Tag Archives: character emotions

Technique

Contradicting emotions

6 Comments
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?

Is your writing any good? Join my writers' email group to find out how you can get a free edit & skill assessment!

 
Technique

Make a scene: show your characters emotions II

4 Comments
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

Is your writing any good? Join my writers' email group to find out how you can get a free edit & skill assessment!

 
Technique

Don’t tell me how you feel: showing emotions

14 Comments
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

Is your writing any good? Join my writers' email group to find out how you can get a free edit & skill assessment!

 
Technique

Emotion: how we get in our readers’ hearts

7 Comments
This entry is part 3 of 14 in the series Emotion: it's tough

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.

Next, we’ll move into how to add emotion in your writing—and how not to.

What do you think? How do you like your emotion in fiction?

Photo by Steve Ventress

Is your writing any good? Join my writers' email group to find out how you can get a free edit & skill assessment!

 
Technique

Why emotion?

1 Comment
This entry is part 1 of 14 in the series Emotion: it's tough

A version of this post originally ran on 12 July 2010.

Last summer, after I had baby #3, I went on a reading spree. I read a lot of great books, but after more than a month of devouring award-winning (and not so much) novels, I hit the wall. In less than a week, I started a number of books that just didn’t reel me in. They didn’t “seduce” me. Reading them was, frankly, a chore.

I did skip to the end of the novels, but largely so I’d never, ever be tempted to pick them up again. (If your novel makes sense without the middle 100 pages, something might be wrong…) Telling vs. showing was the main problem. I said it was like the author was standing in front of me, holding up a curtain as he dictated the action on the other side.

Although bad writing is always a turn off, it’s not always enough to make me give up on a book, or at least half of it. Some of the books I just couldn’t not put down lost me in character soup. Ten characters in the first five pages is way too many—especially when for some reason, we have to dip into each character’s POV for a paragraph or two, even if that character is 2000 miles away and not having a scene of her own! In another case, the story was told from one character’s POV, but by the end of the first chapter, we’d met so many people I couldn’t remember which character that was. And I kept forgetting in subsequent chapters.

I think both of these issues stem from the same problem: a failure to get the reader (me) involved in the characters. Something about the narration style (telling) was too distant or confusing for me to make an emotional connection and sympathize with characters. And I’m realizing that life’s too short for boring books (or boring novels, anyway), so I’m not willing to persevere through a hundred pages to see if I suddenly start liking a character.

No, I don’t believe characters have to be likeable to be sympathetic—but man, they have to inspire me to feel something!

What do you think? Why is emotion so important in writing? What keeps you from relating to a character?

Photo by Wade Kelly

Is your writing any good? Join my writers' email group to find out how you can get a free edit & skill assessment!

 
Technique

Emotions as action

2 Comments

Have you ever read a book (intended for someone over the age of 12) where the emotions lacked depth? I’m thinking something like “Her puppy died. She felt sad.” While it’s not always bad to tell an emotion like that, if that’s as far as you go in delving into your characters’ emotions, you’re robbing your readers of a rich experience of sympathizing with your characters.

So how can you show emotions? I know I’ve referenced this before, but one of my favorite resources on creating character emotions on the page is the article “Emotion is Physical” by award-winning author and editor Alicia Rasley. (It also goes hand-in-hand with her “Emotion without Sentimentality,” but we’re focusing on the physical now.)

Alicia’s basic premise is that one of the best ways to show deep, overwhelming emotions is through the character’s actions, rather than their thoughts or feelings.

Last month at Writer Unboxed, literary agent extraordinaire (and, by no coincidence, I’m sure, also an author) Donald Maass echoed that idea, with a stronger focus on eliciting that emotion from your readers:

So, now to the practical application: What is the strongest emotion you want your reader to feel? Search and delete that word everywhere it occurs in your manuscript. Now, how will you provoke that emotion through action alone? Got it? Good. Next write down three ways to heighten that action. (Remember that underplaying can also heighten.) When you’ve built a story situation that will force the emotion you want—make it happen.

What do you think? Do you build your story situations or your desired emotional responses first? What do you do to help show your character’s emotions?

Photo by Thomas Levinson

Is your writing any good? Join my writers' email group to find out how you can get a free edit & skill assessment!