Tag Archives: writing 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

Writing crutches: How to avoid overusing the most common gestures!

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This entry is part 1 of 3 in the series Gesture crutches

This is one of my favorite, most useful posts. Since we mentioned editing gesture crutches recently, I wanted to share it again!

I’ll admit it: I’m addicted to gesture crutches. I use them over and over again throughout a book or chapter or sometimes even scene. It’s like I can’t stop, especially when I’m drafting!

gesture crutchesWhat are gesture crutches, and why should we avoid them? As editor Michaela Hamilton said in an revision letter:

Don’t resort to overused gestures such as shrugged, nodded, sighed, shook his head. These are ok occasionally, but in general, seek more vivid gestures that tell more about a character, help set a mood, and create visual dimension in the scene.

Guilty as charged [author John Gilstrap writes]. My problem here is that the ones she notes are the only conversational gestures that I know of. I stipulate that I overuse them, but if anyone has other gesture arrows that I can add to the quiver, feel free to speak up.

I, too, am guilty as charged. It’s tough to come up with original gestures, and sometimes distracting to the reader. (Think we’re alone in struggling with this? Check out this thread on Nathan Bransford’s forums.) While critique partners and editors are pretty much a must-have for the ultimate solution, I’ve found a couple ways to check myself on gestures.

Using character-specific, unique gestures

A couple weeks ago, I finished Brandilyn Collins’s Getting Into Character: Seven Secrets a Novelist Can Learn From Actors. Her very first secret, “Personalizing,” describes the process of finding a unique gesture for a character. Her example is of a rich, insecure woman who dislikes her hands, but wants to show off her ring, a symbol of her wealth. Can’t you just imagine how a woman like that would hold her hands? (It’s a conflicted gesture!)

Writing simple gestures more creatively

my cousin and her friend collect pictures of themselves shruggingI also heartily recommend Margie Lawson‘s course on Empowering Character Emotions, which covers these repetitive gestures and how to write them “fresh” and “empowered,” when necessary—and how to tell when they’re not necessary at all. I also have her lecture packet on Writing Body Language and Dialogue Cues Like a Psychologist, which I’m sure builds upon those same principles (but I haven’t chiseled out the time to read it yet. Shame on me!). Margie teaches Empowering Character Emotions online in March (it was $30 last year) and the lecture packets are available year-round ($22—both are a great deal!) (and I only wish I were affiliated with her 😉 ).

Come up with a stable of original expressions

This is also from Margie Lawson (with a little interpretation from me). I realized I have a lot of sarcasm in my MS (which I love), and there were only about five gestures of sarcasm (folded arms, rolling eyes, one raised eyebrow, scoffing, pursed lips, if I remember correctly). Since I already knew the emotion I was going for, I set out to write some original, creative gestures that conveyed sarcasm. Then I had a collection of gestures to draw on and even extrapolate from further. I also found The Bookshelf Muse’s Emotion Thesaurus super-helpful!

Pick the body part first

You could do any of these by picking a lesser-used body part. I once played this writers’ game where two members of the group had to act out a scene and the rest of us had to write about their emotions using assigned body parts. I had wrists and heels. It was awesome! One character stomped around hard enough to leave half-moons in the cement floor. Another offered apologetic wrists. Another had her arms fly open like windshield wipers. Will I ever use those? Maybe not. But that kind of vivid, imaginative imagery can help you create better, more appropriate images.

Monitoring your gestures

I’m proudest of this one because I came up with it myself (extrapolated from Margie’s EDITS system). When editing a scene, make a note of what body part/area is used in the line: hands, eyes/eyebrows, shoulders, lips/mouth, etc., in the margin. Then read the list aloud for the whole scene/chapter. This helped me pinpoint repetitive or too-similar gestures in close context as well as look at the gestures themselves. If I found I had ARMS too close to one another, I could look at those two gestures quickly and easily to see how similar they were.

Pull out the sentences en masse

New to the 2012 edition! I wrote a bit of code to make Word pull out all the sentences that use these gesture crutches, and you can customize it to your word list (there’s also a great version by Paul Edelstein for code-o-phobes!). I’ll probably still use the monitoring technique above to make sure I’m not using any one body part too often in a scene, but now I can focus on just my use of smiles or nods throughout the book to make sure they’re necessary, not repetitive, and fresh.

