How to rewrite with more emotion

Last week, I finished reading my full book draft. (Yay!)

I had read it slowly, making notes on the pages and collecting ideas in the Scrivener document and in an onscreen journal. I created an after-the-fact outline of the entire draft, then rearranged the outline, adding and deleting scenes over and over again. I want to end up with only the scenes that very clearly serve more than one purpose in the story arc. A scene might show fun visual details and also vivid emotion and a plot advance. It might show the protagonist being unhappy in a certain place and at the same time finding a tiny positive (or misguided) way to cope. 

If I struggled to state a clear purpose for a scene in one sentence, I removed the scene until (unless) I thought of a way to reframe it stronger. I don’t delete anything — just store it elsewhere.

I then went through the outline and put certain scenes in boldface. Those are the most pivotal scenes, the most heavily freighted with purpose, with outer events plus inner life. I decided I would write those scenes first, and build everything around them, linking them to create a tight and intense story. In those top-priority scenes, I’m starting with the most simple, direct statement I can make — ideally, a bit of a startling emotion or assertion — that I want the reader to take in. I am working outward from that kernel to build scenes that I hope have almost the clarity of a movie.

This is a much more intense way of writing. During the first draft, I would sit quietly and sink into my memories to locate feelings from the time (which, in childhood, did not have words connected to them). I had to carefully float the feelings to the surface, into 2022, to look at old feelings from an adult perspective and put them into words. As a child, my wordless feelings came out in behaviors or thoughts or beliefs, lots of which are in my childhood journals.

Now that I have written the first draft, with tons of narrative scenes, I have to go deeper. I need to eliminate that boring voice like an NPR radio reporter that I hear in some of my first draft. Scenes are clear, but the intensity is cloaked in a politely boring monotone. It’s not easy to confront feelings from childhood. They’re fearsome. It’s a time when we have little control over our daily lives.

Now that I’m writing scenes by starting with the emotion, and constructing “what you see from the outside” around it, the memories of events are so much more heartbreaking. I can’t write as much at one time, so this rewrite feels like a slow process so far. I am lucky to have free time on certain days per week when I can prioritize this patient and tiring process. After a writing session, I feel tired behind my eyes in a unique way (and not because of looking at the computer). I usually sleep well. My inner preteen is comforted by this work of acknowledgement and visibility.