Paint your story

I don't teach many English lessons these days and instead focus on skill development but today, I had one with a relatively new group with which I have only had a couple sessions. Every session for me is a surprise although, I walk into the class with a couple general points I want to investigate with the participants. Today, it touched on emotive words and narrative and I thought I would touch on them a little here too.

Emotive words

 
Ok, firstly, lets get emotional. Essentially every word carries an emotional weighting that is tied to the meaning of the word but, also to the experience of a person. For example, for many the word mother is going to be classified as positive however, Norman Bates may argue that point. When he hears the word mother, he is likely to have quite a different emotional response than most. But this is true for all words, especially adjectives.

The difference between a car accident, a bad car accident and a horrendous car accident bring to mind different severity of accident and the imagery will change to suit. The problem is (for non-native speakers mostly) is that the emotional rating isn't 'intuitive' and the words chosen are based on translation of terms for best fit, but best fit to what?

Most non-native speakers are unable to choose the words based on the common emotional rating and will often make poor selections and the story gets lost in translation. Like one of my students noted today, this is probably why conversation between two non-natives in a non-mother-tongue language is easier to understand. I agree and believe it is because both parties have to 'translate' into their native position to build the image. Of course, it doesn't necessarily mean good communication.

When writing, word choice is obviously very important for understanding and this goes beyond the actual meaning of the words. Often, non-native speech is bland because even though the ideas are conveyed, the supporting imagery associated may not be, which takes us onto the narrative.

Narrating the image

No matter what the topic, how boring, if it is technical or prose, the basic concept is that ideas need to be transported across effectively enough that the communicator gets the appropriate response from the audience. It could be the understanding of a task or perhaps, the heart-wrench felt at the loss of a loved one by the protagonist in a work of fiction. There is a story there and that story creates mental imagery.

The challenge is to be able to build the narrative so that when read/presented, it will create the foundation and then the framework so that the shape of what the audience sees is aligned with what the writer wants the message to be. I wrote a piece today about education and talked about learning math and the problem for me was that I never saw the story in the equations. Those that are good at math can visualize what it is doing (or could be doing) in reality. This is a problem for many.

Sales people need to tell the story of their product, fiction writers may need to build a whole world and the approach for each may change depending on the topic at hand. As I said to my class today;

Words are the paints on the palette and the mixing and combination of them create the colours with which the artist builds the image.

Depending on what one wants to convey and with which tone is going to affect word choice and to choose poorly can take a brilliant idea and limit the impact or, destroy it entirely. The creator needs to think through their approach from the audience's perspective because, the writer already knows the story.

This seems obvious but is actually something most people miss as they assume because they see the narative and all of the little hidden gems, everyone will see the same thing. Many writers here try to convey what is in their head which is great but, they do it from their perspective and lose the audience. They of course wonder why their masterpiece is not well received. It is kind of like telling the punchline of a long joke and expecting the audience to laugh without having heard the rest.

For some, these types of things come easier than for others but for me, I have to put myself in to the moment I want to convey, visualize it, feel it and then observe how my mind and body reacts. I have written some quite emotional fiction stories while I have been here. They aren't always rainbows and unicorns to create.

And, perhaps this is the best place to end this piece too. If you don't feel what you write, it is likely going to show through in your work because if it doesn'tevoke a response from you, why would you assume it would bring out anything in anyone in the audience. This isn't just for fiction or advertising looking for sales, the narrative flows through anything you ant the audience to understand well.

Be curious, experiment, learn and improve.

Taraz
[ an original ]