Mindy Carlson

As I mentioned last month, we’re all living that fairy tale life. As authors, we’re writing about life, but in encapsulated vignettes that feature our struggles and dark times before we grow and find resolution.

We’re basically writing fairy tales. We’re writing about our time in one section of forest before we come back out into our happily for now.

Writers take their readers on an emotional journey. We make you feeling things–joy, loss, love, tension, surprise, pain, glee. Sometimes deeply. Sometimes these feelings are a whisper. We go on the path through the deep, dark forest of fairy tale land and we take you poor unsuspecting readers with us.

But we can’t do that unless we’ve felt them for ourselves. Felt and wallowed. We need to linger on the way our stomach lurches at the sound of our crappy boss’s ring tone. We have to capture the exact feeling of the lightening arcing up our arm when the love of our lives brushes their hand against ours. We catalogue the emotions of our souls to put them on a platter for you to experience for yourselves.

Honestly, it’s no wonder so many writers are in therapy. We relive our pain as we share it with the world through our characters.

It can be painful to go back there. And as humans we avoid pain. It’s part of our genetic legacy. It’s part of our evolution. Something is ouchie and we don’t touch it again. But as writers we have to go there. We have to take you on the journey through the woods of fairy tale land. It’s our job to be your guides.

A looooong time ago, I was watching an episode of Oprah Winfrey. The audience was talking about their favorite moments and why the show meant so much to them. One woman said (I’m paraphrasing because I can’t fine the actual quote), “I was in a really bad place in my life. It was horrible and to protect myself I was numb all the time. But I’d watch your show and cry. I couldn’t cry for myself, but I could cry for your guests.”

Like her, there are times I couldn’t cry for myself. I felt I was hanging on by a thread and if I admitted just how horrible I felt I’d shatter apart. But I could cry for a character in a book.

We’ve been told for years that books teach up empathy. They allow us to experience emotions we might not feel safe to have in our everyday lives. We can vicariously experience situations and the emotional toll carried by others. I will never be a poor, black woman abused by the husband my stepfather picked out for me, but I can read The Color Purple and walk away with a new understanding and appreciation for where I am in my own life and the choices I’ve been allowed to make.

Even a book as comedic as Jesse Q Sutanto’s Vera Wong’s Guide to Snooping (On a Dead Man) is filled with poignant thoughts about the necessity of friendship and unconditional love, the joy of connection to ones community, the pain of loneliness, and the importance of elder/youngster relationships.

This is the magic of books. Authors allow you to express emotions that might be locked away. You can’t cry or feel happy, or be nervous for yourself, but you can feel them for made up characters in a book.

I guess authors go to therapy so you don’t have to? (But, no, actually go to therapy.)

And keep reading.