March 10, 2020
Affect in Writing: A Way of Feeling
If you searched Home for Fiction for the term “affective power”, you’d discover tons of results. I have referred to the concept of affect in writing in many of my posts – “Sounds in Literature”, “Writing and Reading Symbolism”, and “Narrative Exposition”, to name three.
I now finally decided to write a proper post about it, for two reasons: Firstly, it’s important to speak a bit more analytically about something I use so often. Secondly, I realized that some of my more academically inclined readers might think I make some claim to Affect Theory.
Let’s clear this latter part right away: Although perhaps some accidental commonalities might exist, the way I use the concept of affect has absolutely no connection to affect theory.
Rather, I deploy the concept of affect in writing to refer to emotions, thoughts, and states of mind. I’ll open up the concept in more detail, also explaining i) why it’s important for writers; ii) how to use it in your fiction.
Affect in Writing: The Basic Definitions
As I mentioned in the introduction and in other posts, affect in writing is an expression involving emotions, thoughts, and states of mind.
In more detail, you can think of affect as the background behind the plot. If character A does thing B, there is an instance of affect behind it.
At this point, I need to emphasize a crucial point.
Affect is about both what comes before this action (“thing B”) and what comes after it. It’s both the emotions, thoughts, and states of mind leading character A to doing thing B, as well as the emotions, thoughts, and states of mind occurring after thing B.
You could call the first part “motivation”, “drive”, or something similar, but it would be misleading. The reason? Affect is not an entirely conscious process.
To use a simple example, imagine an athlete practicing for an event. His motivation is to perform well in the event and, say, win a prize or secure a sponsorship. But affect describes all his insecurities, all his vices, the accumulation of all his experiences that have placed him in that particular place, at that particular time.
And so, this athlete might be afraid of success, and he subconsciously sabotages himself; he might be an egoist, and he subconsciously deludes himself into believing he doesn’t need much practice; perhaps he might be affected by a childhood memory or a dream, and he subconsciously finds the strength he didn’t know he had.
Now, let’s see why affect is important and how to use it.
Why Affect Is Important
Art is not about describing events; it’s about describing how these events make us feel.
Classics such as Dracula aren’t popular and… well, undead, because they talk about vampires or have vivid descriptions. Rather, it’s because their author managed – mostly subconsciously – to tap into a cultural moment. The Gothic is a way of talking about what cannot be talked about.
The genre of your novel doesn’t matter. You might be writing literary fiction or romance, horror or poetry. Affect is there. Your characters do all kinds of stuff, but the real importance lies not in what they do but in why they do it and how it makes them feel.
Because, ultimately, this whole process is what makes your readers feel, too.
Literature is not about creating fictional histories, in a sort of linear, point-A-to-point-B kind of thing. Literature is about creating meaning.
And you can become a better writer only by paying attention to the affective power of your narrative – how you treat emotions, thoughts, and states of mind.
How to Use Affect
So, how can you use affect in your writing?
Remember my post on literature being more than a sum of its parts? Here’s what I said there:
When you read book A, your mood that day is introducing bias. So does whether you read book B during a sunny summer weekend or in a rainy November evening.
Bias is good, when it comes to audience reception.
Bias is what facilitates feelings and an emotional response. You can’t have art without an emotional response.
Effectively, bias is the measuring stick that helps us gauge (not to mention create) meaning.
In order to increase the affective power of your narrative, you must understand your personal bias as a writer and embrace it.
In plain English, don’t treat your narrative objectively, because it can’t be. We all carry our personal ideologies with us, whether we admit it or not. Each one of us is part hero, part coward; part good, part evil.
Sometimes we hide in the shadows, sometimes we broadcast to the whole world – every now and then with unintended consequences, but that’s another story.
The point is, you must put yourself in that narrativeIt is important to understand what "put yourself in that narrative really means", as there is a crucial difference between experience and experiencing. See the comment section for more information.. Most poor-quality books I’ve seen fail for this simple reason: Their authors leave out themselves – their biases, their quirks, all their little insecurities and fears that make us humans.
To paraphrase the incomparable Bill Hicks, write from your fucking heart.
