I have been procrastinating to create this video for the past 15 years.
When I work with clients for essay editing, the one thing I always wanted to share is about ‘finding’ an authentic emotion before writing the essay.
In my volumes goals video, I have shared how it is all about writing a lot before finding one’s authentic voice.
An authentic voice is different from reaching an emotional state before capturing one’s authentic emotion.
This is a concept popular among actors.
If you notice the greatest actors. In my books – Philip Seymour Hoffman and Daniel Day-Lewis, why do we feel that they are not acting?
They pursued a technique called Emotional Memory.
Emotional Memory is finding a similar memory as the character is experiencing and then expressing it authentically for the camera.
In essay writing, where you have to write about failures, traumas, and setbacks, if you don’t go back to that emotional memory, the writing will turn into a commentary.
There is a huge difference between reflective writing and commentary.
The first draft of many of my clients is a commentary about their ‘hard’ times. It is not coming from an authentic place.
I ask them to go back to that moment, and they come back with overly emotional lines.
This is not what I mean by Emotional Memory.
It is to find a place in your memory where the details are vivid.
I, as a reviewer and editor, should feel that you have lived that moment.
And it can only come from a place of genuine reflection.
A shortcut to reaching an emotional state that reflects the event is to match the event to your day-to-day mood.
In a 5-day workweek, there would be days in which you won’t be happy.
A client or a supervisor wasn’t happy with your output.
A deadline was missed.
A promotion that you anticipated didn’t happen.
When you are feeling low, write about failures, a weakness, or a trauma.
This emotional state will help you find expressions, phrases, or words that match the emotional state you are writing about.
Now, you can’t wait endlessly to have a bad day.
There is another shortcut to reach that state, which actors call sense memory.
If you are writing about an event 5 years back, play the popular songs from that year.
If your memory is associated with a restaurant, cafe, or a place in your city, try to travel to that location.
Go back to your phone and browse through the photos from that year.
Our mind has something called “Associative Memory” that helps us recall the emotion.
If the memory is negative, we remember the ‘central event’ but forget most of the details.
This is our way of coping with the negative event.
So, to reflect and write about the negative event, you have to stay in that emotional state and ask some fundamental questions like:
1) What was the triggering event
2) What was the hurtful incident?
3) What was the hurtful comment?
4) What was the change in perspective you had after the event?
5) What life lesson do you still carry now from that event?
Once you ask these 5 questions, you will expand on the central event with details.
It is the details that improve a narrative.
A person obsessed about impressing his overbearing millionaire father went to a great extent to scale his startup.
One such funding round led to a collaboration with an investor, who found a loophole and fired him out of his own startup.
His reflection was not just about the person who did harm to his dreams. He went deep into his own motivations.
In a weird way, the essay was a theme on the competition between the father and son – a theme I haven’t read much in essays.
Many of you will not find the emotional state to write about the negative event because the event was too far down the memory lane.
That is one reason i recommend that clients limit reflections to the past 3-5 years.
If you have to go back more than 5 years, it should be something extremely rare and memorable that left a permanent mark in your life.
These are tragic events like losing parents, an identity crisis, or an interaction that revealed a truth about the world.
So, to summarize:
1) Find a similar emotional state as you had experienced, before writing about the event in an essay
2) If you can’t reach the emotional state, use sense memory or artifacts from the year to capture the details.
For any help brainstorming, editing, and reviewing your essays, reach out to me through F1GMAT’s contact form
