What your emotions are trying to tell you.

How you react to what you read teaches you who you are as a writer, and what direction to take in your growth. 

Follow the clues of your own admiration and awe. Even shadow emotions like sadness, jealousy, and repulsion, can be teachers. 

Pay attention to what you notice. Make time to write about what you’re reading. Articulate what you feel and what you don’t feel. Freewrite on all of your reactions, especially those weird mixed-up feelings that are hard to put into words. 

Your feelings are secret messages. By taking the time to put your unnamed emotions and responses into language, you can communicate with your unconscious mind, and start to understand the underlying advice and direction it might be offering you.

The following seven emotions are ones that are often triggered by our reading. Each is a secret message, waiting to be interpreted:

Your admiration teaches you about your own skills and abilities.

Your sadness teaches you what your heart loves and finds meaningful.

Your boredom teaches you about changes you desire to make.

Your frustration and fatigue teach you about what you want to surrender or release.

Your jealousy teaches you what you really desire to do or have in your own work.

Your repulsion teaches you about your disowned strengths, the parts that are in shadow.

For instance, when I first picked up My Brilliant Friend by Elena Ferrante, I put it down, bored by its stream of consciousness style. A year later, after I completed my novel Radiant Shimmering Light, I returned to it and was captivated. What changed?

I had just spent months crafting my own kind of stream of consciousness prose in my own book. Finishing my novel had given me a new way to experience reading, because in and through my own writing, I discovered what stream of consciousness prose was for.

When you read as a writer, your likes and dislikes there to help you make thing you’re making.

My initial boredom with Ferrante wasn’t really about her book—it was pointing to a creative phase that I needed to complete. Now, I can see that my boredom was telling me something about my deep desire to finish. I wanted to move out of the ongoing process of “I’m working on a novel” to experience the crisp satisfaction of “I finished writing a novel.”

It’s not that there's anything wrong with stream of consciousness writing. It’s just that I was at a point in my creative process where I needed to learn how to stop, and Ferrante’s style was long and ongoing, and that was not showing me how to finish what I needed to finish. 

When we listen closely, boredom often signals a change we desire to make in our creative work, even before we consciously know what those changes are. In my case, it was saying: it’s time for you to bring your novel to an end.

Your unconscious mind uses emotions to get your attention. Pay attention to the feelings that come up as you read. Write them down, to let your emotions know you’re listening. Then, follow the clues.

That said, you might not consciously grok the full meaning of an emotion until after you resolve the situation in your creative work. That’s okay!

Maybe that’s one of the reasons we’re called to write something in the first place—to understand something we didn’t know we needed to understand.