There's something that has always dissatisfied me about my fiction. I've known that something was wrong, but have been unable to fix it, in part because I couldn't identify it. It plagued me all through the writing of Smiley and the Hero, and I have begun to run across it in the new book, too.
Last night I figured out what it was: I have trouble expressing the emotional centers of the characters. This is a problem I have in real life, and so I give it to all my characters as well; they struggle to express the intensity of emotion, and so over-explain and over-express, babbling on and on in a kind of pandering tone about what it is they're feeling.
I'm not sure how to fix this yet. I'm don't really know how to convey emotion through my writing in a way that is both affecting and authentic. But now that I've identified what the problem is, I can try to fix it.
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