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Reverse Engineering Character Emotions
Dear Writing Friends,
I have found a really nice trick for writing better and tighter descriptions of character emotion and breaking up dialogue.
So I thought I would share it with you folks since it took me such a long time to figure it out and I have a psychology degree!
All writing coaches and editors bemoan the nearly universal occurrence of having characters constantly nodding, shaking their heads, and raising their eyebrows. So what do you do?
Here is a neat tick that works as well as sending your character to see a psychiatrist.
Get a copy of the book The Emotion Thesaurus by Ackerman and Puglisi. Get the second edition. (The Emotional Wound Thesaurus is also useful, but the Emotion Thesaurus is a must.)
Each time you get ready to use a word like “surprise” or “surprised” (or “angry” or any other emotion) first resist the temptation to tell and make an attempt to “show” what you are telling; i.e., try to never say “she was surprised” or “she was angry” unless there is no other choice. Or at least try to mix it up.
But how?
Go to the Emotion Thesaurus book on Kindle and type in “surprise” (or any other emotion word) into the search bar. That is, don’t go to the LISTING for surprise, do a search of that word.
It will pull up many results of both positive and negative traits. Look at all of them. You might say, “Oh, my character is not surprised, she is CONFLICTED.” And you will see numerous ways to show that. This way, you can “surprise” the reader by throwing out a description that is “surprising” and not top of mind—not the first thing that came to you, but the psychiatrist’s interpretation, if you will. This character is not surprised at all. She is conflicted!
😂
This little trick is making my life so much easier, so I thought I would share.
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8 Replies
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I tried something like this a while back. For me, it didn’t work. There were three parts to the reason.
1 – The base emotions I was looking to represent weren’t mentioned. (I don’t remember what they were was, but it happened several times.)
2 – A lot of the showable symptoms are only first-person relevant. If it’s not the PoV character getting sweaty palms, the repertoire is somewhere between extremely limited and non-existent.
3 – Most of the descriptions are either temporally extended (so inappropriate to the high beat rate of an exchange), or inappropriate to my (fantasy) setting.
That said, maybe it’s just me… it usually is.
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Rick,
Obviously, not everything works for everyone.
This does help me though to think a little more before I decide that I know which emotion my character really is experiencing. I find the exercise to be great food for thought, in other words, as I am examining characters and motivations–but it may just be me.
Thanks for the reply.
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Thanks for this. I can see how it might be useful. Also (possibly) fun to use it to fine tune the tics each character may have, though as I have not looked at the thesaurus yet I could be wrong.
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Bella,
It is absolutely great for refining tics! I am so glad you mentioned that. Making a list of tics is so vital, so people and not always smiling and nodding!!
😄
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I may have a different perspective on this because of the way I came to writing; that is, through acting and directing. One of the first things that was beaten into me early on was that you can’t ACT an emotion. Any attempt to simply telegraph how you “feel” to an audience will inevitable come off as shallow and melodramatic. Obviously, in written prose, you can literally tell the “audience” what emotions a character is feeling–but usually, the result is sub-optimal. Alternately, you can also give a bunch of “stage-direction” to indicate what their feeling (IE: all those dreaded head-nods, of which I am certainly guilty myself) but that isn’t all that effective either. What most schools of acting agree on is that characters must have an *action* –something they are actively striving to achieve or acquire in a scene. That there is opposition to that action from the other characters or the environment is what creates drama, and the nature of the conflict that plays out will determine (and transmit to the audience) what emotions the characters are experiencing. Basically, you don’t have to “show” or “tell” what your characters are feeling. If your scene is constructed well-enough, the reader will intuitively empathize with your characters and *experience* the emotions themselves.
That’s the idea anyway. Not saying its easy, or that I’m particularly good at it myself–but it is what I *try* to do at least.
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Vin,
Good observations.
I see what you are saying on all, especially with regard to naturalness. All I know is that writing is exhausting, and sometimes you can get in a rut.
When I get in a rut or exhausted, I find it easy to be lazy. When I am tired, I might just assume my character, for example, might be “surprised” at a certain moment, let’s say, for the sake of the argument.
Using the method I described above, I might be jolted into thinking, but wait, my character is not “surprised” at all…she is actually [fill in the blank].
At that moment the Thesaurus descriptions are not all I have, they are just food for thought, which might point me to a better description.
But as you say, it has to be real emotion.
As far as I know there is no computer program to write the book for you, but that might be coming sometime this year, who knows.
😎
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For anybody interested I would highly recommend “The Emotional Craft of Fiction” by Donald Maass which covers all the tools available to a writer to take readers on an emotional journey such as:
- emotional modes of writing
- beyond showing versus telling
- your story’s emotional world
- moral stakes
- connecting the inner and outer journeys
- Etc…
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L.,
Yes that is a great book. I have it!
Maass is great. I also recommend his book The Breakout Novelist. Just splendid.
