St Patrick’s with the SCWA

The Southern California Writers Association very kindly invited me to speak at their St Patrick’s Day luncheon on the 15th of March, in Laguna Woods. I decided to speak about the challenges I’ve been wrestling with lately, putting more emotion into my writing.
And why wouldn’t it be a struggle, after all? I’m Irish! And aren’t the Irish the only people in the world that are immune to therapy?
This is a line attributed to Sigmund Freud by Leonardo di Caprio’s character in the movie The Departed. Well, it turns out that Freud never said such a thing about the Irish. Moreover, if you’ve ever been to Ireland and listened to the radio, you’ll know that the Irish are not shy about expressing their emotions. In fact they’re the kings and queens of the over-share. So it’s not my Irishness that’s getting in the way of my ability to put emotion explicitly into my writing.
Perhaps it’s my Northern Irishness! People from the North are a lot more subdued, emotionally. There wasn’t any oversharing on
Downtown Radio when I was a kid. Just great music. And the range of emotions exhibited by the people of Northern Ireland isn’t that great. There’s anger. And resentment. Joy and sadness sometimes, but really only during the rugby season.
But I can’t really blame my ancestry for any of this. It’s really my belief, borne of long exposure to classical literature, that writers should show emotion, not tell it. Take Raymond Carver: his writing brims with emotion, but he rarely tells the reader how a character is feeling. Instead, we infer it from the writing. This is what I try to do, but recently, I’ve been getting the note that I need to be more specific about how a character feels: to tell, in other words.
So I’ve been trying. But it’s not easy. I write thrillers and mysteries, and my influences, from Lee Child to Agatha Christie, are not big on emotion. So there aren’t that many examples out there. Which means, as with so many things, I need to keep making it up as I go along.

Thank you to everyone at SCWA, particularly Maddie Margarita for the invitation, and Nancy Klann for the limerick. It was a lovely day!