By Dorian Fox
I sometimes catch myself compartmentalizing emotions in my mind, as if each feeling—elation, despair, hope—lives in its own apartment, ordering in from GrubHub every night and never talking to its neighbors. But of course, our emotional lives are messier than that; our interior states a chorus of many notes and tones. And as we write about our lives, we bring new emotional insights to past experiences, adding even more layers of feeling to the mix.
It’s a lot to wrap our heads (and stories) around. And yet, a sophisticated and nimble narrative voice can slide around emotionally as a story unfolds, capturing different registers in quick succession or even simultaneously.
“Stretching” our voices as writers requires bringing more of ourselves to our stories, and refusing to box out feelings and impressions that might seem contradictory or even inappropriate to the moments we’re writing about. In our memoirs and essays, we can (and should!) include private thoughts and mixed feelings that social niceties discourage us from voicing aloud. We can admit to wanting to laugh—or having laughed—at the funeral. We can explore why on a day we seemed perfectly content to others, we secretly felt unsettled or frayed.
As much as honesty matters, so does the material itself. Tonal richness arises from gravitating toward experiences that stir up complicated stuff, and therefore feel loaded, unresolved, hard to define. Using the range of our authorial voice means laying bare our confusions and uncertainties, rather than neatly resolving them.
In his essay “ How to Make a Slave ,” Jerald Walker manages to bring notes of humor to his personal explorations of race and racism. Using the second person, he guides his younger self through moments from his past, from childhood to married life and fatherhood. At one point, he describes a conversation with a former girlfriend:
She does not even see race, she has said, having taught herself to judge individuals solely by their character and deeds. She is post-racial, the first post-racial person you have ever known, but because the term has not yet been invented you just think she’s stupid. And because you are the first person she has ever known who has taught himself to see race in everything, she thinks you are stupid too. In time, you both seek and find smarter companions.
The social implications of the couple’s impasse are no laughing matter, but even so, Walker weaves self-aware wit into the exchange. To pull this off, he needs distance from the material, which he signals (in my reading, at least) by looking at himself from the girlfriend’s perspective, and then by dropping that deadpan punchline, “you both seek and find smarter companions.” The gravity isn’t lost, but he’s able to poke fun at how people cling to ideas that shore up their worldviews.
Humor isn’t the only counterpoint to difficult material. Stories with undercurrents of sadness or struggle can be laced with notes that are breezy, nonchalant, sardonic, questioning, angry, wistful. The trick is to embrace the complexity, the uncertainty, the ambiguity your characters—or your narrator—might be experiencing.
Lisa Lanser Rose makes powerful use of emotional ambiguity in her Brevity essay, “ His Apple Pie ,” which presents a situation that at first seems lighthearted: “Once, a man I loved left my dog alone in a car with an apple pie.” The stakes seem amusing—Will the dog eat the pie?—but soon the essay’s tone darkens:
Pennsylvania in deep winter gets dark early and cold; the windows fogged fast with orgiastic apple-pie steam. I said, “She’s gonna eat that pie.”
He exited the car and stretched tall. The man was known for great apple pie. He was bringing it by our host’s special request. “C’mon,” he said. “Don’t kill the mood.”
The tension in the details and dialogue hints that the conflict runs deeper than dog versus pie. When the scarfed pastry is discovered, the man’s reaction is brutal:
At the sight of her worried eye, our friends and I laughed, but the man yanked her out and beat her right there on the wet blacktop.
I was in such shock—we all were—no one tried to stop it. Maybe it was over quick.
Casey forgave him right away. She rode to the dinner party dancing on the back seat burping cinnamon. I rode grim and glaring at my own reflection in the passenger-side window, hearing myself say things I didn’t say aloud…
It’s an ugly turn, though the description of the dog “dancing on the back seat burping cinnamon” carries a whimsical sweetness. The dog’s helplessness and obliviousness disarm us, even as the author stares at her reflection “grim and glaring”—and we realize she is also at risk.
Essays like these feel resonant and real partly because the writers wrap their arms around the complicated mess of life. We shouldn’t force complexity in our work—but in most cases, we don’t have to. Most experiences we’re moved to write about will naturally involve a potent, tangled mix of feelings. The more we lean into that emotional range, the more authentic the work becomes.
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Start your journey of crafting a rich, flexible writer’s voice with Dorian Fox in the CRAFT TALKS webinar The Writer’s Voice: Stretching Your Craft in Personal Nonfiction , August 2 at 2PM Eastern. $25 ($15 Early Bird), and replay will be available to all registrants. More info/sign up here.
Dorian Fox is a writer and freelance editor whose essays and articles have appeared or are forthcoming in Brevity, The Rumpus, Gay Magazine, Booth, The Pinch, Short Reads, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, Los Angeles Review of Books and elsewhere. He lives in Boston and teaches creative writing courses through GrubStreet and Pioneer Valley Writers’ Workshop. Find more about his work at dorianfox.com .
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