writing strong emotion

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Nancy: The Truth in Fiction

The Truth is Between My and Your Stories

All of us here at 8LW are working on fiction projects. We met in a romance (fiction) writing program. We spend the creative parts of our days making up stories and characters to act in them, fleshing out those characters, and building fictional worlds around them. And yet, we spend days and months researching details and trying to ‘get things right’. Our own Justine, Kat, and Michaelina have all recently taken trips to explore the settings for their stories. If we’re just making up this stuff, why do we spend so much time sweating the details?

We’ve probably all read a book or watched a movie that lost our interest or raised our ire because wrong details pulled us out of the story. Continue reading →

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Justine: Death, Dying, and Deep Emotion

emotion, writing emotion, character emotion

Me and my sweet pup, Dulcie, on our last day together.

Last week, I had the great misfortune to lose my precious pup, Dulcie. She’d just made it to her 15th birthday when the tumor in her mouth became so large, she couldn’t eat or drink. She lived an amazing life and I am so grateful to have had such a wonderful little doggie, but it was her time to go, so I had her put down.

This was my first experience euthanizing a pet. My family had dogs when I was a kid, but I was never there when they died — I was away at college, or I’d already moved out of the house. I was sad, of course, when these family pets departed us, and I had always imagined that saying goodbye to a beloved pet would be a very difficult, sad thing to experience.

Nothing prepared me for the raw emotion I felt when we arrived at the vet’s office. Continue reading →