Marite, a student in Mexico, once asked me if I went through an endless chain of emotions while writing.
I don’t know. Do I?
Surely I do! I am an artist! I should be endlessly consumed by the emotions! I should be a seething, nay, gibbering mass of creativity, my soul in agony like molten metal that I pour out into my works!
Er…
There’s one emotion that’s very common. All together, writers? One two, three, “Frustration!”
It’s what you feel when you hunt for words and can’t find them: when the inspirations that first started you have become the limping, inadequate sentences that you have managed to put on the page. The mists of self confidence depart. You are in a desert. The horizon is barren. And (sob) such a long way off!
If writers could get paid for self-pity we’d all be millionaires.
All right, seriously then: yes of course I feel emotions, especially when I am first planning the novel. I experience the highs and lows I want to evoke in my reader. If I didn’t, I could hardly begin. But I don’t feel them all the time, or anything like it.
Mostly it’s just a job: line after line, hour after hour. You write tragedy when you’re feeling cynical, high drama when you’re nursing a hangover and romance when you know the cat’s just left a mess on the carpet.(1) That’s what it’s like. Emotion will show you the horizon, but it can’t carry you there. The only way you get there is one word at a time: craftsmanship; patience; dull plod, plod, plod. Don’t look up too often. Don’t go chasing off after that high. If you keep plodding long enough, maybe the high will come to you.
Wham! Half-way through a morning, something catches fire. The words are flowing out of you. You live what is happening on the page. It’s a good feeling. Passages that you write like that need little or no editing, and will always be (for you) the best in the book.
But the feeling doesn’t last. The scene ends, a new one begins. You don’t know quite how to handle it.
And there’s the shopping to be done, supper to be cooked and cat-mess still to be cleaned off the carpet. Tomorrow you will have to start again. Maybe, yes, you’ll be lucky. Maybe the spark will come and visit you once more. Don’t plan on it.
Just keep plodding, and see.
(1) There’s one emotion you cannot fake, and that is laughter. It’s impossible to write good comedy if you are not laughing as you write it. More of that another time.