To put emotion on the page, you gotta dig!

I went into author/agent Donald Maass’s workshop this fall with a major concern: how to put emotions on my pages in ways that would rock the worlds of both the characters and readers. Steeped in the “show, don’t tell” dictum, I had shied away from flat out telling readers that a character felt sad. Or mad. Or whatever. But when I tried to “show” character emotions through their actions and expressions, critique partners were sometimes left feeling puzzled about exactly what was going on.

 

Image: Stefan Keller from Pixabay

As usual, Maass had something to say about that, although it was so seemingly counterintuitive I initially rebelled: don’t either show or tell the character’s primary emotion. Instead, write something else the character is feeling.

 

Are you like me in thinking, what? why?

 

The reasoning behind Maass’s answer, which he lays out specifically in his book, The Emotional Craft of Fiction: How to Write the Story Beneath the Surface, is that “. . . readers may believe they’re living a story along with its characters. Actually, they’re not. Readers are having their own experience that is merely occasioned by what’s on the page. . . (the novelist) is not causing readers to feel as the novelist does, or as his characters do, but rather inducing for each reader a unique emotional journey through a story.”

 

He justified his answer by using a (ta-da!) show, acknowledging its hackneyed nature in his self-deprecating way: “His guts twisted in fear.”

 

Isn’t that supposed to terrify readers, he asked. But does it? Read it again and notice whether it evokes any reaction in your gastrointestinal system other than, perhaps, indigestion. The reason such writing fails to have the desired effect, he insisted, is because we as writers are asking readers to feel something they don’t want to feel. (Obviously, who would want, well. . . )

 

High, primary emotions such as terror, rage, even love, Maass believes, are too much for readers to process, and even less memorable. (He claimed to have had this epiphany while talking to a friend who writes thrillers – hardly a genre in which we might expect layers of emotional depth.)

 

The work around he advised involves sneaking up on readers’ emotions. Jot down something else your character is feeling – a second level of emotion. Then another emotion the character feels at exactly the same moment – a third level of emotion.

 

“When we feel fear, we can also feel excited, anticipatory, shamed, even glad,” Maass noted.

 

Does the character believe whatever else she is feeling (as well as fearful) is the right thing to feel? Is it a bad thing? Does she feel justification, guilt, revulsion? Is this a necessary and natural way to feel?

 

In describing how the character feels about her feelings – metaphors welcome -- especially the inner conflict of those feelings, the writer can “create the emotional space the reader needs to process their own emotions, to fill in the feeling that they are experiencing” as they relive their own remembered emotional memories.

 

These second and third level emotions also surprise readers with their unexpectedness. And “when you’re working with the internal life of a character, make it surprising!”

 

And while we’re surprising our future readers – and ourselves – how about using our post-NaNoWriMo revision months to find a dozen or more moments of high emotion, take them apart and explore that third level?

 

Have we forgotten my original problem, the old show vs. tell dilemma? Maass recommended resources such as The Emotion Thesaurus: A Writer’s Guide to Character Expression in the Writers Helping Writers series for help with showing through the body language, vocal cues, and visceral reactions associated with emotions. Not that telling is bad in itself, he noted. It’s all in how you do it, and the deep dives of third level emotions can be effective even in telling.

 

(I highly recommend Maass’s book, The Emotional Craft of Writing, whether you’ve been able to attend one of his workshops or not. Both it and The Emotion Thesaurus are available on Amazon. And while you’re at it, dear reader, also check out my August 5, 2020, post on this site, “Shh! Show, don’t tell – unless you must!” with more tips from romance writer Lori Freeland.)