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Works

St Patrick’s Day Blogfest!

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Last year for St. Patrick’s Day, we dispelled some Irish myths. I learned a lot about modern Irish culture as I wrote about Irish characters. Once, they even got to be the villains—and that’s what we get to see today as part of The St. Patrick’s Day Blogfest hosted by Colene and Alexia!

In this (never ever edited and heavily compressed) excerpt, Mark is trying to find the bomb Grace and Pearse have planted on a St. Patrick’s Day parade float the night before the parade. Mark has been investigating them separately for a while, using different cover IDs with each of them (one of which is Southern).

That’s about to come back to bite him.


They could kill hundreds of people tomorrow. Thousands.

On the second row of parade floats, Mark spotted a pile of clutter in the pristine warehouse. If he found the bomb, the bomb squad could be here by the time he finished his sweep. It’d take two minutes to check. It was only a small risk.

He jogged to the toolbox and tools. They were definitely coming back. He glanced at the float. Along the bottom edge, clothespins held a few inches of long green fringe around a small, white translucent plastic cube.

They’d started installing it. Mark jammed his gun into his waistband, grabbed a flashlight from the toolbox and slid beneath the float. The wires hung there, exposed. He could end it now.

He crept from under the float, but before he moved, Mark heard a gasp behind him. He drew his gun, but a flashlight blinded him.

“Jason?” Grace.

A less experienced operative would’ve broken cover and confessed all. A better operative would play his cover even harder. “Grace, what are you doin here?”

“I should be askin’ you the same thing.”

“What’s this, then?” A man’s voice rang out behind him—Irish accent, familiar.

Pearse? Mark turned around and was again blinded by a flashlight.

“Jimmy?” Definitely Pearse.

“Now, y’all, let’s don’t go jumpin—” A blow to the back of his head cut Mark off mid-sentence.

And it gets worse. Hooray!

Happy St. Patrick’s Day!

Technique

Getting through emotions

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This entry is part 10 of 14 in the series Emotion: it's tough

A version of this post was originally posted 17 November 2009 as part of the character arcs series.

Emotions are important in fiction and can be hard to get right. After highly emotional scenes, for me, the next most difficult type of emotion to convey is multiple emotions in a single scene. Although most passions are composed of multiple emotions, we typically don’t experience, say, love, ambivalence and annoyance all the same time. But sometimes we need our characters to.

Typically, these evolving emotions are easier to handle with constant stimuli/input to create these emotional reactions (as in a scene). It’s more of a challenge in a sequel: what comes after the scene—the emotional response. However, the sequel also has a structure that can help with this kind of character arc.

In Scene & Structure, Jack Bickham gives a structure for the sequel: Emotion – Thought – Decision – Action (which leads to another scene). The Emotion is the initial response to the events of the scene and its Disaster. When the character moves past the initial emotion, they think through the events, their response and their options in the Thought phase. This ultimately leads to a Decision, which takes the character to another Action.

Not all the steps of the sequel are necessary. In fact, the sequel itself might not be necessary—depends on the pacing and whether the emotional reaction constitutes a change. But when the character is going through a major change, we can spend a little more time here. And this is where we motivate the next action.

When an emotional change in the sequel follows the full steps of the sequence, we know that there’s a logical progression of the events of the sequel. By moving through these steps, we can lead the characters and the readers through the steps of the change and create a compelling, convincing change.

For example, if we need our character to go from shocked after the last disaster to furious in the sequel, we start with that initial emotional response—the shock. We don’t have to spend a long time exploring the shock, especially if that’s the kind of reaction you’d expect in light of the disaster. Once we create a vivid picture of the shock (and that’s a toughie, since it’s characterized by the absence of feeling, really), we can give the character a minute to get her bearings again.

Once she’s had some time to recover, she’s ready for the Thought phase. Here we can explore exactly why she’s so surprised—because, say, this revelation is something that the hero could have told her. It’s something she would understand and would have even made her happy, if he had just told her, and he knew that—but he’s chosen to lie to her about it the whole time they’ve known one another.

And that can lead us to the Decision. The Decision can be about the coming Action and set up the next scene—or it can be a further decision about the emotional response. You know what? He should have told her. How dare he not? And if he could lie about that, what else about their relationship was a lie?

And now she’s mad.

What do you think? How have you handled drastic emotional changes in sequels?

