Writing Sincerity Is Hard! (For Me)

I am slogging through my WiP at a disastrously slow rate, and I realized there are two things dragging me down:

First, my main character is a ghost who hangs out by herself a lot due to the whole being-a-ghost thing. I hate action with only one character! That means I can’t just lean on dialogue to pull me through! It’s like I have to actually write or something!

But second, I’m learning that I struggle to write anything with a tone that doesn’t have room for humour.

That doesn’t mean that I’m willing to tell only funny stories — I struggle with this in all my writing, even when I’m working on a MS that has a lighter tone than my current one. Most stories in the genres I like have at least some parts that have to be serious. And it’s easy for humour to cross the line from “character’s entertaining defense mechanism against having feelings” to “writer’s actual defense mechanism against writing feelings.”

And so when my character experiences a momentary flash of rage or grief or fear, I often wind up stuck in their emotions for hours trying to parse them into something that can be put down in words on a page. Except, non-cliché. And the right words for this narrator. And–etc.

When my narrator uses humour as a defense mechanism or comically understates their feelings because they lack self awareness, that feels easy. Writing humour is fun, and the tone comes much more naturally to me. I like winking at the reader and embracing my less-emotionally-intelligent past self by having characters display emotions they’re unaware of. I like using deflecting humour to build a character’s personality and set up the conflict for when they actually have to face what they’re feeling.

But my current protagonist isn’t like that. She’s lost her memory (ghost stuff, you know how it is), so she’s diving deep into every feeling she has, trying to figure out what it means about who she is and what she’s done. Her intuition is all she has to go on for the Big Things. She’s very earnest in a way that most of my viewpoint characters so far haven’t been, and that’s a challenge for me.

And, hey, challenges are a good thing! There’s a sign in my gym that says, “What doesn’t challenge you won’t change you,” which I find to be a) the only gym sign I’ve seen so far that takes into account how different people might have very different reasons for using the gym; and b) a helpful reminder that if I’m trying to grow, whether muscles or writing skill, I have to do things that don’t feel easy.

But camera-facing sincerity is tough! There’s such a thin line between intensity and parody!

In my first few manuscripts, including the one I finished in eighth grade that was my first novel-length story, the climactic scenes would always be the Sincere Emotion scenes. Either I struggled to write them without feeling silly, or I wrote them all in a rush, loved them in the moment, and then found them to be cheesy when I returned even a week later.

The vulnerability that made me feel silly about those scenes was my own: people will judge me as a writer and a person based on what I put here! What if everyone thinks it’s immature or weird or cliché? What if, instead of feeling the feelings I want them to feel, they laugh at not just my writing but the way I see the world?

And, hey, I wasn’t wrong to worry about that: I have a very old notebook full of very bad pre-teen poetry that absolutely validates those fears! (Though even most of that was silly limericks and other humour.)

But… those cheesy rhyming verses really were how I was feeling. Part of the reason I think they’re cheesy now is because I don’t feel that way anymore. The feelings were childish because, hello, I was a child when I felt them. And for the same reason, they’re expressed childishly too. Other people’s feelings, whether they belong to an actual second person or a past version of yourself, are easier to dismiss as overdone than what you’re feeling in the moment.

For writers, it can be difficult distinguishing between valid concerns that an emotional part is too cliché or overwritten and insecurities that these feelings themselves are just silly and bad.

That’s why, apart from humour, my go-to strategy seems to be to set things up so the reader knows what my characters are feeling without me (or the characters) having to outright say so. If I’m doing my job effectively, I’ve made the reader care about the things the viewpoint character cares about and empathize strongly enough that their emotional reactions go without saying. Except, I mean, I do say them because: writing, but I don’t need to establish them with introspection.

I guess that what makes my current work-in-progress so tough. At least in this first draft, my protagonist is feeling her feelings, examining those feelings to figure out what they say about who she is, and then having feelings about the previous feelings. That’s a lot of feelings!

More importantly, that’s a lot of earnest, sincere feelings, since this character is earnest and sincere and also her situation isn’t funny to her. If she had a sense of humour about stuff like this, she wouldn’t be the person she is and wouldn’t have led the life she did (that she can’t remember). She wouldn’t have the same relationship with one of the other major characters who is the exact opposite regarding feelings, and she probably wouldn’t have had to (or chosen to) come back as a ghost to set the story right.

So I guess it’s time for me to get more comfortable with writing earnest, serious feelings, even if it turns out that’s not the best voice for me. Maybe I’ll finish this MS if I keep going slow and steady at this snail’s pace and find out, hey, this story just wasn’t meant to be told by me. Maybe not. Either way, I’ll have learned something new about myself and writing.