Emotion is the engine of fiction. Emotion is the medium of story. Now, we’ve talked about showing emotions through action rather than declaring them in text. However, before you can show emotions, you have to know what they are.
You need to know how your characters feel, and what. What would make them happy? What makes them unhappy? When are they bored and what enchants them?
So, what are emotions? And why do we have them?
Passion, not reason, is what makes things happen (even for Mr Spock). Your emotions control your thoughts. They are an essential part of your reasoning – emotion gives weight to the different factors in your decision making, allowing you to choose between your options. If it were possible for someone to be a pure, emotionless creature of logic (Mr Spock, allegedly), they would be completely dysfunctional. They wouldn’t be able to make logical decision because they would be incapable of establishing preference: which outcomes are better than others.
This isn’t idle speculation. Medical research has been performed on people whose brains are damaged such that they don’t experience emotion. Their ability to make decisions is lost as well. So emotion is a psychological device used to weight decision making – and when our psychological wellbeing isn’t great, our emotions express it, and impact our choices.
What are emotions? Well, they’re non-verbal – so we have an immediate problem, because we are verbally expressing them. So, ask yourself, what happens when you have an emotion? How do you know you are feeling one? How did it express itself? What did you do?
That is something you can describe verbally: the mind leads the body, and we can describe the body.
Of course, we can describe the mind: “Chris was sad.” But for fiction that’s a bit rubbish, really. Unless you describe it as an interior dialogue – that can work. But what would Chris say to himself? “Sad” is a label, not an expression of emotion. We’ve already talked about this, but it bears repeating. Show emotions, don’t declare them. “I should get more cigarettes,” Chris thought, “but it’s raining again.” Much better.
Things people do when they’re upset
Disassociate – think about something completely different to protect themselves.
Deny – they claim they aren’t upset.
Face it – open the tub of ice cream and have a good cry.
Negotiate – seek a compromise for something less upsetting.
Displace it – Blame something completely different for how they are feeling.
Think Positively – try to spin the thing that is making them unhappy into a good thing
Question – look at their life and ask why this sort of thing happens to them
Plan – scheme a way to improve their situation (or ruin the situation of whomever hurt them!)
Why is this list useful? Well, as we’ve talked about repeatedly in this section of the course, the best way to illustrate how somebody is feeling is to show them doing the sort of thing people do when they have that feeling. Specifically: what this person would do when they were sad (I’m more of an ice-cream and chick-flick than plotting revenge sort of guy, for example.)
This is all about delving into the inner workings of the character. You have to know what those inner workings are – but you have to make the reader work a bit to discover it. If they have to reflect on the characters actions to gain insight into their personality the experience will be far more rewarding.
Don’t write what you know – write what you can imagine.
If you find the emotional truth, then you are writing a true story.
But what do we do if we are writing about things outside of our experience? I’ve never lost a spouse, but in my novel Dead Moon one of my main characters is trying to deal with losing his husband while the world is ending. Hopefully I won’t experience either of those things, but that doesn’t mean I can’t write about it.
You’ve heard the adage “write what you know.” However, you’ve may never have been told what that means.
Both of my first two novels included spaceships. I love spaceships. But, sadly, spaceships don’t exist (not the sort I imagine.) How am I supposed to write what I know and write about a man grieving for his husband while the world ends.
Well, that’s because “write what you know” is misleading. You start by writing what you can imagine. Any idea you can pluck out of your head and excites you has the potential to be a story.
That doesn’t mean don’t do your research. Before writing Dead Moon I read about grief, testimonies of people talking about how they coped with losing their life partner; I also read lots of books and films about the end of the world, as well as scientific articles about nuclear winters and climate catastrophe (the first part was more fun than the second.)
That will lend you some practical authenticity, which is always good for keeping disbelief suspended, but all the research in the world can tell you how something feels. If you are writing a situation so strange to you that you can’t imagine it, then write what you can figure out. You can figure out most human experience. For specific details, read around.
Then, lie back and imagine how that would make you feel. If you’re a writer I’m willing to bet you spend a lot of time doing this already! The crucial factor isn’t whether the spaceships would work or not: the thing you really have to imagine, and to know, are human emotions. And you have all of those already.
Once you’ve imagined how it would make you feel, you can imagine how it would make your character feel. Once you know how your character feels, you can translate this into actions that express there feelings. Have those actions ram up against obstacles and BOOM, story.
One final note. Sensitivity readers are really useful if you can find them. If you’re writing a story about aboriginals or lesbians or straight white guys at Harvard or anything that you’re not (and particularly if it is a group with a history of being misrepresented and/or repressed), it’s well worth finding someone from that group and bribing them to read your ready-for-readers draft. Imagination is good, imagination is more important than being right, but contributing to being shitty to people is bad and best avoided.
Exercise:
Write me 200 words of someone being upset, trying to do something about it, and failing.
Hang on, didn’t we just write about being sad? Well, sad isn’t necessarily the same thing as upset, and I’d like to see them implementing a coping strategy (Dissassociate, Deny, Fact it, Negotiate, Displace it, Think Positively, Question, or plan), in all cases avoiding using any of these words, or the words sad or upset.
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