Crossing the Chasm: The Quest to Incorporate Set, Setting, Emotion, and Meaning Into Memoir
Business writing (where my background lies) is primarily a persuasion game. You compile case studies, propose frameworks, write standard operating procedures, and add a few anecdotes to make it feel a little more human.
(5 Tips for Evoking Emotion in Writing.)
Successful business writing is the alchemy of the above with a dash of luck and a whole lot of consistency. So it’s natural to rely heavily on buzzwords that all business folks want to hear—ROI, growth hacking, framework, go-to-market, branding building, etc.
While I’m no Clay Christensen or Malcom Gladwell, I’m confident and credible enough to have an opinion on business and entrepreneurship that can be skillfully communicated. It’s my comfort zone and how I pay the bills as a B2B sales and marketing consultant.
While the experience and repetition of business writing is a valuable skill, translating that into writing about life, feelings, struggles, and challenges is so far out of my comfort zone that it has its own zip code.
That’s why when I found myself staring at the blank screen, cursor blinking, and my soul crushed by the death of my 36-year-old wife, I realized I had to rethink my buzzword bingo filled prose to tell our story.
The Hard Thing About Hard Things
The experience of my wife Jane dying of leukemia on April 3, 2017, was a moment in time that started my transformation from business writer to heartfelt storyteller. The transformation, now some six years later, is still not complete. I have learned a ton that not only makes me a better writer but a better brother, partner, friend, and human.
For those of you who are compelled to cross the chasm from persuasive business writer to a teller of tales, let me share with you what I found.
The Four Quadrants of the Emotional Apocalypse
For business writers, emotion is the metaphorical enemy. Our writing has to be clear, concise, and compelling so that folks part with their hard earned money. While emotion plays a significant role in making that happen, it’s not the emotion of the writer that matters. Rather, the emotion of the prospect that’s trying to cure some pain or accomplish a goal.
This “putting yourself in the story” is the hardest part of crossing the chasm between persuasive writing and emotional writing. Since I love frameworks, I mean who doesn’t, I have distilled how I inject feelings into my writing.
Set: The Mindset of the Writer or Protagonist
For those of you familiar with psychedelics, you’ll recognize these first two quadrants as essential to a good trip.
Mindset is the attitude one comes into any experience and how you experience what happens to you. This is essential because the reader needs to know your experience, your quirks, how you come to your conclusions, and why you love Strawberry Frosted Pop Tarts.
Your mindset is the filter in which the other three quadrants will come to life on the page.
Setting: The Environment You Find Yourself In
Unlike the stale, Saccharin business environment where the coolest thing is the beanbag chair or foosball table in the break room, the environment you find yourself in will heavily impact how the story unfolds.
Is it the chaos of an ER? Is it the peacefulness of a 5 AM run? Is it the day your wife died?
All of these settings will push and pull on how your emotions will ebb and flow as the story unfolds. The setting will also play against your mindset in ways that need to be revealed on the page since your setting will trigger different emotions.
Emotion: The Feelings You Feel
It’s important, actually vital, that the reader know the emotions that you are feeling. Emotion is what drives action and action is what creates the tension, change, chaos, reaction, sorrow, and joy of your story.
Without the proper dose and cadence of emotion, a story falls flat. It can feel like you’re listening to a mildly lisping court reporter reading back the testimony of an expert witness. The details are important but the delivery feels clinical.
This emotional thing is partially hard and meaningful for me because as I was writing my memoir Ride or Die: Loving Through Tragedy, A Husband’s Memoir, all of my editors told me a variation on, “Jarie, I don’t see you in this. Where are you?”
That “where are you?” is because I did not want to share the crushing emotions of grief, sorrow, loss, pain, anger, and frustration because I was afraid.
Afraid of what people would think.
Afraid I’d get it wrong.
Afraid I’d let Jane down.
Once I tapped into not being afraid of the emotions and writing them down, I could start being true to myself and my experience.
Check out Jarie Bolander’s Ride or Die here:
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Meaning: The Reason It’s Important to You
Emotion without meaning is just a bitch session with friends or your therapists. While this is hard, once you have opened the emotions vein, it’s pretty easy, comparatively, to organize said emotions into some sort of meaning.
This meaning takes several forms but the best way I can explain it is how my publisher and editor Brooke Warner explained it to me—what’s the lesson or take-away here?
Now, by lesson, I don’t imply that you, say, experiencing grief, are the de facto expert on what grief means but you are an expert on what lessons you learned from said experience. That’s powerful because while you may think that it’s trivial or even wrong, people want to understand the journey you went on and what lessons you learned.
After the Fact Journaling
One of the best ways I found to get good at exploring these four quadrants was to do after the fact journaling. I learned this technique from my good friend Leslie Watts, who also happened to be one of my editors early on.
The practice is to think back to the day or circumstances that you want to write about and write a journal as if you are doing it right then in the moment. Write down everything that you can about set, setting, emotion, and meaning for that day or event.
I used this exact technique to put myself in my memoir and relive some of the events and moments that really needed to be captured with more emotion.
Don’t Be Afraid to Be Afraid
One of the biggest challenges to make the transition from business writer to other genres is the fear of not measuring up or that you have no right to write what you feel. I can tell you that I had the same feelings and fears, yet I have found that exploring those fears makes you a better writer and a better human being.