Tag Archives: empowering character emotions

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

Writing with class(es)

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This entry is part 3 of 5 in the series Writing resources

If you subscribe to enough writing blogs, you’re sure to see at least one workshop or course recommended. I see a few every week, and most of the time, I dismiss them easily. “Not writing a query,” I tell myself. “Not going to LA. Not spending $375.” Plus, I’d only have the recommendation of that one blogger (who might even be teaching the course).

Finally, there was a course where I ran out of excuses. The blogger posting about it included dozens of testimonials, I’d heard of the teacher before, it was online and it was $30 (which I consider affordable). So I signed up.

From the first lesson, I have found ways to improve my writing and push myself more. The course concepts—portraying character emotions vividly—pushed me to examine my writing, pointing out patterns and opportunities for improvement.

I think the most interesting thing I’ve learned so far is that some of the things I’ve tried to avoid are actually things that best-selling authors do—and do a lot. They’re things that readers actually like, and not violations of those “immutable writing laws” we can only break once we’ve sold 50,000 books.

For example, I actually avoided using more elaborate body language descriptions (although those can take away from a scene and should be used with care) or telling how the dialogue was said (not using adverbs, mostly: sentences like “She used the same patronizing tone she’d use with a two-year-old.”). Some best-selling authors, however, use those to portray emotions powerfully and vividly—and they have more than one of the “dialogue cues” per page.

Something else I love about this class is that it encourages us to look at our manuscripts so we can customize the lessons to our writing—the assignments almost all instruct us to go to our manuscript, so we can analyze how we work, and how we write, so we can discover where we need improvement individually.

About halfway through the course, I was so excited about what I was learning that I went on a big “sign up for classes” kick. I found some free classes online and . . . maybe I’ve gone a little overboard. By April 9, I’ll have been through seven classes. I’m taking classes on things I feel I already do well (can never hurt to get better, right?) to things I want to do better. I’ll let you know if that’s a little excessive—if I live through them all 😉 .

What do you think? What classes have you really enjoyed? What topics have you taken classes on?

PS: the class I’m taking is Empowering Character Emotions from Margie Lawson. Loving it! In addition to an online class, you could also take this as an “independent study” course—it’s $22 for the lecture packet (and no, I don’t get a cut or anything else for this endorsement). The free courses (with a $30 membership), mostly week-long miniworkshops, are on substantive editing, dialogue, revisions, marketing, POV and story structure.

Photo by Dave mcmt

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