Reading time: approximately 10 minutes
Hello my darlings! Remember last week, when I postulated that all we need to do as writers was concentrate on the emotional journey of our main character to at least get us through a first draft?
Weeeeeellllll………
I don’t think I postulated wrong. I just didn’t realize how hard that process would be.
I’ve started work on a new story. The inspiration for it is from a very raw piece of my personal history (my writing group counted 2, maybe 3 personal traumas), so it’s extra important to me to Get It Right.
I made it 978 words, and then the trees closed in.
That’s what it feels like when I start a story and then get stuck (a feeling that has happened too many dozens of times). When I start a first draft, my story feels like it is a stretch of woods I must traverse, one that I have the map of fresh in my mind. I have strong ideas about the setting, the characters, the plot and the structure. The words flow out as I set the scene and introduce the reader to the protagonist. The path through the woods is clear and I’m walking down it, confident.
Around 800 words in I notice how dark the woods are getting. I glance behind me and instead of the clear path that I walked on to get here, there’s nothing but trunks, branches, and leaves. I make myself go on a few steps more, but when I stop the trees are in front of me too, all traces of the path gone. I’m surrounded by close, lonely, overgrown woods, no idea which direction to head in next, no idea how I got there. I’m completely lost in my story, and as usual, I don’t know what to even try next.
After just being stuck for four days, I completely gave up on fiction writing. I stood in my kitchen and tried not to cry over a frying pan while I told my husband this was the end. Clearly I could write good essays and people seemed to like that and that was what I was going to do. Because I could actually do that, and this fiction thing felt like it was just completely beyond me—as it has has felt many times before.
My husband had been on his way to the bathroom just as I confided my misery. So he begged me to hold that thought. I said of course, and I kept emptying the dishwasher, while all this frustration and despair and hopelessness just sloshed around inside me. How could I not figure this story out? The plot is very simple: the main character has to get the materials for and put together a necklace. That’s it! The meat of the story is simply the feelings and remembrances the main character has throughout the process. How could I be lost? The path through these woods should be pretty damn clear.
Then I thought: but how do I show those feelings the main character is having? How do I even know what they are? And that’s when I realized I have no idea how to show emotion on the page. Not at the sentence level, not at the scene level, not how to connect it to action, not how to use it to drive the plot. Sometimes I get emotional dialogue right, but mostly I make the reader infer emotion, not truly show it (or even tell it). I realized I had thoroughly abstracted the idea of “emotional journey,” just like I have with “structure.” I understand how it works, I know it when I see it, but how to actually use it?
Ok, maaaayyybeee I don’t have to give up on this story writing thing after all.
Because now that I know the problem, I can just learn how to do it. So I looked for books and courses. It might not surprise you to learn I found only 3 books that looked to usefully cover the topic, and a handful of classes, many of them not currently available. You know, I really need to stop blaming myself for not getting things that so few people are bothering to explain.
One promising course I found is by C. S. Lakin, Emotional Mastery for Fiction Writers. In the description, she says:
There are two facets of emotion in fiction: conveying what your character is feeling and evoking emotion in your reader. We’ll look at these two facets separately and in depth. Yet, they are intrinsically connected.
Emotional mastery requires writers to set up the dynamics of a scene in such a visual, textural way that readers can’t help but feel what they are meant to feel. Understanding that emotional mastery requires a twofold approach—the emotional landscape of both the character and the reader—is the first step.
🤯
…what? WHAT?!
This makes so much sense. Sometimes a character will feel embarrassed, but the reader won’t, the reader will be laughing. Or sometimes the character will feel confident, but we the audience will be cringing in our seats, knowing This Isn’t Going To Go Well.
There is so much more to this than I ever even thought.
Determined now, I pulled out the last book I read, The Girl From Everywhere, by Heidi Heilig (have you read it? It’s really good) and I decided to map out the emotions the protagonist feels in the first chapter.
OMG, my darlings. Oh. My. Goodness!
**SPOILERS**
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Nix's feelings in order throughout the first chapter:
Abandoned by her father
Doubt about his love for her
Worried about the future he is bringing her to
Physically overheated
Determined to haggle for the bird
Awkward as she screws up haggling
Vexed as she tries to fix it
Relieved to see Kashmir
Surprised at how much gold Kashmir gives the merchant
Panicked running from the Englishman Kashmir stole the gold from
Disbelief that her father starts to sail off, leaving Kashmir behind
Fear that her father would leave her behind
Stunned when the Englishman shoots at them
Embarrassment for enjoying Kashmir shirtless
Exasperation at her father not taking anything seriously
Impressed with herself for finding the next map
Exasperation at Kashmir
Worry about her father making it to Honolulu 1868, his goal
Spooked as they sail on to New York City in the twentieth century and the trip feels off
Camaraderie with Kashmir when he cheers her out of feeling spooked
Surprised they ended up in the wrong time
This is everything. This is where the story is. I have never looked at story this way, but it makes clear so many things. Let me explain.
