Angela Booth's Writing Blog: Name your emotions and stop them derailing your writing

Books: Write Fiction

Angela Booth: Short Fiction Secrets: How To Write And Sell Short Stories (Selling Writer Strategies Book 2)
Writing short stories is a fun and easy way to get started writing fiction — you can get paid to write, in your spare time. If you're new to writing fiction, you can learn the elements of writing fiction — short stories are much easier to control than longer fiction.
Angela Booth: Master Fiction Writing: Craft A Novel in 31 Days: Selling Writer Strategies 4
This program began as a 30-day challenge which I organized in 2010. Hundreds of writers joined the challenge; they wrote novels. You can write a novel in 31 days too.
Angela Booth: Step By Step To Fiction Which Sells: Plotting And Scene Magic
What if you could leave boring fiction forever behind you, so that the story in your head becomes the story on the page? You CAN, when you discover the magic of story, plotting, and scenes.

Emotions are messy and they can derail your writing.

This is because emotions seem important and you want to solve the mystery of why you had a particular emotion, so you make up reasons. If you find yourself feeling depressed for example, you can spend an unprofitable half hour wondering why you're depressed - your writing's not selling, the fantastic idea you had yesterday seems ridiculous today, the mortgage is due... etc. You're playing old mental tapes, and this wastes time.

At the end of the half hour, you realize you haven't written a word, and think that suicide is an option.

You can stop this process if you remember to name your emotions, as suggested in "Writers' creativity: weed your creative garden".

Apropos of which, an interesting article "Brain Scans Reveal Why Meditation Works" reports that:

If you name your emotions, you can tame them, according to new research that suggests why meditation works.
Brain scans show that putting negative emotions into words calms the brain's emotion center. That could explain meditation’s purported emotional benefits, because people who meditate often label their negative emotions in an effort to “let them go.”

I've got a minor quibble with the statement 'people who meditate often label their negative emotions in an effort to “let them go.”'

Labeling, whether you're meditating or not, is simply an acknowledgment; a label. You're not changing anything, or making any effort. You acknowledge a thought, or an emotion, by labeling it "thinking" or "anxious" - and the letting go just happens, because you're not getting caught up in trying to fit the emotion to something else.

Try it yourself. Next time you feel a gloomy cloud descending just acknowledge it with "depressed" and go back to writing. This process works even better if you write down the time and the emotion, as in - "4.10 pm, depressed" and then go back to writing.

At the end of your writing period you'll look at the list of emotions you named and you'll be pleased that none of them have succeeded in derailing your writing.

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