Emotion in Writing:

(Ignore the featured image for now, we’ll get to it)

Emotion in Writing is, it seems to me, an intermediate level topic in writing, and one that isn’t as obvious as it might sound. At least, it hasn’t been for me, especially given my interest in genre fiction, rather than literary (ie. I like action-packed stories, not ones that dwell on the misery of someone’s day to day life). So a few comments on the topic:

Why do you even need to consider it?

Emotion is an important consideration in writing, and is stressed as such by several writers and writing instructors that I respect, as it achieves several things:

1. It makes your story more powerful and memorable, especially for people who most strongly empathize with that particular emotion.
2. It helps grab and keep a reader’s attention, by introducing an emotional investment, which is harder to walk away from. Having said that, as in this post, an emotional grip on the reader is more difficult in the opening pages. Which isn’t to say that you shouldn’t plant the seeds early.
3. It adds texture and depth to your writing, an additional dimension. As David Wolverton (AKA, David Farland of Runelord fame) notes, combining internal and external conflict to a story adds variety and interest.

What have more successful writers than me had to say about it?

(sourced from memory and Internet sources, so please take exact wording with grain of salt, especially as these quotes are parsed out of the context of larger discussions)

• David Farland: Writing a novel is like composing a symphony—not a symphony of notes, but a symphony of emotion
• Ilona Andrews: The key to an effective time-compressing transition is the change that takes place in the character. Think of the character’s emotions as a string. As long as you hold on to that string, you can slide all sort of beads on it.
• Orson Scott Card: You can’t control everything the reader feels, and no two members of your audience will ever be emotionally involved in your story exactly to the same degree. Still, there are some things you can control, and if you use them deftly, without letting them get out of hand, you can lead most of your audience to intense emotional involvement with your characters.

How much emotion do you need?

• This probably depends on genre and taste. And maybe format too. It seems to me that short stories play more heavily on emotion than novel-length fiction. Which is one reason that I find short stories a little harder to read one after another for an extended period, as compared to losing myself in a single book for hours. Sometimes a short story collection can feel a bit heavy handed, and even depressing. I don’t mean to be critical of short fiction here, I’ve read a lot of great stuff, but it is something I notice in that format.
• Like anything, I’m sure you can have too little or too much. And even successful authors have missed that mark. 🙂

Can ‘Fear of Getting Killed in a Messy Way’ be your emotion?

• In other words, is excitement and tension an emotion? If a policeman is hanging on top of the criminal’s car during a high speed chase, an inch from sliding off, does that create reader emotion? Fear of him dying?
• Kind of, although in a narrow way.
• I have to admit, this is a question I struggle with myself. But I think that excitement and tension is a narrower subset of emotion, that probably better fits into the discussion of Plot and Conflict, so I think I’ll defer that question for now. 🙂

Big Picture Emotions:

• David Farland (Million Dollar Ideas) has an interesting claim that readers and movie goers expect certain emotional elements in certain genres (love in romance, ‘sense of wonder’ in fantasy, etc), and that the author has to satisfy that expectation, big picture. If not, you’ll end up with a dissatisfied audience.
• I believe that this is a big picture comment, and that it makes sense to separate it from the ‘little picture’ emotions that dot a book (anger, righteous frustration, grief, shock, ect) that tend to be tied to your character’s reactions, and come from empathy with that character.
• But it’s still a very important thing to remember. If you write a fantasy without ‘sense of wonder’, you might want to rethink it!

So, how do you actually do it?

You can agree that emotion is important in writing, but never put much thought into how you’re doing it. I certainly didn’t run across a lot clear direction on this topic (although Orson Scott Card does have some good tips, which I only came across recently). Or maybe I just didn’t understand what people were telling me. But anyway, for visual folks like me, I’ve tried to break down the steps below:

Please don’t take me as the fountain of all knowledge on this one. I’m going through this exercise partly because I want to think it through myself, and improve my own skills. But maybe this framework can help you arrange your own thoughts. I think it makes intuitive sense.

