Getting all Emotional

I was just about to buy The Emotional Craft of Fiction: How to Write the Story Beneath the Surface by Donald Maass when I noticed there was no Purchase button. The usually-yellow button instead was green, and said Read Now. I was all like "Oh, is this book free?" But then I saw the big imprint across the top of the page: "You already purchased this edition on February 4, 2022."

D'oh!! It was when my Kindle was new, and now it's buried way in the back, on one of the last pages. I don't often scroll that far back into it. At any rate, it seems like a good addition to the books and articles I've been reading. I think it takes a much less formulaic approach to depicting emotion. That's one thing I notice about the Deep POV stuff, it does feel a bit formulaic. But that's one of the things about it I won't be emulating, I just need to extract the good info from it and discard the rest.

I'm through the first module of the course and almost halfway through the second. Correction—of my initial read-through. I'll go back and mark things up, take notes, and re-write the important stuff in my own words to make it stick.

The Emotional Craft of Fiction book is far better than anything I've run across so far concerning deep POV, and the writer is much better than the one who put the course together. She has a very loose way of explaining things, where his is tight and precise. And he brings in aspects of writing emotion that go way beyond anything I've seen mentioned in the deep POV material (so far anyway). But there are definitely things I like about deep POV.

I also couldn't help but notice—all the stuff I've seen about deep POV (including a book I read about it some time ago) has been written by women. Apparently it's most commonly used in modern Romance stories.

I was digging through a stack of books last night and ran across one called Characters, Emotion & Viewpoint by Nancy Kress. I bought it maybe a year or so ago, when I was studying POV, and I only read the sections pertaining to that. Once again, a book I already have in my possession about getting emotion into your writing. It looks like it has a lot of overlap with the book I found in the back of my Kindle recently.

And suddenly it hits me—how ironic is it that I had several books already about writing emotions, and I had either not read them or ignored the sections about emotion? Not ironic really, but telling maybe. It's like I avoid emotion or something. Or maybe I'm making a connection where it's more a matter of random chance. Anyway, the thought struck me and it made me smile, so I thought I'd put it down here in my online journal.

This is closely adjacent to the Stanislavski stuff I'm currently blogging about, but it really fits better in here, so here it goes. Most of it is applicable to writing, directly or indirectly, and with some translation, up until the last section really.