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Let's say I tell you I'm anxious because I'm about to take an exam. You get it. You've been anxious in the past so you know the feeling. Taking an exam is a situation that makes many people anxious, so you probably think my anxiety is justified.
Do you feel anxious yourself? If you're my parent, possibly, because you have your own anxiety about my exam. Otherwise, probably not.
Now let's say I tell you my foot won't stop jiggling, my palms are sweating, and I feel like if I tried to speak no sound would come out. Your response is different, right? Even though you don't have a name for my feeling or know why I'm feeling that way, you're feeling a bit jiggly and nervous too. You're involved in my story, even though you don't yet know what it is.
This is how mirror neurons help writers.
Mirror neurons were discovered in the 1980s and 1990s, and they're still not fully understood. The quick explanation is that they're a type of neuron (basically, a brain cell) that responds to actions you observe and fires as if you were performing that action yourself. For example: you see someone smiling happily, in reality or on TV; you can't help but smile too; you feel a little rush of happiness yourself, even though whatever made that other person happy has nothing to do with you.
An article on the National Institutes of Health website says that "our ability to interpret the actions of others requires the involvement of our own motor system." In other words, to truly understand another person, you have to "feel" with them, using your own body.
What Navé and I realized, when we developed our book and course Write What You Don't Know, is that you don't have to observe the person to set your mirror neurons firing. Reading works too, when the words describe bodily movement or sensation.
This is why we titled Session 3 "Common Senses." As a writer, when you make use of the senses you and your readers have in common, you engage them on a visceral level. You're appealing to neurons that fire faster than the rational mind interprets and thinks and understands.
So, back to my anxiety. When I told you I was anxious and what caused it, I gave you information. I appealed to your rational mind. When I told you about my foot and my palms and my voice, I appealed to your mirror neurons. Even though we may have never met and might be half a world apart, your imagination leapt across time and space and your body responded to mine.
Most people think of writing as an activity of the mind rather than the body (aside, obviously, from your moving hand or fingers). But if you want to write with emotional power, write from your body. Call up the emotions of your story in the present moment as you write, and report on how your body feels. If you're not used to noticing the sensations of your body, imagine yourself into an emotion and then do a body scan: your toes, your feet, your ankles, your calves, your knees, and so on, all the way to the top of your head.
You've heard the word "heartbreak," but did you know that when you feel grief, the fibers of your heart actually tear? A cardiologist friend told me that.
This is excellent advice and results in enriched writing. The kind where we can show and not tell what is happening. Taking this line of thinking one step further, I believe the ability to mirror at the neurological level leads to empathy. When we write in a way that allows our reader to stand in our character's shoes, whether protagonist or antagonist, we strive to build in them a level of intimacy with these characters. As their creators, it is our goal that our reader walk in each character's shoes and this means they have to imagine what it feels like to be immersed fully in the situations our characters face. In this way, the story becomes believable and compelling. This has to be sustained for every character throughout the whole book, for the book to be great. A lot to think about.
That's what I think today, anyway.
Thank you, Allegra. This was really helpful!!! As a therapist, I really want to get beneath the left brain language the client uses, to tap into the body's responses. So important.