emotion

Finding the Emotional Core

December 1, 2018 By Jo Eberhardt 6 Comments

A few months ago I wrote about how Authors are Magic. During that post, I talked about reading Cressida Cowell’s How To Train Your Dragon series to my children. We were reading the ninth book in the series at the time, and I described my love for the books like so:

The story is engaging, the characters are fun and inventive, and as the series goes on, it’s clear that the stories – for all that they’re about fantasy Vikings having adventures with their dragons – are really about the process of growing up and find your place in the world. Or, to quote the oft-repeated tagline in the books: They’re about becoming a hero the hard way.

We’ve now finished reading all twelve books in the series, and they’ve prompted me to write about yet another aspect of writing that is near and dear to my heart.

(On a sidenote, I can’t recommend this series enough. The world-building, the characterisation, and the skillful way Cowell continues to “make it worse” are things all writers could learn from.)

Halfway through the eleventh book in the series — right at the Black Moment of the narrative — everything goes wrong. And I mean everything. A secondary character who had been with us from the first page of the first book dies in the most heroic and bittersweet way possible. And, in the end, it doesn’t even (seem to) help.Our hero loses everything he’s gained over the course of ten and a half books, and we’re left wondering: How can he possibly succeed from here?

That in itself isn’t rare or unusual. No, what made it really striking for me was that I was reading this book out loud to my sons. Just like I had all the others. But the emotional core was so very strong that I was struggling to read through my tears.

And it wasn’t just me.

Both my eleven-year-old and seven-year-old cried. My younger son crawled over to curl up in my lap so he could hold on to me and sob his heart out.

Did they want me to stop?

Hell. No.

The very idea that I might stop reading to let us all take a few breaths and recover was met with a chorus of heartbroken pleas not to do such a thing. They were absolutely, completely engaged with the characters and the story. They both, in that moment, knew that their tears were as much a part of the book as the words I was reading.

And that — that, my friends — is what it means to build an authentic emotional core within a story.

[Read more…]

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How to Write Emotional Scenes When You’d Really Rather Not

July 23, 2018 By Anne Greenwood Brown 13 Comments

This book gave me “all the feels.”

We all strive to write the quintessential delivery system for “feels,” whether we know it or not, whether we’re consciously striving to deliver, or not. We do this because that’s what drives us to tell stories in the first place. Somewhere along the line—whether it was Vonnegut or Brontë, Irving or Rowling—we all read something that touched a chord and made us say, “Ah. Yes. I’ve been there.”

Or maybe we were too busy blowing our noses to get those actual words out, but you get the idea.

So what can you as a writer do to elicit more empathic reactions from your readers than detached ones? Writing emotional scenes has less to do with the scene itself and more to do with tapping into universal experiences and the emotions that go with them. Not many people (if any at all) will have experienced the exact scene you are writing and be able to connect to it. But all people have experienced some sort of loss, triumph, grief, disappointment, or love.

Empathy creates a bond. When you as the writer find your empathy for the character, chances are you will create an empathetic bond between your reader and the character, as well. Therefore, if you find yourself in a scene that is so much bigger (emotionally) in your head than it is coming out on the page, take a step back. Identify the emotion you are going for, then recall the last time you felt that way yourself.

Easy, right?

Confession time. I talk the big talk. Walking it is a whole lot harder. I come from a long line of stiff-upper-lipped Scandinavians who settled in the Midwest. Stoicism is a virtue; “not too bad,” is high praise. My natural reaction to writing an emotional scene is to pull back. Getting in there and feeling right along with my character seems very rude and more than a tad voyeuristic. Good manners tells me to fade the scene to black. But I know in my phlegmatic Midwestern heart, that this won’t do for storytelling. So I make a list. [Read more…]

Foreshadowing vs Callbacks

February 3, 2018 By Jo Eberhardt

A couple of months ago, I took my children to see the new Lego Ninjago movie at the cinema. For those people unfamiliar with the movie (like, perhaps, most people who don’t have a child under the age of 12), the plot revolves around five trainee-ninja teenagers who must learn the ways of Spinjitsu and defeat the evil Lord Garmadon. The movie opens with our heroes foiling Lord Garmadon’s attack against the city of Ninjago by piloting giant elemental-themed mechs.

