Flash Extravaganza Day 5: How Does It Feel?
Femme en pleurs (Weeping Woman), Pablo Picasso 1937 Wikiart (fair use)
Hello friends,
Such incredible writing these first days of our Extravaganza! Well over FIFTY new flashes have been posted so far! I’m so grateful to
, and for their fun and inspiring pop-up prompts! Tomorrow, there will be a terrific pop-up prompt from our own !Today, I’d like to address how we might convey powerful emotion in our very short stories. Before we can effectively and powerfully render emotion on the page, we must first understand how emotion is experienced. (Some of this material is drawn from a weekend class I have taught called “The Heart of the Matter.”) Your prompt, below, will have you drawing from memory and emotions to create a deeply resonant piece of writing which may result in a complete flash draft or the bones of one.
In From Where You Dream: The Process of Writing Fiction, Robert Olen Butler maintains that emotions are experienced in the senses and therefore are best expressed in fiction through the senses. He describes five ways in which emotions are experienced: