Concert report (and musings on emotional authenticity)
The Alanis Morissette concert was unbelievable. Hands down the best live performance I've ever seen. Her voice is a magnitude better in person (which I found shocking, since I always thought she sounded really good on CD!), and she's got a really honest and upfront energy about her. It's hard to describe most of it, but I can say that when she danced during musical breaks, it was a bit like watching River from Firefly give a rock performance- almost frenetic, but oddly graceful.

The thing that struck me the most was how much she connects emotionally to each song. She doesn't over-perform it or go out of her way to emote; in fact, it doesn't really feel like she's performing or putting on a show at all. It's more like every song she sings was written because it meant something to her and tapped into the emotions she was feeling at the time she wrote it, and that comes through in the performance. I had this moment during the concert where I stopped and thought about emotional authenticity in books- about the differences you can sense as a reader between something that reads just achingly true, and things that read more like performances of an emotion than the real thing. And that got me to wondering about how much of the raw power of a book comes from the author's own emotions and depth of emotional experiences in their life. I've never been much of a hardcore "you MUST write what you know" person in terms of experiences per se, but I've always thought there was something to writing what you know emotionally.

I write first person, but I've actually never written a narrator who's all that much like me. At the same time, though, if I boiled each of my MC's down to a sort of emotional core, even if it manifests in a different way, it's usually something that's been very central to my personality at one point in time or another. Like with Lissy, her love/hate relationship with the Sight, and her desire to be normal - that's definitely something I can look back on and think, "Oh, yeah. Totally know where that's coming from." Or with Lilah, who's at the total opposite end of the spectrum, for whom the big issue is being in control and protecting herself. One of my faculty advisor's friends has read all of my books, and she's convinced herself that I'm Lilah- meaning that I'm a manipulative, popular, Machiavellian bitch who rules everyone around me with an iron fist. And...ummmm... not true. At all. On any count. To the extent that people laugh hysterically when she suggests it. But feeling trapped by the way people view you and being terrified of falling off a pedestal that you half made for yourself and half didn't, because the world might end if you did? That my inner teen definitely gets.

One thing I've realized about myself as a writer is that this isn't really something I can set out to do consciously- most of the time, it tends to be the natural default, and more often than not, I only recognize it in retrospect. Sometimes (like with Lilah), it takes me a while to figure out what it is about the narrator that I'm relating to so strongly and why. It's kind of funny, actually, because while people always take the fact that I'm working on a PhD in psych to mean that I spend all this time analyzing myself and others, I really don't- and the most analyzing I *ever* do of myself tends to be post-hoc, after I've written something, and I'm sitting there wondering "where in the WORLD did that come from?" Conversely, one of the skills that's been the hardest for me to develop as an author is realizing when that natural, subconscious, relating-on-a-fundamental-level thing ISN'T clicking on. I've actually written entire drafts before and not realized until I was done that this was missing and that I had a major problem.

But, yes. Concert. Very good. The rest of this is just pondering. And now, I have to go pack. I leave for my neuroeconomics conference in a measly (and depressing) three and a half hours. No sleep for Jen tonight. No sleep at all.