Meraki: (n) The essence of yourself that is put in your work

Meraki: (n)

The soul, creativity, or love you put in to something, the essence of yourself that is put in to your work.

It’s all about emotion. Mostly about love.  That’s what writing is about for me and it’s not that simple is it? I go from thinking it’s all about getting to the truth only to find that love is  delusional, there is no truth. My heart is broken and I rewrite the story.

The intensity of emotions can often convince us that what we feel is absolutely real  but as many  stories tell us, we live in a world where betrayal is often covert, perhaps for years. We are in relationships with families, friends, homes, animals and then one day, we learn something new and everything changes.

I was very upset when I discovered one of our cats, whom I believed to be a loyal member of our household, was known as Mary’s cat to our neighbours. There was nothing about his behaviour that suggested he was with another human. Every night, apart from when it was snowy, he would go out and come back every morning. That was his routine. I assumed he was out hunting. But no, he was scoffing and snoring elsewhere!

Oftten we can be led to believe we are all-knowing and assured about the people and things in our lives and then the clang sound appears. Certainty disappears.

Armed with my naive life experience, choosing to write about emotions, placing emotions at the centre of my work is a huge challenge. But I am driven by nothing else. It is all about feeling. I feel first, then act, then think. What happens when that is in a piece of fiction? It can be highly comical, farcical, disastrous, poignant, heart-breaking.

For as much as we like to think we are in control, scientifically deducing everything like Sherlock and wish to appear all-knowing, that is not real. We fail to acknowledge the surreal, we are not honest about the dreamy side of ourselves.

I like dreamy, surreal tales. One of my favourites is Like Water For Chocolate by Laura Esquivel. Like Harris’ s Chocolat the medium for evoking emotions is food. The magic is wonderful and sometimes perturbing, but the essence of woman is in there doing its thing.

Some are suspicious of the magic that is happening, but it can’t be stopped. It is as important in our lives as eating is. But to eat with feeling – that is a story. To be seduced by words.

Do women writers write with emotion differently to men, do we portray lead female characters in a way that empowers us more? Is this relevant to us? When I have a female MC I think carefully about how I want her to come across, what her power is, how she uses it.

As a woman writer I feel I have a responsibility in the portrayal of my female MCs. I don’t want to lose the emotions, the essence of woman,  nor do I want to fall in to the trap of creating a stereotype. I hope, therefore, when I put  a bit of myself in there that it all becomes unusual, a little different. It’s one way of excusing one’s strangeness, passing it on to a character created.

Perhaps this is why for many of us putting love into our work, something we have made, can not only be tangible for us, but can also be shared with other people. In our world of mass manufacture, there is something so wonderfully endearing about a bespoke, hand-made gift.

And this is what a story is or should be. A story will always be made with the essence of a writer, a team of artists collaborating.

The story is a gift to ourselves, it should be written with the essence of ourselves. This is my challenge. I want my words not just to be read, but to be felt. I want my characters to be packed with emotion

—

Elisha Gabriel is an aspiring novelist and her current work in progress, a novella, is titled Butterfly Coffee.  She is moving it over from her notebooks and slowly adding it all on to a machine.

Find out more on her website elishagabriel.wordpress.com and follow her on twitter @Rosyosy

Tags: featured, meraki

Category: Contemporary Women Writers, On Writing