I originally planned on using this framework to take you through an example, but at the moment, I’m all typed out and need to get back to some of my actual writing! 🙂 Maybe another day…

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Life continues to make time short, but I’ve gained a bit of momentum on my editing of the old Fantasy manuscript, which I think is going quite well. My effort to look at the story through the lens of emotion has (I think) strengthened the piece considerably, and provided some of the ammunition for this post…

(I wouldn’t suggest trying it with underwear though. Not well received–especially if not yours.)

Emotions are somewhat like elastic bands. The harder you pull, the bigger the power you’re building for when you finally let go. But if you pull too long, or too hard, things can also go badly wrong.

This applies to the building of sympathy by hammering down misfortune on your character, or building the importance of achieving a certain goal by piling on the reasons that success is critical, or dwelling on what the character wants but can’t have. The more effort and failure, the more page time devoted to that particular goal, the more you move the goal post out of reach, and the greater the character efforts, the bigger the reader investment in the resolution.

But watch out for the SNAP. 🙂

I read a book in a very popular series once, a series that I was actually enjoying quite a lot, by a writer I respected. But I put that book down half way and never picked it up again (although I may one day, never say never). Why? Because the unrelenting drudgery of failure got to me. The author threw the kitchen sink at the character, then the piping, and the wall, and then had the roof crash down on top of him. Everything that could go wrong, did, to the point of absurdity, where it actually felt contrived. God has to hate you for things to go that wrong.

I know what the writer was trying to do, and I know that eventually there would be a snap back, an achievement of the goal. The character would endure, endure, and finally reach the other side. But I just couldn’t bear the trip. I was looking at another 200 pages of sheer depressing drudgery and I couldn’t face it.

That’s the danger here. Your payoff in stretching the reader’s emotions is very high. The more you can do to invest the reader, and make them emotionally involved, the better. But be careful. Nobody really wants to be permanently depressed, and sometimes you can go overboard. Better to sprinkle in some small victories, slivers of light in the darkness, even if fleeting and small.

There’s also an overlapping concept here, that I won’t dwell on in the same depth, but might be worth noting: small modest efforts by the character can sometimes be very effective, plodding effort that keeps moving forward, even if not spectacular (think Harry Dresden in the book where he painstakingly built a model of Chicago, and gained great magical power from that tedious work) also seem to have some reader appeal. I think it has something to do with ‘fairness’ and earning your victory. A lot of people know that success is rarely an easy thing to achieve, and that character effort seems to validate it somehow.

Not necessarily much in the way of clear guidelines here, but some ideas to chew over when considering how to manage reader investment in your story, whether too little or too much. It’s something I want to get better at myself, so we can work on it together. 🙂

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This image has been shown before, a watercolor dragon I did, recycled for some eye-candy. I have been swamped at my day job, up a few nights with sick kids, and finding time a bit difficult to carve out recently. I’m hoping that as the New Year settles in, I should get back into a more productive routine, on the writing and art side. Here’s to wishing everyone a happy 2015!

My mind and body aren’t always connected. There have been a few girls over the years that I knew were bad news, and still felt the spark of chemistry, the rev of pulse that said my body had a different view.

So aside from making my wife irritated if she ever reads this, what’s my point? How does it apply to writing?

You can try to weave in tension and conflict in a cold deliberate fashion, and it’s a good thing to try, to give your plot some room to strike sparks. But another thing, that I realized in my last manuscript, is that sometimes you can feel good tension in your gut. As the writer, you are the first reader. Sometimes you can feel the physical tightening of your abs, the stir in your gut, that says your body is reacting to the conflict you’re putting on the paper.

And that’s a good thing.

If only it did really exercise my abs…

And maybe my next manuscript should have a bad girl or two. Don’t tell my wife. 😉

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I’m still dabbling with short stories and the big picture plot of Broken Detective (title to be changed). Letting it brew, mucking around in Scrivener, and generally letting some motivation and excitement pool again, to get me to the finish line on that project. Plus, the kids and Christmas. Very exciting for the little Hooligans.

Have a great holidays!

 

This image is a full view of the ‘Angels and Devil’ piece that I’ve shown fragments of so far. I’ve got a couple of umbrella lights in my basement now, so that I can do a bit better photography for my art. There is still a fraction of a glare in this image, that I may remove in later efforts, by use of a filter that just arrived in the mail, but we’re getting there slowly. Presents, presents. 🙂