As I prepared the lessons for my upcoming Write Your Paris Stories class, I considered what makes a good story. Many elements contribute to a fictional or non-fiction story: setting, character, plot, point of view, voice, etc.
But there’s something underneath all that that really makes any story work: emotion. In a recent memoir class I took, the teacher started with emotion. She asked us to consider what the predominant emotion was running through the story.
My art mentor emphasizes the need for feeling to be present in every single art piece. Bringing feeling to writing or art isn’t easy. I hear her, I get it, but actually doing it? Still working on that.
My suspicion is that feeling shows up in the stroke of the pen or in the color added. With writing, it’s a bit more conscious, which words you choose and how you arrange them.
Ultimately a good story or piece of art moves us emotionally. Like a good dinner party, all the elements need to be in place – the food, the people, the hostess, the table, etc. But it’s the overall mood and feeling of the evening that makes it work, that makes it memorable. It’s the same for story.
This is one of the things we’ll be exploring as we craft our stories in my Write Your Paris Stories online class. It’s been awhile since I taught the craft of writing, and I cannot believe how fun it’s been to develop the class and write the lessons.
If you look at a recent story or piece of art you created, can you tell what predominant emotion it evokes? How do you get feeling into your work?
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