"resistance manifesto" -jess

In my writing…I’m easily amused. I like boring things and I want my readers to like them too. I resist sentimentality so much that sometimes I inadvertently avoid it altogether. So caught up in thinking it will be over the top, I approach an emotional scene and immediately back away, write around it. The writing suddenly feels awkward, not my own. I’m overly sensitive to clichés and common drama. It’s been done and there’s plenty of it. Drama shouldn’t be absent- it’s a good thing and it’s important, but it doesn’t have to be crying, shouting, throwing things drama. Well-done drama, in my opinion, is subtle drama. It should be present, and even powerful, but the approach, the path toward it, should be set up in such a way that even the smallest gesture or image has the ability to evoke an emotional response from the reader. In my own work, I’ve tried to be as subtle as possible when it comes to sentimentality. I try to write everyday scenarios, where what happens, what’s dramatic, wouldn’t be if it wasn’t preceded by a particular event, which may or may not be dramatic in itself. I try to write the uncommon actions, which lead to unlikely reactions. It doesn’t always work. Trying to control it so much, it often becomes dull and has no impact at all. I wonder if my characters even have emotions, or if I expect my readers to care about them in any way. I wonder if anything has actually happened in my stories. Still, I like it there, at this extreme, as opposed to the other. I like to work at making the boring become interesting. So I resist the sentimental, yet try to employ it at the same time, using it in a different way, measured and controlled, so that anything as simple as someone checking their watch twice in a the same minute could make the reader feel something.