Photo by Dan Foy

Technique

Hit me with your best shot: emotional turning points

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This entry is part 9 of 14 in the series Emotion: it's tough

We’ve briefly mentioned that you have to suit the portrayal of the emotion to fit the pacing of the scene. Sometimes that means we can only afford a quick gesture, thought or even a tell. Other times, that means fully delving the depths of the emotion. So which scenes deserve the biggest emotion, the fullest development?

The short answer: the emotional turning points. This week at edittorrent, author/editor Alicia Rasley shared a useful definition of turning points:

Turning points are the major plot events that cause some big change and modify the trajectory of the characters in the plot. But the “turning” comes from the CHANGE. It’s not just a big dramatic event, it’s an event that “turns” from what’s come before. Yet, if you want a logical, coherent plot, you want that big turning event also growing out of what came before.

Our characters often get to do 180s in circumstances, attitudes and emotions. When these changes come quickly (in a single or short series of scenes), as Alicia says, we have to make sure that the turning event and reactions are organic. And when things change that quickly, we may have to do a lot more emotional exploring so our readers can follow the process instead of just getting jolted from one extreme to another.

For our readers to appreciate the full extent of the change, we also have to set up or establish the beginning point very well. As Alicia says:

Think of the turning point as the culmination of something. Then set up for that in earlier scenes. Then the turning point will have something to turn FROM. It will be a pivot point from one situation to another.

Sometimes the effects of an emotional turning point will be obvious. But most of the time, we can’t jump from fear to anger or joy to despair without showing at least a little of the thought and emotional process. We have to show the turning so that our readers can experience the full emotional journey.

Next time, we’ll look at showing the process.

What do you think? What are your favorite emotional turning points? How are they set up? How are they portrayed?

Photo by Stacy Lynn Baum

Technique

Contradicting emotions

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This entry is part 8 of 14 in the series Emotion: it's tough

When we’re crafting our characters’ emotions, we want to strive for consistency. Our characters are going to look fickle, insecure or flat-out crazy if it seems like they’re playing “he loves me, he loves me not” in every scene. However, while we want to make sure we preserve the causality chain of emotional responses, if our characters just play the single note of “love” or “fear,” well, that’s the definition of “monotonous.”

So we can’t just show our character as “in love” or “afraid” all the time—even highly suspenseful or romantic scenes will tend to lose their power when strung together ad nauseam. By incorporating other emotions—even contradictory ones occasionally—we enable our characters to come to life, throw their “main” emotions into relief, and show the many facets of human emotion.

Author Brandilyn Collins calls these “main” emotions passions in her book Getting into Character: Seven Secrets a Novelist Can Learn from Actors. She bases her secrets on the methods of acting guru Konstantin Stanislavsky. On passions, she writes (emphasis mine):

Stanislavsky likens a human passion to a necklace of beads. Standing back from the necklace, you might think it appears to have a yellow cast or a green or red one. But come closer, and you can see all the tiny beads that create that overall appearance. If the necklace appears yellow, many beads will be yellow, but in various shades. And a few may be green or blue or even black. In the same way, human passions are made up of many smaller and varied feelings—sometimes even contradictory feelings—that together form the “cast” or color of a certain passion. So, if you want to portray a passion to its utmost, you must focus not on the passion itself, but on its varied components. (95)

So by using different aspects of these passions, we can better illustrate the real depth of feeling a person would experience. Instead of constantly hitting the same emotional cues in every single scene, we can change up some of the emotions to explore the real depths of the feeling. And every once in a while, we can even take a break from that passion—dropping a low-tension scene every once in a while to make the high-tension scenes stand out.

What do you think? What are the components of the passions you tend to write most?

Technique

Too much emotion: the other extreme

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This entry is part 7 of 14 in the series Emotion: it's tough

When it comes to writing emotion (just like everything else in writing!), we each face our own challenges. I tend to leave it out too much—but putting too much emotion in can be just as deadly to our writing (or even more so, since it can be an even more obvious problem for readers). This is especially true in highly emotional scenes. I think we’ve all heard the adage, “If the character cries, the reader doesn’t have to” (or something like that).

the actual scene from the show: Psych, episode Dual Spires (a tribute to Twin Peaks)This reminds me of a scene in a recent episode of one of my favorite TV shows. Two characters (whom we’ve just met) discovered the niece they’ve loved and raised has drowned. When they view her body, they bawl.