Feelings 1, 2, and 3 are the book. They are the theme, they are the conflict, they are what the protagonist has to resolve by the end of the story. They are the emotional journey. Laid out in the first two or three paragraphs, here is the promise of the book presented in a way that is so clear that we get it unconsciously.
Have you writing folks ever heard about “tension?” As in, good stories have tension, this scene needs more tension, without tension a story is flat? And have you ever thought to yourself: but how do I add more tension, exactly? And what does it even really mean, in the context of writing? Well, when you look at the feelings, it is clear as day. In Feelings 4 through 7, Nix has a goal that she can’t fail to achieve: to haggle for a mythological bird with only a few rupees to pay. Her emotions are really strong and not very positive—there is the tension. Ah, but Feeling 8 relieves the tension—Kashmir has come with gold and they get the bird! But then Feelings 9 and 10 come along—up goes the tension! And it keeps going up—Feelings 11 through 13 are intense and powerful in response to the external chase scene and its resolution. Then another release of tension at Feeling 14—though that one lays out a source of future tension, which is absolutely delivered on throughout the book. Tension is ratcheting up the emotion—either the protagonist’s, the reader’s, or both.
What little of the writing in this chapter that is not strongly emotionally charged is description, backstory, some narration, and some conversation that is meant to introduce more characters. So story writing isn’t just about the overarching emotional journey. It IS emotion. The story is the feelings of the characters and the audience, on a moment by moment basis throughout most of the narrative. If you take a purely structural approach to writing, you are cobbling together a string of events and then trying to figure out how the characters feel as a reaction to those events. But that’s backwards. Acting out of emotion is how characters end up in those events in the first place.
Rather like life, right?
(Yes, of course, our character’s (and our own) personal agency isn’t unlimited, and some things do happen, through bad luck or circumstance or systemic awfulness, but that just means choices might be limited, not that characters don’t choose what action to take next.)
Once again, this is all just conjecture on my part. But I feel like I’m on to something important, something that will unstuck my writing.
I’m also running way out over my skis here. I still haven’t finished reading How Dare We! Write, the book I started like a month ago. I also plan on reading Trickster Makes This World by Lewis Hyde, for some ideas about how mixed-race / multicultural narratives might be structured (I don’t think I want to entirely throw the idea of structure out with the bathwater. I feel like when it’s used with the emotional journey, structure can help map the change that needs to happen? Still fuzzy on that though.) I know I need to slow down and really absorb and try to apply these wild new ideas I keep tripping across, so stay tuned for what that looks like in the coming weeks.
💖, as always
Elnora
If you want to actually learn what professionals have to say about emotion in fiction writing, here are the resources I have found that look helpful:
Books
Writing for Emotional Impact: Advanced Dramatic Techniques to Attract, Engage, and Fascinate the Reader from Beginning to End by Karl Iglesias (this is where I am going to start)
The Emotion Thesaurus: A Writer's Guide to Character Expression (Second Edition) (Writers Helping Writers Series) by Becca Puglisi and Angela Ackerman
The Emotional Craft of Fiction: How to Write the Story Beneath the Surface by Donald Maass (I have some reservations about Donald Maass—I’ve read his book Writing the Breakout Novel and it champions the “just keep pulling the rug out from under your protagonist as hard as you can over and over and over and that will make the best book ever” school of writing that I find…frustrating. But I haven’t read this book and who knows, it might be helpful, especially to people who don’t live in my head, so here it is.)
Classes
Emotional Mastery for Fiction Writers, part of C. S. Lakin’s Writing For Life Workshops. Online, self-paced.
Emotion Into Art: Infusing Your Writing with Feeling from the UCLA Extension. Online. (I feel like you might pay for more than you’ll get with this course, but I’ve been wrong before.)
Emotional Truth: Making Character Emotions Real, Powerful, and Immediate to Readers offered as a one-off by the Odyssey Writing Workshop. Also not sure when it’ll be offered again.
Creative Writing: showing character emotions on Udemy. (Oh, Udemy.)
I read this post a while back but totally forgot to leave a message to say thanks for sharing the links to resources at the end! 🙏
This particular topic is something I've been thinking about for a while for my graphic novel, albeit with a different sort of lens/twist based on my career as a UX designer. In UX, recognizing and using emotional states to understand how a user might be interfacing with your website/app/whatever is often key to creating exceptional experiences. It's provided a good foundation of understanding that emotive character writing isn't necessarily going to be 1:1 to how a reader is feeling, but lacks the writing/authoring view of the same concept.
Great post and thoughts (as always!) on a topic I've often pondered.
On my first read of this, I thought that was Nix's feeling through the *book*, not just the first chapter! Impressive, and useful way to summarise it like this. I haven't ever done that whilst reading a book. The closest I've done to this is summarising what happened in each chapter of Gardens of the Moon before going to read the more professional breakdown+discussion of each chapter at Tor.com. But that was more plot summary rather than character/emotional summary.
Hadn't heard of The Girl From Everywhere, but sounds interesting and so I've thrown it atop the mountainous "to-read" pile!
I'd still love to read those 978 words you did pen, should you so wish to share them.
I have more thoughts on all this but I have to dash. Will write more later.