an emotional section, I would write it first by hand.

I still do that. Virtually every poem I write is written first by hand. Several sections of my three novels were first written by hand. Even parts of my non-fiction on poetry at work were written by hand.

I can’t explain it, but writing by hand connects me far more emotionally to what I’m writing than simply typing the text. I’ve also found that writing by hand helps when I hit a wall or dead end.

It’s one reason I carry a journal with me wherever I go, including church.

Have you tried writing by hand, or using writing by hand to help you through difficult parts of a text?

Photograph by Adolfo Felix via Unsplash, Used with permission.

An email arrives from the other side of the world.

“I finished reading Dancing King this afternoon. Well done, Glynn, I feel it’s the most powerful of the trilogy; I misted up too many times to count.”

This third novel of mine is simultaneously the least and most emotional of the three I’ve written. It includes no scenes that are overtly tear jerkers. But it includes scenes that make me forget I was the one who wrote them.

When I was a child, my mother took me to the movies she wanted to see. My father was not a fan of film; he liked stage theater and even acted in community theater plays. But he didn’t care for movies. My mother did; as a young teenager, she had been shaped by movies like The Wizard of Oz and Gone with the Wind when they were first publicly released in the 1930s. So now, if she wanted to see a movie, she had to drag a little boy with her. Me.

Perhaps the most memorable movie event was when she took the eight-year-old me to the Saenger Theater in downtown New Orleans to see The Last Voyage, starring Robert Stack and Dorothy Malone. A passenger liner is sinking, and rescue ships are too far away. The movie was filled with tension, and I cried through most of it.

We stayed through the end of the movie, but my mother was so upset with having me sit through what was really an adult film that she walked us across Canal Street to the Joy Theater, and we saw our second movie that day – Some Like It Hot, with Jack Lemmon, Tony Curtis, and Marilyn Monroe. It was probably even more of an adult movie, but it was funny. No tears, this time.

I sat with my mother through countless movies, both in theaters and when the television networks started broadcasting them. Watching The Wizard of Oz on television with my mother became an annual ritual. We watched so many movies together that I attribute to, or blame, her for the fact that I cry at movies.

I went with a blind date to see Love Story with Ryan O’Neil and Ali McGraw when it opened. I cried; she didn’t. It was rather embarrassing. To this day, my wife brings tissues when we go to the movies. And not for her.

The scenes evoking emotion in my books usually involve crowds: the closing ceremony of the Olympics in Dancing Priest; a press conference in A Light Shining. In Dancing King, two scenes evoking emotion start quietly enough but then grow into something else – a sermon and a scene involving the Victoria Memorial near Buckingham Palace (the book’s cover photo is of the memorial). Neither of the two was part of the first draft. But during the rewriting, characters changed, the narrative changed, and both scenes emerged.

Emotion is the place, and in writing it is a place, where we connect directly and almost intimately with readers. I can’t consciously write emotion into a story I’m working on; I’ve tried, and it never works. Instead, emotion seems to emerge, slowly or quickly, during the process of telling the story. What I’m learning, and usually from my readers, is that they see it almost from the beginning of each story.

Emotion in my stories functions like a pulse rate or a heartbeat, sometimes fast and sometimes slow, but always there. Who knew what a child could learn from a movie-loving mother?

Top photograph by Jake Hills via Unsplash. Used with permission.

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