Click to display the embedded YouTube video
Affect in Writing Is about What You Cannot See
Just in case you didn’t know, here’s some news: All plots have already been devised, all stories have been told. There’s nothing new under the proverbial sun, it’s only a matter of showing something new in terms of how and why something happens.
To be sure, it’s not easy. This is particularly the case for genre writers, who must balance between originality and audience expectations.
Ultimately, however, affect in writing is about showing the unseen. Quality literature – as opposed to books produced for monetary benefits – might offend you, scare you, or make you feel sad. It might make you feel good or it might make you feel bad.
But it has to make you feel.
3 Comments
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I find it interesting you call it not motivation because it is not entirely conscious, while I’d rather stick with the word and redefine my own understanding of it as accounting for unconscious influence too. I mean, I already understand it in such a way anyways, but still, it’s not like semantics are set in stone.
I would not advise writers to place themselves some way or another in the writing, I’ve had horrible experiences teaching creative writing and saying such a thing to students/starters, but rather I’d advise them to work themselves into language. Once a student asked me “How do I look up for avant-garde [writing] techniques?”, to which I replied “Re-create, re-produce the affect [as you, Chris, define it] that you get from an avant-garde work, or even just from another art-form [that is not literature].” and I saw a light shine bright in his eyes.
Ultimately, I think that was the utter mediocrity of Bukowski’s fiction, or most commercial fiction, the writer putting themselves in the text. There needs to be some reworking, some creative translation (Campos’s trans-creation), if else, it becomes the sheer satisfaction of the writer’s desires and wishes (conscious and/or unconscious, doesn’t matter) and it reduces itself to a stupid confessional text that speaks nothing to anyone else. There has to be some other-ing of the self in order to reach the other. Or so I think.
You make some very interesting and apt observations, to the point I feel I need to clarify my stance (and add an associated footnote within the body of the post).
You are absolutely right in tracing mediocre fiction to writers putting themselves in the text—you mentioned Bukowski (I agree), and I’m very tempted to include Hemingway in this, not perhaps in terms of mediocrity per se, but definitely as an example of what not to do.
However, a critical differentiation must be made, relevant to the topic. Both Bukowski and Hemingway (in this example) put themselves in the text in terms of writing what I once referred to as a fact-based literature. When in the post I said that authors must put themselves in the narrative, I did not refer to their actual experiences, but only to the affect generated by their experiences. I sometimes use the terms “experience” versus “experiencing” to make this differentiation.
The point is very subtle, but also very important.
Authors who write about their experiences (a fact-based literature) end up writing the same story again and again — which is indeed what Bukowski exemplifies. They don’t have another story in them. They can’t extrapolate the intangibles of the experience, transcending the limits of their own context.
Literature (well, quality literature at least) should be about taking the specific and showing something greater hiding behind it. For better or for worse, the human experience is miserably commonplace. Timeless works of art (Homer, Euripides, Shakespeare, Shelley, etc) are timeless precisely because they go beyond their context and highlight the eternal nature of the human condition.
Since I mentioned Shelley, Frankenstein is a great example of the differentiation between experience and experiencing. A mediocre writer, “putting herself in the text” in terms of experiences, would have written Frankenstein as a text about giving birth, losing children, and suffering the “slings and arrows of outrageous fortune” — a mixed metaphor from another text; a meta-mixed metaphor 😛
Instead, Shelley “put herself in the text” in terms of experiencing, understanding the larger implications of her condition. The Gothic symbolism of the monster (malleable in interpretations ranging from feminist to postcolonial readings) has allowed her work to be timeless, in ways other texts of the time (even within the Gothic canon) are not.
Thanks for pointing this out, great comment!
Thank you for your extensive response and clarification. Bukowski fantasized satisfactions to his desires through his text, thus placing himself (his emotional, affective self and its discontents) straight untransformed into the text. What you explain as transcending the local, bounded experience towards polysemic symbolism is precisely a transforming of the self-insertion into the text. Never forget Rimbaud’s injunction: je est un autre [I is an other, the very bending of agreement grammar rules shows how powerful has to be the transformation before any self-insertion: enough to move the tectonic plates of language].