The Problem with Conveying Emotion

It’s an element that all writers need, but they are not always good at showing the reader. The problem with emotion is that sometimes, it’s just difficult and awkward to get right.

The aim for any writer is to move the reader, so that they read a particularly moving scene and feel the emotion behind it and they may feel a tug at the heart, or even feel like crying. Perhaps they read a terrifying scene and it affects them with fear or apprehension. Or there might be a heart-warming, happy scene that simply makes the reader smile.

Getting the reader to react to what the main character is feeling is no mean feat.

The most common problem with trying to convey emotion occurs when writers sometimes make the mistake of telling the reader the emotion they should feel, for example ‘John was sad’ or ‘John was angry.’ While this may seem logical to write, it doesn’t convey any feeling; it doesn’t mean anything to the reader. For emotion to work, the reader has to feel it or be affected by it.

As an example, compare these two scenes. The first one has little emotional depth, while the other does:

His heartbeat grew loud in his ears. The sounds of desperate men floundering against barbed wire and bullets soaked his senses.

He hid among tangled arms and legs and sand-smeared entrails, stooped to the knees in a pool of a dozen soldiers’ sacrificial blood.  There could be no surrender, no glory in death.

Something trickled down his face.  He couldn’t stop the tears...

This example doesn’t even try to show much emotion. The narrative simply tells the reader what the emotion is and doesn’t describe anything in detail. It fails to engage. Compare the same scene with more emotional depth:

His heartbeat unfolded like a flower. It grew loud in his ears, louder than the blasts that shredded the ground, louder than the voices in the middle of a blood-raked beach.  The sounds of desperate men floundering against barbed wire and bullets soaked his ragged senses and made him shudder.

Purple scars stretched across a blackened sky.

Fox in the hole; he hid among tangled arms and legs and sand-smeared entrails, stooped to the knees in a pool of a dozen soldiers’ sacrificial blood. There could be no surrender, no glory in death.

He thought about his family then; their memory burned to his mind and the new born child he would never see. Something trickled down his face then, and he couldn’t stop the tears...

This is the same narrative, but with the added emotion and sentiment. This one is much better; it engages the reader and it shows the emotion through description and the ‘showing’ technique and highlighting the emotive themes of loss (he thinks about the child he will never see), and cold acceptance of his fate.

The more you can give to the reader, the more they can feel.

The way around the problem of conveying emotion is to describe a character’s physical responses rather than telling the reader about them, for example the mention of tears, the twitching of the bottom lip, the colour of someone’s face as frustration gets the better of them, their reactions with objects, such as door-slamming, pushing things over, even hitting someone. All are reactions to and because of emotion.

If you can convey emotions well, you have a chance of affecting the reader in the same way. They will feel sad, happy or relieved, or angry at something.  Remember that not only do your characters need to feel; your readers do, too.

In a nutshell, emotion is about responses; it’s a reactive feeling to something or someone. There are other devices to use:

  • Physicality to highlight emotions
  • Use thoughts or dialogue to show emotion or sentiment
  • Subtext can be used to show emotion
  • Use imagery to suggest emotion
While it may seem daunting trying to encapsulate the sentiment of a situation, emotion helps the reader connect with the character. The reader can identify with the character’s risky predicament or perilous journey, or the ultimate goal they’re trying to achieve. And because of this connection, they can sympathise with or feel for the character when things go wrong or the character is in danger. Simply telling the reader how a character feels just doesn’t work. There is no emotion involved.
.
Conflict creates an endless list of emotions. Be ruthless with your main character. Put them in mortal danger, take away the things they love most, kill off their nearest and dearest and create all manner of trauma. All these create reactions and in turn they generate emotions. Don’t be afraid to push your characters, torment them or be mean to them. Physical and psychological pain creates emotion, too, and none more so when we sympathise or empathise with what the character is going through, because certain situations will be all too familiar to us.
.
Something else that packs the emotional punch is the descriptions you create. Manipulate them to emphasise the emotion and make them believe the feeling is all too real. Remember:

  • Excellent characterisation is essential – create immediacy and a connection to the reader.
  • Show, don’t tell.
  • Emotive themes always make for emotional writing – loss of something or someone, grief etc.
  • Create empathy and sympathy with familiar themes.
  • Conflict & overcoming obstacles provides emotion.
  • Quality of writing counts.
  • Look inward for own experiences to convey them to the reader, however hard or painful.

The thing about emotion is that it’s something everyone feels, even to those who pretend otherwise. It’s inescapable because we all feel pain, joy, despair, sadness, anger, grief, love...all the things that can and do take place within stories.

Conveying emotions doesn’t have to be hard. It just takes a bit of thought to understand why these emotions are important and how they should be shown.

Allwrite is taking a well-earned break and will return in two weeks.

 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Chapter & Novel Lengths

Just how long should a chapter be? What’s the best length? And does a novel have to fit into a set amount of words? These are just two of the most common questions asked by writers.   They assume they have to work to a strict template of X amount of words and X amount of chapters, usually because most novels have around 30 or 40 chapters and around 80,000 words.   Novel Lengths Firstly, let’s dispel a few myths - novel lengths are dictated by the story itself, not the writer or the editor or a specific written formula.   Secondly, writers don’t have to fit their word count into generic set amounts.   Again, the story will dictate how long the novel will be. It’s also worth knowing the different types of novels that work well with different word counts.   Uncomplicated stories containing minimal characters tend to be short – usually around 20,000 to 60,000 words.   These are called novellas. Longer, more complex stories, which contain a handful of main characters and periphe
Read more

What Makes a Story Dark?

If you’re a horror writer or you love to write dark, psychological stories and thrillers, or moralistic tales, this is the one question that needs an answer. Wanting a dark story and writing one are two different things, so how do you actually make a story dark? To answer that you first have to understand what is meant by ‘dark’. We usually define ‘dark’ as quantifiable elements that we know and are familiar with, but it’s more than that. Dark doesn’t necessarily mean scary or gory with a crazy psychopath going around chopping people into bits. Instead we have to think of ‘dark ‘as anything outside our accepted rose-tinted reality. Dark is the underbelly of our society; it’s the handling of ideas, themes, social issues and behaviours that would be seen as morally unacceptable. It’s less about fictional monsters but more about the real monsters that lurk in the shadows, something that is underscored by our fears and anxieties. It’s the unknown, because the things we don’t know
Read more

Cadence in Writing

Following on from last week’s article about purple prose, cadence – something many writers haven’t heard of – is something that writers aspire to but don’t always manage it, yet it’s the fundamental difference between poetic language and over-indulgent, flowery prose. Cadence in writing is a sense of rhythm and pace, it lifts the narrative from the page and makes it dynamic; brings a certain tempo to the words and sentences; it’s what makes prose poetic, layered and fluid without it being extravagant. Cadence makes the writing visual and evocative, and to an extent, beautiful . It’s an important element in fiction writing, because without it, narrative certainly won’t be as effective. Writers don’t actively think about cadence – they simply want to write and get the words down. It’s not until later, while editing, that they realise that a sense of rhythm might be missing from their narrative. When poetic description works, it’s called cadence. When it doesn’t work, people ref
Read more