Cultivating Emotional Curiosity
Below the main essay, I've added a couple sections for what I've written lately and what I've been reading lately, since I assume readers of this newsletter are interested in my fiction and perhaps also in my exquisite taste. Please don't challenge this assumption, it's load-bearing.
To be a writer is to be curious. Or more precisely, to be a good writer is to be curious. The life of the pablum merchant can be achieved with no more mental effort than receiving wisdom and passing it along, and there is no shortage of demand. And I’m well aware that by making pronouncements about what it means to be a good writer, I’m leaving myself open to the vicious rejoinder “well, how would you know?” It’s a roughly similar danger as declaring that one has checked one’s hotness privilege, only to be told not to worry about it. But I will risk it all to expound for a while on what I believe is a critical skill for writing good fiction: curiosity
Of course, there are a number of different aspects of life to be curious about, and the methods of cultivating curiosity in each aspect is different. Being curious about how things in the world work and how stories work are both important for developing specificity in work and in developing one’s craft respectively, but I’m only going to talk about emotional curiosity, the act of wondering about another person’s internal life. There are some people to whom this comes naturally, who have always been gripped by this wonder. I’m not such a person, and for most of my life I found other people vaguely mystifying, deviating as they did from what seemed to me to be the correct and obvious way of thinking and acting. That this quality of mine was a deficiency, both as a writer and person, was also obvious to me, so I had to learn how to think differently.
But first, why this is so important: I specify that this is the habit of the good writer because one of the gaps between the good writer and the bad writer of similar skill is what they offer to the reader: is it a set of answers, a set of questions, or something else entirely? Providing answers forecloses on further thought and reduces the reader to a passive participant, receiving what wisdom the writer has to offer and potentially being narrowed by their reading experience. In the best case, the reader hasn’t considered those particular answers before, and so they are widened in some regard, but most of the time they read these books for the pleasure of receiving preaching while sitting among the choir. A set of questions is more widening for the reader, but if the questions are so familiar as to be answered without a second thought, then the reader will rightly wonder why they were even asked. These are the questions most likely to result when written from a place of knowing the answers, not meaningfully from providing questions like a contestant on Jeopardy. So, how does a writer arrive at the good, interesting questions about the world? This question isn’t one of those because the answer is incredibly simple: the writer learns to ask these questions by asking them, and curiosity is simply the habit of questioning. Then, the process of writing becomes itself the process of questioning, and the resultant story an artifact of that questioning.
Now, what do I mean when I say emotional curiosity? The questions are picking up pace already. This is the process of investigating people, how they talk, their qualities and inner lives, and the complicated emotions that rarely occur in daily life. This is the knowledge that’s essential in creating characters with depth, and the best way to do it is to watch people and wonder. Eavesdrop relentlessly, steal glances at outfits and actions, the way they stand and talk with their hands, how they react to someone invading their personal space, and, this is the crucial step, ask yourself why they do all of these things. Develop theories. Even if you’re wrong, you might be right. One exercise I like to do while I walk around town or stare at the people on the sidewalk below my apartment’s window is to look at someone and ask myself who I would have to be in order to love them. This question serves a couple purposes: first, I need to develop a theory of the person from the details I observe, what they’re like in private and how they treat others and if they’re goofy or morose or short-tempered, and second, I have to come up with the kind of person who would love them for these qualities, or despite these qualities.
When people in your life make decisions, wonder about why they did it, what the subjective experience of doing one thing or another is. Assume different emotional content behind each decision, maybe they offered to buy lunch out of kindness, or spite, or a desire to show off how little money means to them. In each of those cases, what qualities does the decision take on? Speculate wildly.
While some of us are more curious by nature than others, one child peering into the thick brush in the backyard while the other cowers behind mommy’s leg, it’s not an inborn trait. Eventually, it becomes second nature, though it won’t necessarily make you a more empathetic or attentive friend and lover, so much as create yet another axis on which the writer acts as a voyeur toward everyone we meet and especially those cursed to love us.
What I’ve Written Lately
I’ve released a couple pieces on my Patreon. One for free, the other hidden for only the elite few who give me a token payment every month.
They’re Gonna Boil You: a piece of flash fiction about a character who has committed an unspecified, grave offense, who is reckoning with the oncoming consequences. An opportunity to write the sentence "I’ll tear my name off the social contract, I’ll repent of the sin of language and forsake manhood to live as lonely meat," which I enjoyed doing.
A Tower Above a Man: a novelette (which is essentially just a way of saying a short story that’s not really all that short, half of a novella) about a timid gay man named Arno who flees, along with everyone else, from a large gang of men who are pummeling buildings into dust with sledgehammers, into the center of the city, from which most men are turned away for having calluses on their hands. There, he falls in with some other men who are angry about how they were perceived as weak and allowed in, and want to prove their capacity for destruction
What I’ve Read Lately
Greta & Valdin by Rebecca K. Riley - a charming novel about a very anxious gay man and his bombastic lesbian sister in New Zealand, and the rest of their family and romantic relationships. It’s one of the funnier books I’ve read, but not hugely substantial beneath the surface. Still, I enjoyed it.
Realistic Fiction by Anton Solomonik - a collection of stories about characters who mostly don’t know themselves, or know themselves falsely, or can’t relate to other people, or are fixated on something bizarre or have failed to fixate correctly. Solomonik is good at achieving an off-kilter, too-direct mode of first-person narration that brings characters like this to life. A great entry into the “let’s spend some time with this weird guy” mode of storytelling, one which readers of my own fiction know I love. I may have more to say about this one later, but I finished it last evening so my thoughts haven’t congealed, wet and gross, into a final shape just yet, but it's safe to say I had a great time with these.