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Posts Tagged ‘emotion’

Conflict and Caring

Posted in Story, tagged , on December 18, 2012 | Leave a Comment »

Have you ever watched one of those movies where the hero gets shot six times and run over by a truck – then he gets up and races after the villain as if nothing had happened? You saw the conflict, but there was no sense of pain to go with it. The conflict was divorced from feeling and emotion.

Personally I feel short-changed by this. If something bad happens in a story I want to feel the emotions that this engenders. It will most likely be the emotion of the person on the receiving end of the bad thing, but it could be the emotion of an observer or even of the person who perpetrated the offence.

The emotion might be expected – “He hit me. I’m angry, so I’ll hit him back.” “He hit me. I’m afraid so I’ll run away.” Or it could be unexpected – say pity because the aggressor is totally unable to control his movements.

As a writer you can choose the response and follow it any way you want. What you should not do is ignore the emotion. “He hit me and then I went shopping and bought new shoes.”

OK, that’s a pretty obvious example. But in effect that’s what we often do. We show the response -’ hit him back’, ‘run away’ and we short-change the reader on the actual feeling of anger or fear that produces the reaction. When you are angry, how does it feel to you? Think back to the last time you were angry and define the physical feeling within you.

If you want the reader to care about your protagonist and his journey you have to generate that caring by having him drawn in emotionally. A conflict happens then show the feeling that follows. That feeling will probably lead to the next conflict. Show how, show why.

Not by saying “He felt angry.” How do you, your spouse, your co-workers, neighbors and friends show anger? Watch and find out. One person might go red in the face, another might grind their teeth or curl their hand into a fist.

Become a collector of emotional clues – that way you’ll get it right when you need to show emotion in a story. Unless you are writing ‘hunt-’em-down, shoot-em-up’ stories be more generous in showing the emotion. It doesn’t cost you extra. It’s the ingredient that brings your characters to life.

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Write what you know – People

Posted in Writer's life, tagged , , , , on July 10, 2012 | Leave a Comment »

I was raised in a large industrial city in England. When I was about twelve years old I sent off my first story to a magazine publisher. It was full of conflict, about creatures trying to exist in the Amazon rainforest. Much later, understanding a bit about marketing, I realized the magazine published only romances. The best ‘creatures in the Amazon’ story in the whole world wouldn’t have made it on to their pages.

Someone on their staff, though, was kind enough to send me an encouraging note along with the rejection. Of course it contained the sentence “Try writing what you know.” It not only encouraged me to keep writing, it made me excel in biology classes as I tried to get to know Amazon creatures better.

Many years later I visited the Amazon and saw – and in  a few cases touched – tarantulas, anacondas, raucous birds, tiny monkeys and even a cayman (seen at night by flashlight). Let me repeat – I SAW them. There’s no way I got to know them. not like I know people.

People are what or who we know. Most of us are surrounded by them, all shapes and sizes and all with unique emotional dimensions. Each one comes with strengths, weaknesses, flashpoints, hopes, hostilities, beliefs and viewpoints. No matter where you live the people you know carry these personal individual bundles around with them, just as we all do.

Once in a while you can glimpse the reason why they act and react the way they do. Mostly, though, it’s the writer within us that compels us to try to connect the seemingly unconnected dots. We look at the little behavioral clues they leave and try to puzzle out why, in this case, A led to M instead of to B. What if some pressure was being applied that we don’t know about? What if…

And because we, as writers, spend so much time with people and thinking about possible reasons for their behavior, we start to know them and understand them better. So when we write about people we are writing about what we know. Probably more than others we begin to understand motives behind actions. We see the telltale tiny signs and we empathize with their emotions, remembering a time when we ourselves felt so angry, so sad or so distraught that we too might have…

The more we learn about people, the more we figure them out, the more our readers will connect with our characters and enjoy our writing. They will feel the reality underlying our fiction.

We will be writing about what we know, what we understand, what we have deep feeling for. And our writing will be good.

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Showing emotion

Posted in Conflict, Main, tagged , , , , on June 21, 2012 | 3 Comments »

When you write fiction it’s important  to convey to the reader exactly the emotion of the moment. Not tell them (“She felt sad.”) but show them.

Let’s say that her good-looking boyfriend has just announced that he is breaking up with her. She might feel anything from total devastation to great relief. How will you show her feelings?

The extremes are fairly easy – she hits him over the head with a frying pan or she sweeps him into an embrace “Oh, thank you. That’s wonderful”. You leave no room for the reader to misunderstand.

But what about more subtle emotions? She might be fearful of being alone, thinking how to find another room-mate, annoyed because she had plans for the weekend, glad to be free because she has met this other man.

How will you show her emotion? You can  state it:

“Oh, no! I’m scared to be alone!”

But that is still a bit obvious. You’ll pull the reader further into the story if it has to be figured out.

How about something like:

‘She sucked in a breath and her shoulders tightened. He wondered for a moment if she was going to cry but instead she turned to him, her eyes pleading. “Couldn’t we try again? One more time? Please?”‘

OK, maybe I laid it on a bit thick but you get the message. Let the reader do some of the work of understanding what is going on inside the character’s head. The reader doesn’t have to understand it fully right away but the characters reaction will drive further actions.

