Last week I asked if any of my readers shared my experience of using fiction writing to express feelings their early training had taught them not to acknowledge. Here are some of the responses I received:

Dorothy Pensky said, “Interestingly for me, trying (and so far kind of failing) to be a writer has made me able to see my feelings in real time in the world. I’m not sure I’m in control of them on the page, yet. Trying to be a writer has completely changed the person I was trained to be–Scottish Presbyterian minister’s daughter–to, I don’t know, someone able to cry about my father’s death and then feel the joy of being with my son and then the boredom of alphabetizing books. And to just keep my head up and keep moving.”

So in Dorothy’s experience, working with feelings on the page has enabled her to acknowledge and live her feelings more fully in her life. It’s an aspect of this process I hadn’t considered, but I suspect it’s almost inevitable, that stirring the pot of emotions day after day in our writing teaches us to recognize and honor emotions when we encounter them in our lives, which is the first step to being able to live them fully.

And I want to add that being a yet-unpublished writer isn't a form of failure. It’s part of the journey for all of us. Besides that, we are all writers when we write. Publication doesn't change anything about that. It just widens the audience.

Cori McCarthy spoke of another aspect of this journey, learning important truths about ourselves through discovering what our writing reveals. Here’s what she said, “I grew up hiding my sadness. This is not something that I realized until I started writing, but over the years, I’ve seen it come out in my work over and over again. I allow my characters to put forth so many emotions in an attempt to cover up sadness, regret, or embarrassment. For some reason, these were never acceptable emotions…at least not ones that I ever dared let someone else know.”

Early in my career I used to say, rather smugly I’m afraid, “No one can psychoanalyze me by reading one of my novels, because I never write autobiographically.” It didn’t take many novels, though, for me to recognize that anyone who reads more than one of them has, if they care to look very closely, a pretty good image of my soul. As the same themes, patterns, story problems arise, again and again, I have come to realize that I am actually quite transparent on the page. Recognizing that, I then had to look inside to see where these reoccurring themes came from. My stories don’t just reveal me to the world, they reveal me to myself!

And Karen said, “My mother, raised in a stoic Midwestern farm family, used to worry about me because she said I was ‘so sensitive.’ Fortunately, she came to realize that trait was a positive, not a negative, because she tried so hard to understand why we were different by listening to me closely my entire life. In the end, she said she learned from me, but I believe I learned the value of unconditional love from her. The ultimate gift.”

What a blessing such a mother would be! Our deep differences about being able to express and acknowledge feelings form one of the chasms that make us so unreadable—and thus unacceptable—to one another, especially in close family relationships. For a mother to be able to accept such a difference in her daughter is a gift beyond price.

And returning to fiction, once again, stories can open a window in all this mishmash of difference about our ability to acknowledge, express and accept feelings. Feelings of every stripe are safer when played through someone who is clearly not us, when they can’t intrude on our lives except on our own terms (we put the book down when we've had enough), and when they can ultimately be tied up into a neat little bundle called a story.

And the final question came from Steve. He asked:

Do you think you've ever been changed or transformed by the process of getting into the mind and heart of a character?

What an interesting thought! Anyone out there have a response?