And they bawl.

And they bawl. (And this is a comedy!)

At the opening of the scene, knowing what they’ll find, I was on the verge of tears myself. (I’m a mother, and for once I didn’t resent the emotional manipulation.) But after what felt like several minutes (though it was probably only one) of watching these people cry, my feelings changed from deep sympathy to alarm. “Why are we still watching them cry?!” I asked my husband. “This is torture!”

Don’t torture your readers! Too much emotion can pull your reader out of the story. It may be overwrought or melodramatic, or perhaps it trips your readers’ sensitive emotional shutoff valve (exactly what happened when I watched that show).

How can you avoid using too much emotion? We need to know when and how to portray emotion to make sure we don’t turn our readers off.

Set it up in advance
Don’t just drop an emotional scene out of nowhere, without giving the readers some frame of reference. Foreshadow. Set it up. Give us a chance to find out how the character feels about others in the scene or the general situation or similar events, etc. Then it’s safe to let the reader feel along with the character with a lot less emotion words. As author/editor Alicia Rasley says:

I suspect "less is more" really works here; most of the scenes that bring me to tears are underwritten, without emotion words.

But these passages are usually at the end of an emotional set up– that is, the author sets up the emotional situation so that I know what the stakes are, and then there’s the moment of emotional release.

Even then, though, there’s a fine line between subtle and just plain underdone.

Make it clear in the scene, but don’t beat us over the head with it!
Using common gestures probably won’t make it perfectly clear (unless you’re going for a common emotion—and then, dig deeper). We don’t need to be reminded every five lines, and we don’t need paragraphs about the feelings, but do make sure it’s there.

Use emotional imagery, especially something physical in the setting or props
Going along with the physical sensation of emotions, physical objects in the setting—whether scenery or props—can imbue even more meaning and resonance into a scene, as editor/author Alicia Rasley points out:

We really do endow things with emotional significance (wedding ring!), so that works better for me than emotion WORDS, which are necessarily a step removed.

Know when to put it in, and when not to
A number of factors influence this. One of them is pacing: if the scene is fast-paced and the emotional beat is short, don’t delve too deeply into it. (Gasp! You could even get away with telling!)

Get feedback
Probably the most important step here: get some objective eyes on it!

What do you think? How do you tell whether your emotion is overdoing it?

Image totally lifted from Wikipedia. Fair use FTW.

Technique

Emotion: less isn’t always more

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This entry is part 6 of 14 in the series Emotion: it's tough

You might not be able to tell so far from this series, but I’ve actually long been a proponent of the “less is more” school of writing, especially when it comes to emotion. Unfortunately, as I’ve learned the hard way, sometimes less is just less. Not enough.

Different readers like different styles, and expectations vary by genre. But, handled well, emotion can enhance any dramatic scene. Sometimes we do need to avoid putting too much emotion in to give the reader room to feel, too. Other times, it’s more important to show the reader that the character cares and struggles, so they should, too.

I think we’re all used to seeing the sin of too much emotion in writing. But not enough emotion is probably just as common a problem, and even trickier to diagnose. It’s good—vital, even—to leave room for our readers to feel, too, and to avoid melodrama. But if our characters don’t feel anything on the page, the readers are left to wonder whether they are supposed to fill in all the blanks (and if so, how, exactly?), or whether they’re just blanks.

Writing “she felt sad” or “he was scared” isn’t going to cut it. We want our readers to feel what our characters feel, and characters—people—experience emotion physically.

Our emotions engage our bodies. Even emotional clichés convey this: we see red, our blood boils, we get butterflies in our stomach. To get to our readers’ emotions, we do need to go through our characters’ emotions. As I’ve said before, we want our readers to experience these emotions right along with our characters. Techniques like figurative language from last week, when focused on physical reactions to emotions, almost bypass a reader’s thoughts, evoking similar physical responses from the reader. That’s why they’re so powerful—and why we have to be careful to use them judiciously.

We still have to be careful to make sure we don’t overdo it—we’ll be talking more about that this week—but at the least, I think we need a little physical response to the emotional stimulus in any scene where we want the readers to know this matters to our character (and, by extension, them).

What do you think? How do you convey physical emotion?

