Writing About Emotions... or Why You Have to Go Through Stuff

Blessed is the writer who has lived through some stuff. And the more stuff - the more milk spilt, hopes dashed and hearts broken, the more battles fought and won or lost (no matter), the better.

Everything is material. What else would you write about?

Someone once said (and if you know who it was please do tell) that a writer should not write that it started to rain, but should instead give the reader the sensation of getting wet.

Because of course, you tell stories not to relay facts (not even fictional facts) but to arouse sensation. Your reader picks up your book hoping to feel something. Don't disappoint her.

When it rains, let her feel her hair slick against the back of her neck, chilled to ice by every gust of January wind across the pond she just climbed out from.

Better yet, let her fear that no one will hear her call for help, no one will come to rescue.

Just never say that she is afraid.

Frighten her.

You are a writer. You have ways to do this.

Into the Skin and Into the Water

You realize, of course that every character you have ever written, or ever will, is you. Even the one modeled after someone you know is you, because that someone you know is interpreted by your assumptions and biases, and those are formed by your experience.

This is an advantage. You understand abandonment, and mind-numbing grief, and anger, and fear.

Want to know what your character does with her fear? Close your eyes. Find the experiences that inform your writing of her, and climb through them beneath her skin. What do you feel?

Fall into the pond with her, and climb back out onto the sheet of ice that cracked beneath your feet. Call for help, and listen to the rustling of the cedar branches and the call of a crow strutting along the bank. Try to stop your teeth from chattering so you can call louder. What does your body do now? Does it arch its back to give the call a greater force? Does your voice squeak at the end because your throat has constricted? Does your chest shudder from some sick feeling  beneath your ribs? Try calling once more. A little louder.

Do you hear anything?

No?

Never Say Never Say Never. 

The climb into your character to observe sensation and movement is a powerful tool to help you write about emotions, but it is not the only tool. Sometimes a well-placed reversal can leave your reader questioning why a character would do something he thought she would never do, and the answer he comes up with can be powerful.

Your character swore, all through the novel that (one) she hated Mr. Mandex next door who backed his truck over her dog two years ago, and (two) she would never enter the forest for any reason, not since she was lost there for three days when she was a child.

So on page 214, when your character stands on her front step still holding the note and the silk scarf he handed her just before he got into a car with his children to drive to the home of his daughter where he would live out the rest of his shortened life...

And on page 215, when a gust of January wind lifts the scarf from your character's hands and flicks it end over tassel across the fallow field into the forest... When she hesitates a long moment before charging across the field, pauses a moment more, and then follows the silk scarf into the forest...

You don't have to say much. The reader understands something important, whether she knows what the note says or not.

Bad Advice, Writing, and Aimlessness

In the end, none of really knows when we started writing or why or what it was we first hoped to accomplish. We know it was a long time ago, and we never stopped, never saw a reason to. And we keep writing. Reading too. Maybe if we knew all the answers it would take the fun out of everything.

But it isn’t until we take up the mantle of writer (maybe even author) that the question of what we are writing (and reading) and why begins to be asked. By then it’s too late. We’ve already forgotten. Didn’t know it would be on the test. Happily, we’re storytellers, so we’re never left in wont of an answer.

Marilynne Robinson has been over-asked about the origins of her shattering debut (1980) Housekeeping. She answers, "I was interested in writing extended metaphors. And so I kept writing these little things and just putting them in a drawer." And in time: "I took out this stack of things and they cohered. I could see what they implied, I could see where the voice was."

A wonderful answer that is hardly an answer at all. Is Ms. Robinson merely cagy? I doubt it. If she’s anything like me (and I have no reason to think she might be), she may simply be hedging because the idea of needing to explain the genesis and metamorphosis of idea into story is beside the point. Really a question of marketing more than art.

Latayne asked us to consider what we read and write and what we hope to gain from these stories—our aim in writing them. The only answer I could come up with is: completeness. It’s a terrible answer, but it holds a universe of meaning to me. It means the novel has heft and breath.

Recently, I was in conversation with a writer friend who shared a piece of advice she’d been given by another writer friend, “Write the story that costs you the most emotionally.” I think this is bad advice. Surprised? Here’s why: Emotion is a symptom of effective storytelling, not the cause. Yes, we connect emotionally with a story we love, but we don’t connect with it because it’s emotionally stirring, we connect with it because we are brought face to face with the human condition and THAT brings emotion to the surface.

So what is completeness in story for me? It’s the story that promises to change me. Not tickle me under the chin, not make me sigh over someone else’s romance, or contemplate the sinful nature of other people. The complete story, the ones I’m drawn to as a reader and the ones I aspire to write, are the stories that promise to leave a mark. The ones that say, Warning: This story is a compass to the culture, speaks to the individual, and will make you accountable for the knowledge contained herein.

