My instinct to find and finesse emotion began when I was a student journalist and later perfected as a working reporter/features writer.
Front pages, if you wanted them, were built out of gore: if it bleeds, it leads. For Sunday magazine or feature covers, the rule: if it causes tears, it sears (as in readers’ emotions).
People remember other people’s pain.
I cut my feature-writing teeth on anonymous writing for our paper’s annual Christmas fundraiser. Each day of the holiday season, the front page boxed off a short, sad story created from the reality of someone else’s misery.
Not really knowing how to approach the task, I leaned on learnings from 19th-Century novels about how to create and sustain sympathy in service of contributions.
Even then, as my borderline-exploitative prose drove donations to a record amount, I knew I was dangerously close to crossing over into using other people’s pain for my own ends.
A little Jiminy Cricket voice of conscience in my head whispered this to me. But the bullhorn bass of my big, fat orangutan ego drowned it out, celebrating the success and attention.
I kept skirting the line, wondering if someone would call me out as manipulative or exploitative.