Photo by René van Belzen

Technique

Make a scene: show your characters emotions II

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This entry is part 5 of 14 in the series Emotion: it's tough

Tag! I’m it—I’m interviewed on Christine Bryant’s Tag! You’re it! Tuesday this week. Are you next?

I have to be honest. The resource that really revealed this whole idea to me was part of Kaye Dacus’s showing vs. telling series, on feelings. And to give credit where credit is due, I’ll also be using one of her examples on these two techniques to show characters’ emotions.

The first method is possibly the most powerful way to show a character’s emotion:

Fear ran down Molly’s spine like a hundred tiny mice with cold feet.

That’s right: figurative language like metaphors and similes. Can’t you just feel that spine tingling? Figurative language is the best way to show an emotion. The imagery here can be so vivid that you might be able to get away without the name of the emotion at all.

This figurative language can be even more powerful an draw reader into the story and the characters even more when we work hard to use language specific to our character. Your MC is a veterinarian? Maybe she thinks of fear like an animal backed into a corner, and describes each of her actions and responses that way (arching her back, snarling, barking, etc.). Or maybe he’s a veteran—he sees the world divided along battle lines, can’t shake the memories of those he’s lost, or is just ready for all this fighting to be over.

Finally, in Margie Lawson’s Empowering Character Emotions course (and her EDITS system), she has a special classification for an involuntary physical response to an emotional situation—the most powerful type of emotional response. Things like sweating, blushing, skin tingling, and other responses to extreme emotion pack a powerful punch.

These methods of showing character emotions are a little more advanced and work best in tandem. But these are the most vivid methods, the most individual, and the best to illustrate the feelings and the character. But they should still used in moderation—especially involuntary physical responses and similes/metaphors. Too many, even if they’re all spot-on, can really distract the reader.

Of course, this is all easier said than done. Showing character emotions in a unique and engaging way is a pretty big challenge, no matter how many times you’ve done it before. (Actually, I might argue it gets harder over time, since you continually have to fish for new ideas so you won’t repeat yourself.) So, seriously, don’t pressure yourself to get this all right on the first try, or even the first draft. Human emotions are tricky things—and in writing, we should be grateful we get multiple attempts to get them right!

What do you think? How else can you show a character’s emotion? What are your favorite methods?

Photo by Bobby Acree

Technique

Don’t tell me how you feel: showing emotions

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This entry is part 4 of 14 in the series Emotion: it's tough

The lie from the First Crusader Challenge? I don’t have any brothers: three younger sisters. When I went to college, they got a rabbit. Seriously.

The major pitfall most of us face when writing emotions is falling into the trap of telling. But to engage our readers, simply stating “she was scared” or “he was angry” isn’t going to suffice.

This is just another example of one of those old writing rules: show, don’t tell. But this time, the rule rings true. Take this example from Flogging the Quill:

The scene: Anna is beat from a long, bad day at work and now she’s spent hours at the hospital with her father, who has been unconscious for days. You want to give the reader Anna’s physical and emotional condition. This author wrote:

Anna was physically and mentally exhausted.

Sure, you get information. You have an intellectual understanding of her condition. But you have no feeling for what Anna feels like, do you? To show that Anna is physically and mentally exhausted, you could write this:

All Anna wanted to do was crawl into bed and go to sleep. But first she would cry. She didn’t think she could be calm and composed for another minute.

Here, the example relies on getting deep into the character’s thoughts. Personally, I think we should be on this level with the character a lot of the time. That level of access to the character’s thoughts and feelings draws the reader in.

Another technique is to use action (to use another FtQ example):

Telling: He stabbed the man furiously.

See how an adverb tells rather than shows?

Showing: He plunged the dagger into the man’s chest again and again and again, screaming “Die!” each time the blade stabbed into flesh.

Notice that this example doesn’t name the emotion. Can you tell what it is? Of course! Would using the word “anger” help? Probably not. In fact, it might undercut the power of the scene.

Another option is showing with the cliché, of course, but that’s hardly any better than telling. Clichés, automatic turns of phrase like “his blood boiled,” are used so often they don’t carry much meaning anymore. Even gestures can become cliché. Work harder—change it up and make it fresh instead of giving your readers something to gloss over.

Next time we’ll look at two more ways to show character emotions!

What do you think? How have you used characters’ thoughts or actions to convey their emotions?

Photo by Daniel James