Tag Archives: character emotion

Technique

Secret sauce: emotion

This entry is part 11 of 16 in the series Spilling the secret sauce

Emotion is vital to fiction. Without emotion, our books can read like bad history textbooks: a log of who did what, where, and when. Some history stories are moving enough to catch our imagination, but those are rare.

If we want our readers to care about our stories—our characters—we have to grab our readers (and our characters) by the emotions.

This is something I’ve had to work hard on in my fiction. I’ve usually run under the assumption that my readers could infer how my character felt. Until I got that dreaded feedback: “This scene drags. It’s boring.”

Boring? Boring?! I thought. Can’t you see the emotional turmoil she must be in? The moral dilemma this puts her in?

Um, no, they couldn’t—because I didn’t put it in there. For all they could tell, the character didn’t care. She was impassively watching the scene unfold, or participating without any trouble. Setting up a situation just isn’t enough: you have to show how that situation affects the character as it unfolds, or we’ll have to assume it’s not.

Compare:

Andrica grabbed the rope with both hands. She stared at the ground thirty feet below her. Her palms slipped a little.

She looked up. Above her, footsteps echoed across the rooftop she’d jumped from. They were going to come after her any minute.

But she could get out of this. She had to. She just needed to think.

No, she needed to act.

She’s in a pretty precarious situation—but do we really care about the outcome?

Andrica grabbed the rope with both hands. Her heart beat in her throat, but the thrill of triumph quickly faded. She dared to peek at the ground below. It should have been only thirty feet down, but her vision swirled dizzyingly. Her stomach plummeted and her clammy palms slipped a fraction of an inch.

She willed herself to look up. Above her, footsteps echoed across the rooftop she’d jumped from. They were going to come after her any minute. Adrenaline sang in her veins, making coherent thought impossible.

But she could get out of this. This time, she had to. Andrica forced a deep breath into her lungs. She just needed to think.

No, Aryn needed her—he needed his mother. She had to act. Now.

Now, not only do we watch what she experiences, but we know what she feels. And if the author does it right, we feel what she feels. And that‘s the way to creating powerful characters and stories.

More emotion resources

I can’t even begin to scratch the surface of getting emotions right in fiction. My top eight reads on emotion in fiction, from blog posts to books:

Even more resources on emotion!

Emotion is how we get into our readers’ hearts. Emotion can take our book from “well written” to “captivating.” We read for an experience, and emotion is the best way to convey that experience. In fact, it is the experience.

What do you think? How do you like your emotion in fiction? Come share!

Photo by Steve Ventress

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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

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