I suppose there is a fear that this idea may come off as lofty, unrealistic, or, from a publisher’s point of view, unsellable. But if I were to come up with the most honest answer about why I started writing and what I hoped to achieve, I would have to say I started writing because I didn’t understand anything, and I wanted to, and story seemed the best way for me to do this. And I keep writing because there is so much I don’t understand about the world, and story is the best way I have of asking questions I don’t have answers for.

What piece of writing advice have you received that seemed like bad advice?
Do you like novels that promise to change you? Am I utterly delusional?

Character Emotions and You

But some emotions don't make a lot of noise. It's hard to hear pride. Caring is real faint - like a heartbeat. And pure love: why, some days it's so quiet, you don't even know it's there. ~ Erma Bombeck



No wonder we writers struggle so much with the depiction of character emotions. Overplay them and you slip into melodrama. Underplay, and the reader misses them altogether. You have to understate (not underplay) in such a way that the reader is taken by surprise with feelings that burst from his or her own heart - not from your pen - and you have to build those feelings one by one till they crescendo at the end of the story into something unforgettable.
Chekhov instructed us to make the hero's state of mind clear from his actions. Show, don't tell. But I would add to that an elegant secret I have observed in stories I have loved: skillfully establish a character's interior life through everything she says and does, and when the big moment comes, the one thing she most fears or most longs for, you can simply state what happens, and end the chapter. We already know what she feels.


I find writing emotion particularity difficult in first-person. The temptation is to spill it all out there. "My heart folded in on itself." "A cold finger of dread traced my spine." "A bubble of panic popped in my gut." Used minimally, this works. But there are just so many ways a body produces emotions. In first-person, the challenge is to show the POV character taking action on their emotions. In fact, it's such a challenge, my mind has gone completely blank.

Let me flip through the pages...yes, here's an amazing example. In this opening lines from What We Keep by Elizabeth Berg, we know how the first-person POV character is feeling by what she sees and how she sees it:

Outside the airplane window the clouds are
thick and rippled, unbroken as acres of land. They are suffused with
peach-colored, early morning sun, gilded at the edges. Across the aisle, a man
is taking a picture of them. Even the pilot couldn't keep still--"Folks," he
just said, "we've got quite a sunrise out there. Might want to have a look." I
like it when pilots make such comments.
It lets me know they're awake.

She's nervous about flying! Subtle. Very subtle.
~
It's funny, I'm the opposite of Patti. I love writing first person, and for me it's the easiest POV for conveying emotion. (And I love What We Keep. I read it a few months ago at Patti's suggestion. It's excellent.) But emotion is never easy to write, because, as Katy said, it's so easy to turn into melodrama. Conveying the emotion you want to convey without overstating or resorting to just saying, "She was angry, sad, afraid, etc." is not easy. But this is truly the time to show, not tell if you want your reader to really get submersed in your story. The fact that your character picks at her thumbnail till it bleeds tells us plenty about what she's feeling. Or if she holds her middle as if it's the only way to keep her guts from spilling out, that tells us too. When I'm writing an especially emotionally charged scene, regardless of the emotion, I try to literally put myself there. I want to see what my character sees, hear what she hears, know what she knows, understand the stakes, weigh the consequences, then I can share what she feels. To do that, I have to draw on my own emotional experiences, and that can be uncomfortable at the very least. But it gets me into the moment. Then I rehearse the scene as if I'm playing the part. When I can honestly feel what she feels, I'm ready to write the scene, and hopefully make the reader feel it.
~
The best advice that I've heard about emotion in characters is to use crying very sparingly. This builds on what Katy said about understatement. It is much more powerful to show your character contemplating something that symbolizes their sadness (for example, the toy of a deceased child or replaying the last voicemail from a spouse who has left) than to show the raw emotion itself. Of course, there is a natural place for tears (I've used it myself) but readers grow tired of overuse. I once read a novel by a New York Times bestselling author where the protagonist had lost a loved one and cried on every other page. The sympathy I felt for the character drained away quickly and I grew impatient with her. Crying is a tricky emotion to portray. State it simply or have your character wipe away a tear rather than give a description of full-blown sobbing. Tears can detract from a scene.

There is a scene in the movie Always that has stayed with me over the years. Holly Hunter is sitting in the semi-darkness of a dreary, sparsely furnished room with a look of utter despair on her face after the death of a loved one. If she was crying, I don't remember it, but even now I still sense her pain and hopelessness. The atmosphere was thick with it, and the emotion was more powerful because the room (description) embodied her sadness.

What these other wise women have said is a wake-up call for me, because I recognized that I've got that cryin'-thang going on in my novel. But because I'm writing an historical I just call it weeping and thought it's okay. Not.

