Straight from the Library: Straight Chatting from the Library: Benjamin X. Wretlind

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Emotional Intelligence and the Writer

Success as a writer depends not only on your ability to, well, write, but also on your ability to connect with your readers on an emotional level. Emotional intelligence is a critical skill that you can use to create stories that resonate with readers and leave a lasting impact. This is something I have been exploring with the help of one of the founders of the MSCEIT Emotional Intelligence Test and the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence.

Simply put, emotional intelligence involves the ability to recognize and manage your own emotions and the emotions of others. I’m probably going to expand on this much later, but here are my initial thoughts on the matter.

First, understand your own emotions

This is hard for me, as it may be for you. Then again, you may be one of those people who are always in touch with your emotions. Understanding your emotions can help you create characters that are relatable and authentic. I personally spend a lot of time reflecting on my own emotions and experiences so that the characters I write have a little depth. Granted, I’m a nutcase, but that emotional history helps.

Next, empathize with your readers

Just as it’s hard for me to get in touch with my emotions (that “f-word” as in “feelings”), I know that one way to use emotional intelligence in writing is to empathize with my readers. Ideally, I want to consider who my readers are and what they might be feeling as they read my work. Are they triggered by something? Does it make sense that they should feel a certain way? Thankfully, I’ve had some feedback in this area from beta readers—they let me know what works, what they feel, and what needs help.

Use emotional language

Show, don’t tell. The language you use in your writing can have a powerful emotional impact on your readers. When I was younger and completely out of touch with my feelings, I might have written “he felt sad.” Now I step back and consider using vivid, descriptive language that evokes strong emotions. There were times while writing All We Leave Behind that I needed to dive deep into my own emotions and write out what I thought people should be shown. It if didn’t work, I again had beta readers who were more than happy to tell me the truth.

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Following the exodus from rising floodwaters, the surviving descendants of those who came to create a society on a planet far from Earth have struggled to rebuild within the remains of an ancient temple. Now, as disease and an unfamiliar environment threaten to destroy them yet again, everyone seems to have an opinion about what to do next.

Miriam and Tobias Page, newly married, believe there may be a possible home beyond a distant canyon. Their journey with a quarter of the population doesn’t start well and soon nature and their own humanity will conspire to end it all. Meanwhile, Miriam’s two cousins, Joel and Micah, have different ideas. Joel is convinced the best course of action is to return to the mountains they left to mine for the ore that would make a great return to Earth possible. Micah hopes to stay, learn all he can about the temple’s previous occupants, and prove both of them wrong. But soon, he and his new partner Patience realize that no option is truly safe.

As the transits of three different groups get underway, new dangers and surprises emerge from within the rainforests, mountains, and deserts of the planet…and one of those may have followed them from Earth. While a final home is a dream away, present nightmares must be dealt with first if any of them are going to survive.

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Patience tried to count the number of people left in the temple at Manoach. Three hundred, three hundred fifty? Many of those had already revealed their desire to follow Joel when he returned from the Barrier Mountains. There might be a few more or less, but her calculations sounded right given the number of people who followed Miriam to the west. Of those not going with Joel, maybe a handful would be willing to pack up and leave Manoach.

Would Micah be one of them?

A cry of alarm rose from a scout to Patience’s right. She looked over and saw Theresa Atkins, a woman slightly older than Patience, wave a lit torch indicating a potential threat. Patience looked out beyond the wall and tried to focus her eyes on several shapes she saw moving out of the tree line. At first, there were three. Then four.

Now seven.

“Lord, help us,” she whispered.

Another alarm rose to her left. Levi Barrett, one of the newest scouts Patience had been training and still only fifteen, waved his torch back and forth. Fearing the worst, Patience looked out toward the tree line in front of his part of the wall.

Nine.

Fifteen.

Fifteen rychat, approaching from two directions, silhouettes in the dark creeping through the brush.

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