Friday, September 09, 2005
Writing a Character's Emotions in Context
Characters come alive in the reader's mind by reason of their emotional dimensions. They feel joy, anger, hope, despair, etc. To feel real to the reader, these emotions need to represent more than the present moment. Real people's feelings are a complicated whirlpool blending past, present, and future attitudes, behaviors, and experiences. To understand why a character feels a certain way now, the reader needs to understand the context within which the character's emotions exist.
To accomplish this, beginning writers sometimes make the mistake of diving into long, windy passages about a character's background. They try to explain every detail about why the character feels the way she feels in order to convince the reader the present emotional state is believable. The problem with this approach is readers don’t want to spend their attention on information about the past. Their attention is on the present and the future (what's going to happen next?), and they are happiest when the writer allows them to maintain that focus.
To this end, background, while necessary in order to understand a character's emotions in context, serves the story best when treated like table salt at a meal. A little goes a long way. Pick a significant situation, and try to connect the character's present emotion with a specific event in the past. Take a mental snapshot, and flash it in all its sensory glory before the point-of-view character's eyes. The key word there is sensory, not expository.
For example, in Joel Rosenberg's The Ezekiel Option, the hero and heroine are trapped in the middle of a violent military coup. Bullets fly around them, and the hero is hit. It's understandable the heroine feels afraid. But Rosenberg layers the emotional context of the scene by tying the significance of the situation with a particular event in the past.
As is key with any use of background information, keep it short and keep it sensory.
To accomplish this, beginning writers sometimes make the mistake of diving into long, windy passages about a character's background. They try to explain every detail about why the character feels the way she feels in order to convince the reader the present emotional state is believable. The problem with this approach is readers don’t want to spend their attention on information about the past. Their attention is on the present and the future (what's going to happen next?), and they are happiest when the writer allows them to maintain that focus.
To this end, background, while necessary in order to understand a character's emotions in context, serves the story best when treated like table salt at a meal. A little goes a long way. Pick a significant situation, and try to connect the character's present emotion with a specific event in the past. Take a mental snapshot, and flash it in all its sensory glory before the point-of-view character's eyes. The key word there is sensory, not expository.
For example, in Joel Rosenberg's The Ezekiel Option, the hero and heroine are trapped in the middle of a violent military coup. Bullets fly around them, and the hero is hit. It's understandable the heroine feels afraid. But Rosenberg layers the emotional context of the scene by tying the significance of the situation with a particular event in the past.
...She feared for Bennett's life. It wouldn't be long before he slipped into shock. He was losing too much blood.
McCoy gritted her teeth and tried to push away the fear of losing him. But that was impossible. She remembered the last time she had wondered whether she would lose the man she loved. Suddenly she was back at Dr. Mordechai's home in Jerusalem, kneeling over Bennett, desperately trying to stop the bleeding from two gunshot wounds he'd sustained from an Iraqi terrorist tied to Al-Nakbah.
Just like on that day, she could hear the thunder of gunfire crashing all around them. She could smell the gunpowder in the air...
As is key with any use of background information, keep it short and keep it sensory.