The other challenge I'm having -- and I'm hoping some readers can help me out with it -- is how to show character emotions through silence. In other words, people often respond to my protag by not saying anything at all -- for variety of reasons. Now, in music, you can write in several measures of rest. How do you do that in fiction? How do you make sure the reader doesn't just trip along to the next line of dialogue and instead, like the characters, lets it sink in? I mean, you can only say, "They sat in silence a long time" so many times. And now I can't say, "They wept in silence," either.

She does not contemplate the ebb of time as she loves to do. To daydream the ticking moments, dream of holding firm to seconds, minutes, hours. She knows they are ideas, contemplations we all agreed to about how best to divide the day. But she's not thinking about this now as fingers poke and jab at her keyboard. Jut, jut, backspace, misspell, backspace. She doesn't look at the clock, she knows enough what it says. The bright light in the window is enough. Peck, jut, backspace. Fingers tatter at the keyboard, piling words like stones, one on top of the other. A hasty alter on which she will offer up her thoughts to the blog readers. Jut, clack, backspace, misspell, backspace, delete, peck, jut, jab.

Go Ugh

Before we get into the hoopla of the blog post - there are a few things we at Novel Matters are excited to share with you.

In the weeks to come we will have things that will make you smile, things that will get you excited, and things that will make you have to pick your jaw up off the ground. And a couple of things that will require someone with a spatula to scrape you off the ceiling. Boo yay!

Yep, it's starting to get revved up around here - and we are thisclose to announcing major contests on the blog. How major? Could change your life. We strongly suggest you follow the blog, or subscribe so you'll be among the first to hear. Yes, that's all I'm going to say about it for now. Yes, I enjoy torturing you. It's fun.

This is on top of our monthly give-aways (books, gifts, and more!), guest bloggers (folks like Andy McGuire, Sally Stuart, Karen Ball, Jeff Gerke, and more!), and the other surprises we have up our collective sleeves. Fasten your seat belts, faithful reader - things are about to get very, very interesting.

And now we return to our regularly scheduled programming:

Sometimes a voice comes along and rocks the visible universe. Like William Goldman's The Princess Bride, and no one asks why. We just know, somewhere in what Carl Jung would call the collective conscious (or unconscious, depending on his mood), we just get it. No one needs to explain it. We read, and we understand. It's a bestseller because it is wonderful. It's a phenomenon because everyone gets it on a primal basis. The fact that Rob Reiner can come along and make a bang-on fantastic movie out of the book is a total bonus - and helps us to keep the love alive for generations to come.

I finished a novel the other week and my husband asked what I thought of it. "It was good, but I didn't go 'Ugh'".

"Ugh" is the sound of my primal instincts becoming fully awakened -it is the noise of my most basic emotions zinging to the forefront. I laugh, I cry, I yell at the text, I plead, I threaten, I run and hide, I clap my hands. All the right buttons are pushed and somewhere deep inside, I hear the sound of "Ugh". My primal, inner cavewoman is satisfied.

Lest you think that only novels like Anna Karenina should make us go "Ugh", (and they should!), I need to remind us that primal feelings are not pristine feelings. They are messy, strange, difficult feelings and the things that can stir them are often surprising - even to the one being stirred. Oddities can bring out our primal response - like the runaway train that started out as Lynn Truss writing a humble book about punctuation Eats, Shoots & Leaves. There are nearly 600 reviews total of the book on Amazon.com. How odd is that? Doesn't make you want to run out and see what all the fuss is about? What made that happen? A particularly virile gang of English teachers out to raise the profile of the comma no matter the cost? Probably no. But there is something about the book that makes us go "Ugh". The fact that our "Ugh" is wrapped in proper punctuation matters not. A connection has been made. My guess on this one is that the primal Ugh here is the "I'm a smarty-pants" feeling.

Sometimes the Ugh comes from the sappy melodrama of a book we "shouldn't" love, but we do. The guilty pleasure we don't talk about, but read over and over again with the covers pulled over our heads. I had two children (a toddler and a newborn) when I read The Nanny Diaries. Oh my, I was Ughing all over the place! Primal emotional chords being pulled every third page. At least that was my excuse for reading it the first time. I confess, when I read it again, it was just for fun - just to let it touch those particular feelings again.

And the number one Ugh we all want to feel rising up from our primordial bellies? Love. Ah, love. Twoo Wuv.

Shaken, not stirred. Unrequited. Passionate. Godly. Brilliant. Consuming. Love. Enter the Twilight series, and The Shack. Both books about love. Both are romance novels. Both stroke the same deep chord, and ask the same question we've been asking since the dawn of time....

Does he love me?

Oh we need to know so.....so......badly. Does he love me? Whether "he" is God, a lover, a vampire, our dog - if the story asks the question well enough, and if it can take us to a place where we find our answer is, "Yes", then we go. Masses of us, running to the Yes we need so much it hurts. But these books go one better. They don't talk about just any love, just every day love. They talk about impossible love. Girl and vampire. God and humanity. Love that just cannot be, yet is.

And that is the deepest Ugh of all.