What do you think? How do you keep yourself from repeating the same conversational gestures?

Photo credits: crutches on orange background—Christian Guthier; my cousin’s Facebook.

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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?

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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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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

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Technique

Why emotion?

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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

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Technique

Writing crutches: gestures

7 Comments

I’ll admit it: I’m addicted to gesture crutches. I use them over and over again throughout a book or chapter or sometimes even scene. It’s like I can’t stop, especially when I’m drafting!

What are gesture crutches, and why should we avoid them? As editor Michaela Hamilton said in an revision letter:

Don’t resort to overused gestures such as shrugged, nodded, sighed, shook his head. These are ok occasionally, but in general, seek more vivid gestures that tell more about a character, help set a mood, and create visual dimension in the scene.

Guilty as charged [author John Gilstrap writes]. My problem here is that the ones she notes are the only conversational gestures that I know of. I stipulate that I overuse them, but if anyone has other gesture arrows that I can add to the quiver, feel free to speak up.

my cousin and her friend collect pictures of themselves shruggingI, too, am guilty as charged. It’s tough to come up with original gestures, and sometimes distracting to the reader. (Think we’re alone in struggling with this? Check out this thread on Nathan Bransford’s forums.) While critique partners and editors are pretty much a must-have for the ultimate solution, I’ve found a couple ways to check myself on gestures.

Using character-specific, unique gestures
A couple weeks ago, I finished Brandilyn Collins’s Getting Into Character: Seven Secrets a Novelist Can Learn From Actors. Her very first secret, “Personalizing,” describes the process of finding a unique gesture for a character. Her example is of a rich, insecure woman who dislikes her hands, but wants to show off her ring, a symbol of her wealth. Can’t you just imagine how a woman like that would hold her hands? (It’s a conflicted gesture!)

Writing simple gestures more creatively
I also heartily recommend Margie Lawson‘s course on Empowering Character Emotions, which covers these repetitive gestures and how to write them “fresh” and “empowered,” when necessary—and how to tell when they’re not necessary at all. I also have her lecture packet on Writing Body Language and Dialogue Cues Like a Psychologist, which I’m sure builds upon those same principles (but I haven’t chiseled out the time to read it yet. Shame on me!). Margie teaches Empowering Character Emotions online in March (it was $30 last year) and the lecture packets are available year-round ($22—both are a great deal!) (and I only wish I were affiliated with her 😉 ).

Come up with a stable of original expressions
This is also from Margie Lawson (with a little interpretation from me). I realized I have a lot of sarcasm in my MS (which I love), and there were only about five gestures of sarcasm (folded arms, rolling eyes, one raised eyebrow, scoffing, pursed lips, if I remember correctly). Since I already knew the emotion I was going for, I set out to write some original, creative gestures that conveyed sarcasm. Then I had a collection of gestures to draw on and even extrapolate from further. I also found The Bookshelf Muse’s Emotion Thesaurus super-helpful!

Pick the body part first
You could do any of these by picking a lesser-used body part. I once played this writers’ game where two members of the group had to act out a scene and the rest of us had to write about their emotions using assigned body parts. I had wrists and heels. It was awesome! One character stomped around hard enough to leave half-moons in the cement floor. Another offered apologetic wrists. Another had her arms fly open like windshield wipers. Will I ever use those? Maybe not. But that kind of vivid, imaginative imagery can help you create better, more appropriate images.

Monitoring your gestures
I’m proudest of this one because I came up with it myself (extrapolated from Margie’s EDITS system). When editing a scene, make a note of what body part/area is used in the line: hands, eyes/eyebrows, shoulders, lips/mouth, etc., in the margin. Then read the list aloud for the whole scene/chapter. This helped me pinpoint repetitive or too-similar gestures in close context as well as look at the gestures themselves. If I found I had ARMS too close to one another, I could look at those two gestures quickly and easily to see how similar they were.

What do you think? How do you keep yourself from repeating the same conversational gestures?

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