Welcome back to another blog hop, with #OpenBook. Here’s this week’s prompt.
Don’t forget to click the purple button to see what everyone else has to say.
Do you remember the first book that made you cry? Or maybe the last one?
It’s good to be back and participating in my first blog hop of 2022. I hope everyone had a great Christmas and wish you all the very best for the new year.
It’s really funny, how the wider world has a habit of keeping up with what’s going on in your life. Every now and then, you get a little reminder that there are connections everywhere.
I took my usual break from social media over the holidays, this time of year raises a lot of emotion in me and I feel the need for a bit of solitude, with just my close family for company.
Then, as soon as I return to the online world, I get this prompt from the blog hop, dealing with – emotions.
Anyhow.
Emotions are funny things, I read a lot of Sci-fi, with action and adventure. There are a lot of things in the stories that stir my emotions, I get excitement, shock and very often, sorrow.
The death of a character is always one of the things that will get me going (even it’s one that richly deserved it), more especially when it’s one of the people you’ve invested a lot of time getting to know.
The rise of tension that comes from the realisation that things might not be working out as expected, especially if there seems to be no way out of the situation, can also produce the same sort of feeling.
As for crying, I remember my first time (who doesn’t?). It was reading Love Story, back in the early 1970s, I’d already been to see the film (Ryan O’Neal and Ali McGraw), with my girlfriend and we had both sobbed. Reading the book, I did the same, only privately and more so.
Since then, every now and then, I’ll be reading something and get overwhelmed by emotion, it might be a plot twist or a shocking moment, or the feeling could just manifest for no apparent reason.
Who knows why such moments strike?
My own writing also has the capacity to induce the same sort of response in me. Which is strange as logically, it shouldn’t. Surely because I wrote it, I should have seen what was coming. I knew the moment was approaching, I choreographed it.
My novels Life and Other Dreams and the upcoming We are Saul, both set me off at a certain point. Not necessarily at the twist, or the end, just at apparently random places in the story.
I never noticed the feelings when I wrote them, it was only when I read them back I saw that, somehow, I seemed to have put together a combination of words that just resonated with me on a different level.
I can’t really quote the passages as you would miss the build-up, then again, they might not have the same effect on you.
Emotions can be fickle things.
Until next time.
Let me know what you think about this week’s subject.
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Stevie Turner
Ah, Love Story, yes I remember seeing that film when it first came out too. Can’t remember if I cried though. If I saw it with a friend, then I probably wouldn’t have, lol.
Richard Dee
Yet I can sit through other “emotional” films and books without a flicker. Wierd?
Daryl Devore
Happy New Years. Missed you last week. Glad you are back.
Ii think I was the only one in the theatre who wasn’t crying during Love Story. Guess I’m kinda cold hearted.
Tweeted.
Richard Dee
Happy New Year, good to be back. I’m just an unpredictably emotional sort of guy.
P.J. MacLayne
I deliberately wrote part of my last book to make me cry. Weird, I know. My goal was that if I could make myself cry, I’d stand a chance to get some emotion out of my readers
Richard Dee
I wish I knew how to do that, it seems to be a totally random experience for me.