The power of details
Published: March 28, 2003
Emotional writing almost guarantees that the reader will not react emotionally. Being excited is not being exciting. A writer with the power to excite emotions coldly examines his own passions to discover what ignited them. If he identifies and assembles the details that stimulated his emotions, they will stimulate the reader's. The writer causes responses. He does not obscure the causes by reporting his own responses. ...
Gertrude Stein says, "Sentences are not emotional and paragraphs are." Accumulation of details produces emotion. That is the principle of power in writing.
--From an article by S. Leonard Rubenstein
The Writer, May 1983 |