Creating an Authentic Emotional Experience: Sentiment vs. Sentimentality

I reside in Hawaii but am currently writing this from my childhood bedroom in upstate New York. It’s always a bit of a trip to be back in the small town and home that raised me. I haven’t lived in this room in nearly twenty-seven years, but I return to visit once or more each year and often still write while sitting on my childhood bed. I wrote my first poem here, my first play and short story. My first publication notice was mailed to this address. I became a writer inside this house, even if I didn’t understand that’s what was happening at the time.

Writing has been a constant in my life, my loyal companion and friend, who’s seen me through every struggle and triumph, heartache and breakthrough. Until recently, I could only assign those attributes to one other – my best friend of forty years. She and I shared a cubby in kindergarten and were inseparable for the next fourteen years. When I moved away at eighteen, she stayed, and while geography became our enemy as adults, even with the distance we remained each other’s tried and true, ride or die best friend. Until we didn’t. Until we weren’t. While the actual breakup of our friendship was quiet and anticlimactic, the result has left me marooned on an island of emotions I’m still grappling to navigate nine months later.

As a long-time fiction writer recently turned personal essay novice, I feel pulled to write about this recent loss, to organize my thoughts on the page in hopes it’ll help declutter my mind. And what better time to write about the dissolution of a lifelong friendship than when I’m back home in the place where it all began? It’s a romantic idea but also a needed distraction from the knowledge that she’s just down the road, and this will be my first trip home in twenty-seven years when we won’t get together.

My first attempts to write about this experience were cathartic for my soul, but held little quality in terms of literary merit. They were more emotional dumps on the page than well-crafted personal essays, definitely not worthy of public consumption. Yet I feel compelled to share this story. Romantic breakups are written about all of the time, yet friendship ones are mostly ignored. I wonder why we’ve normalized the right to claim heartbreak over one type but not the other? For assistance in tackling this challenging topic, I signed up for our new Writers.com course, Writing the (Modern) Love Essay, taught by Paz Pardo. I wanted help learning the best way to tell this sad story that wasn’t, well, overly sad.

My fear in writing an essay based on this experience, which I hope to share publicly, is that while my emotions are very real to me, they may not translate on the page to readers. I know what I feel, but how do I adeptly express that in an essay sure to be loaded with sentiment without veering off course into a wasteland of sentimentality?

Therein lies a conundrum for all writers: How to evoke an authentic emotional response in readers without telling them exactly what they should be feeling. You want your readers to feel, but you don’t want them to feel like you’re forcing particular emotions or reactions upon them. Writing that does that will feel void of true sentiment because its sentimentality is overpowering.

Let’s dive deeper into the difference between sentiment versus sentimentality. Writing sentiment involves conveying emotions or feelings in a genuine and authentic manner that tends to evoke an emotional response from the reader. Writers do this by pulling readers inside a text and expressing emotions effectively through the use of language, tone, and descriptive elements. Sentiment in writing can enhance the reader’s connection to the material and make it more universally relatable. As a reader, you feel this anytime a story makes you laugh, cry or feel any other emotion as a result of your immersion in the text. In contrast, sentimentality is an excessive or exaggerated display of emotion, often in a way that feels forced or insincere. When you encounter sentimentality as a reader, you’ll often recognize that a writer is trying to evoke a specific emotion from you but is failing to do so. It often involves an overwritten or maudlin treatment of emotions, relying on clichés or melodramatic expressions. Sentimentality can come across as manipulative or overly saccharine, and it detracts from the authenticity of the writing.

Here are some common pitfalls to avoid when writing emotional narratives:

• Forced Emotion: Trying too hard to evoke emotion can lead to a forced and contrived tone. Allow the emotions to emerge naturally from the narrative rather than manipulating them for effect. Readers can sense when emotions are not genuine.
• Overreliance on Clichés: While every cliché was at one time a fresh turn of phrase, they’ve long since lost their original effect. Overused phrases can make your writing feel formulaic and insincere. Strive for originality and find creative ways to express emotions without resorting to worn-out expressions.
• Emotional Manipulation: Manipulating the reader’s emotions by using cheap tactics can backfire. Instead of trying to force a specific emotional response, focus on creating genuine moments within your writing where readers can ground themselves and respond accordingly.
• Excessive Sentimentality: Going overboard with sentimentality can overwhelm the reader and make the writing feel melodramatic. While tragic events can be powerful, relying solely on tragedy without exploring a range of emotions can lead to a one-dimensional narrative. Balance and vary emotional moments to maintain an authentic and realistic tone.
• Lack of Subtlety: Don’t overwrite! Heavy-handed writing that explicitly states every emotion can be off-putting. Respect your readers by giving them the space and time to infer emotions through subtle cues and nuanced descriptions.

While writers of any genre can fall victim to sentimentality, it’s a particularly vast trap for creative nonfiction writers. Why? Because we’re writing about emotions we felt during actual experiences we had and we want our readers to get what we got out of it in order for them to relate to our story.

Allow me to be blunt: Don’t be a control freak! You cannot control how readers respond to your writing. Stop trying. Your job as a writer is to create an immersive environment in which your readers will feel something, but you’ll never be in complete control over what they feel. You’re a guide, a storyteller, a narrator of experience, but keep in mind your readers are not clean canvases. They come to the page with their own histories, dreams and traumas that will affect how they respond to your work – and each reader will be unique. Emotions are an authentic experience created naturally by responding to stimuli. No one can be made to feel simply by being told what to feel, and no one likes to be told how to feel. Just like wearing someone else’s shoes, an essay full of sentimentality will never feel comfortable to a reader or have the desired effect for the writer.

It would be impossible for you to write anything that would affect each reader the same way. It feels ludicrous when you read the mere suggestion, so why are so many of us attempting to do just that when we write? Because not only are we control freaks, we’re also desperate to have our readers get our writing, to understand our stories, to see us through our words. My best advice to avoid sentimentality is to let go of control – don’t attempt to dictate emotions or the proper response from readers – instead focus on creating a deeply authentic experience for your readers and allow them to feel whatever they will. You provide the stimuli, allow them to provide the response.

Recommended Reading: The Anti-Sentimentality List

I’ve recently been reading a lot of Modern Love essays in The New York Times. Not only has it been helpful to study the craft of personal essay writing, it’s also provided a plethora of examples of how to write about various kinds of love without sentimentality. Here are a few of my recent favorites:

• “The Subway Crush Who Crushed Me” by Zoe Fishman
• “Two Boys on Bikes, Falling in Love” by Darnell Pritchard
• “What Does it Mean to be a Kept Woman?” by Deanna Fei

If you don’t have a subscription to the NYT, you can listen to the full essays for free on the Modern Love Podcast.

Here are a few examples of memoirs written about some extremely challenging topics, but done so with nuance, balance and respect to the emotional experience of readers:

• The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion
• A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius by David Eggers
• Fresh Off the Boat: A Memoir by Eddie Huang

Three of my all-time favorite novels that evoked deep emotional responses from me without ever feeling like the author was forcing them upon me:

• A Fine Balance by Rohinton Mistry
• I Know This Much is True by Wally Lamb
• Before I Die by Jenny Downham