There’s action and adventure and ninjas—the trifecta for my sons—and all was going well. Then, just as they easily win the battle, one of the heroes exclaims, “As long as we have these mechs, we’re unstoppable!”

It was at that moment that my ten-year-old son leaned over to me and said, “That means they’re going to lose their mechs, and have to beat Garmadon without them.”

What I said was, “Let’s keep watching and see.”

What I thought was, “Yep. We may as well leave now. We already know how the story will play out. That’s the most heavy-handed foreshadowing I’ve ever seen.”

[SPOILER ALERT: The heroes lose their mechs, and have to beat Garmadon without them.]

Later that night, I was watching some particularly good stand-up comedy. As the set drew to a close, and I was laughing much more loudly than I probably should have been while my children were asleep in the next room, I found myself thinking about the art of the callback. That, in turn, led me to wonder about the relationship between foreshadowing and call-backs.

Are they related?

One sets up future events, and the other references past events, sure. But does that mean they’re linked? [Read more…]

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Emotion vs Feeling

March 14, 2017 By David Corbett

I’m going to tell you something: thoughts are never honest. Emotions are.
—Albert Camus

I’m wading into tricky waters today. If I’m successful, I will have begun a discussion on a topic that is very dear to one of our own, the esteemed and estimable Donald Maass.

If I’m not so successful, I will have stumbled, fumbled, and bumbled into an area that Don understands far better than I do and will have made a flaming bozo of myself.

Sound like fun?

Here goes.

I’m going to refer to two posts here at Writer Unboxed, one by Don titled “Third Level Emotions,” and another concerning his upcoming book, The Emotional Craft of Fiction.

I’m also going to refer to a talk he gave at ThrillerFest two years ago titled, “Why Your Thriller Isn’t Thrilling.”

In each of these, Don addressed a subject of great importance to him in his evaluation of what matters in fiction: the portrayal and evocation of emotion.

My perspective on this: I have been puzzled by what at times has seemed to be a blurring of the line between emotion and feeling.

As I wrote in The Art of Character:

The difference between emotion and feeling is more one of degree than kind. Feeling is emotion that has been habituated and refined; it is understood and can be used deliberately. I know how I feel about this person and treat her accordingly. Emotion is more raw, unconsidered. It comes to us unbidden, regardless of how familiar it might be. Rage is an emotion. Contempt is a feeling.

[For a more detailed, neurological discussion of this distinction, see “Emotion and Feeling” in Descartes’ Error by Antonio R. Damasio.]

Both emotion and feeling are essential in fiction. But given the distinction between them, rendering them on the page requires different techniques. And that’s where, perhaps, Don and I have differing perspectives.

[Read more…]

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The Art of the Plausible

March 22, 2016 By John J Kelley

photo by Flickr's Farrukh — photo by Flickr’s Farrukh

There are few greater pleasures for those who love storycraft than picking up a book, easing into the first pages and then–bam–finding an entire afternoon has simply vanished. You know, those times when pages dissolve into a realm so convincing you find it hard to pull free. Over the years I have encountered many stories with intricate plots and clever narratives. But rarely does the whole of a tale envelop me, compelling me to walk with the characters, breathe their air, see through their eyes and, at times, even cry their tears.

I began pondering the matter during the recent WU Breakthrough Novel Dissection exploration of Station Eleven, a National Book Award finalist from author Emily St. John Mandel. Among the group a consensus arose that, despite the intriguing concept, the narrative at times distanced the reader. Early on, Liz Michalski described the book as “a story behind glass,” an assessment that resurfaced throughout the discussion, even as participants praised many attributes of the tale.

For me the criticism echoed days afterward for, you see, I have been similarly struggling. Despite chipping away at the outline of my current WIP, I have yet to feel fully immersed in the world of my characters as I did with my first novel. In a situation many of you will recognize, voices of doubt followed, taunting “If you can’t experience a sense of reality with your own story, how on earth will anyone else?”

Warding off full-blown anxiety, I began a quest for the keys to an immersive reading experience. Not surprisingly, given complexities of our craft, I found no definitive techniques. Still, I gained insights from revisiting books that had stuck with me, those that had transported me to worlds beyond my own.

For each, I asked a simple question: What made the experience “feel real”? [Read more…]

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