Maybe she will plead for another chance and become a compliant and obedient mouse, fulfilling his every wish until one day she smartens up and realizes there are worse fates than living alone. Or one day he realizes he can’t stand compliant women. Or one day she finds another room-mate.

Maybe, to go back to the man breaking up with the woman, the woman is just mildly annoyed at now having to find another room-mate. The milder the reaction, the harder it is to show reaction with any subtlety. Perhaps she shrugs, or yawns, or says “Don’t forget you’ve got some clothes in the dryer.”.

This is unlikely to be the reaction that drives the rest of the story unless she is faking it and bursts into tears the moment the door closes behind him.

And there’s also the man in the scene to consider. What is his body language saying? He can’t just stand there. Is he showing anger? embarrassment? fear? annoyance? How will you reveal his feelings, other than saying ‘He was angry’? Or ‘he yelled’?

Take time to pick out the body language, the gestures, the hesitations you need to reveal emotional reaction. But don’t give it all away – allow the reader to use imagination. That’s why we read.

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Your Person

Posted in Character, tagged , , , , , , on January 22, 2012 | Leave a Comment »

One of the first decisions to be made when you sit down to write fiction is:

Shall I write in first, second or third person? The choice you make here is important to the effectiveness of your story.

First person is “I” or “We”.

Second person is “You”.

Third person is He, She, It, They”.

First person is used for a personal story, for sharing an experience you have had. You could also choose to use it for a purely fictional story, to make it feel more immediate. More about that later.

Second person is not often used in fiction. It’s common, though, in articles or blogs that tell you how to do something. “First you do this, then you do that and lastly you tie a big red bow on top of it.” “You” makes it more personal and immediate than saying “The widget goes on top of the lower bar”.

Third person is most generally used in the fiction you pick up in the library or buy from a book shop.

“Francesca swooned gracefully into his arms, her face pale. He lifted her gently to…”

You can see that writing that in the first person might cause questions in your family. “I swooned gracefully into his arms, my face pale. He lifted me gently to…”

Third person is the workhorse of most fiction. Writing in the third person you cannot get into any one person’s mind, but you can show all of the action. You are free to show almost anything anywhere in a “Meanwhile, back at the ranch” kind of way.

The downside of third person is that you can’t feel the feelings of any one person. You can show them – “Her shoulders drooped in despondency” or “He ran up the stairs two at a time and reached eagerly for the door knob.”

But third person cannot give you the deeper layers of feeling or of mixed feelings.  For this you need first person story telling.

There’s a reason that first person stories go over so well. It’s because they have the immediacy and power of the feelings behind the actions. We don’t just understand and enjoy the story, we ‘get’ the underlying emotion.

If the underlying feelings don’t matter much, if it’s all about the action and what happens next, then third person is both easiest to write and most effective.

But if your story is about feelings – if you want to demonstrate mixed feelings, if you want to show why someone did something that seems almost incomprehensible, if you want to focus on this person’s depth of love or fear or hatred – then first person is the way to go.

If you are uncertain, try the story both ways and see which feels right to you. There is no “correct” way. Just the most effective way to get your story across.

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Where did it hurt?

Posted in Writer's life, tagged , , , , on November 8, 2011 | Leave a Comment »

As writers we try to collect interesting settings, complex characters and intriguing plots. Our eyes and ears are open to anything that might make a story or pull people into it so deeply that they can’t stop reading

Sometimes we forget the closest place to look. Not, perhaps, the easiest but the closest. Ourselves.

It’s easy enough to look at the people we know or have known with their conflicting and puzzling characteristics. Or looking at places we have known and tweaking them into a setting full of atmosphere and interest. Or remembering strange stories we have been told and devising ways to use them.

The part that is not easy is remembering our own stories and the emotion we felt at the time they happened. It might be a mistake we made. The feeling of embarrassment or humiliation is all too real when we recall it.

Or perhaps your puppy or kitten died. The memory of grief, maybe even guilt, is hard to face. We’d rather brush it aside and think about something less disturbing.

But the memory of that feeling – in addition to the event itself – has enriched your experience as a person and as a writer. Your feelings become part of you. Hiding them, burying them is neither healthy nor useful. Facing those deep feelings and even mining them validates your life experience and uses it to guide others.

Think back to the depths of the sadness – the tears that wouldn’t stop, the sick or sore feeling in your stomach. This needs to be part of your writing when you are showing your story character feeling his or her own sadness.

Painful as it is, you need to feel again your own sadness. If this sounds too depressing, remember that the feeling of happiness works the same way. Recall a time when you felt the height and depth of joy. Bring that to the story.

Whatever feeling you are expressing in your story you need to recall it at a gut level as you are writing it. Every feeling – fear, guilt, excitement – has its own sensations physically and mentally. Each is completely different and needs to be expressed as fully as you can.

Take time to re-visit in your mind the moments of action and drama in your life, recall the times when you felt happiness or laughter bubbling up in your chest.

You inner research is as important as the trip to the library. Only courageous inner research will bring honesty and  true life experience to your stories.

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