Heightened emotion

So, forgive the back story:

Recently I had two fabulous betas read my nearly-not-quite-finished-new-shiny-manuscript. One came back telling me to cut the bits where the mc's emotions are stated outright because they're obvious; the other wanted me to point up the emotion and make the most of some scenes where it's muted.

I've worked a lot with both of them, so after I finished banging my head against the wall, I set to work and spent a lot of today removing statements of obvious emotion and trying to up the emotion in some of the scenes.


So. I have A Thought (possibly it's a failure of implementation thought and will be rendered insignificant if I manage to take the tweaking further, but it surprised me). I spent quite a bit of today working on an emotionally muted scene, giving it reasons to be A Scene Of Great Emotional Significance in the previous chapters and then re-writing the scene to make it more powerful.

And having done that, it's painfully raw and agonising. I don't like it at all. It takes a really dark story and makes it a painful, difficult story, and I don't want to write that.

Awful things happen to my mc -- it is a dark story -- but I don't want them to be really felt, I don't want him to dwell and I don't want the awful things he has to do to be what the reader focuses on.

Turns out I don't want heightened emotion (at least, not everywhere).

Is that weird? I always thought all scenes should be played for as much emotional impact as you can get, but now I wonder if that's actually what one wants -- if sometimes, for example, implied emotion can be more effective, and if sometimes (as in Dick Francis), you want a sort of cursory recognition of the emotion and then on to the next thing.

So, if that's so, when to use heightened emotion, and when to imply etc? Are there rules?

Not weird. Less is more, I think. If I think back to scenes (in other books) which have affected me the most, it's the ones which are really simple. For example, there's a bit in Glitterland where one character just touches the other character's hand with his thumb. And it made me blub. I can't be doing with authors emoting all over the shop.

As the beta in question... It's not about huge emotions but well placed ones. The smallest thing can convey it - like Mouse's example. But when a scene dmands emotion I think it should justify that demand. The peaks and troughs thing that carries a reader along and keeps them hooked?

I think there's a great deal to be said for restraint, both in writing and in real life. I'm a lover of Jane Austen and to me the emotional incontinence of an Emily Bronte makes my slapping hand itch. So if you don't want heightened emotion, particularly if the story is dark and unpleasant, remove it. And after all, some people, and therefore some characters if we are to be true to life, aren't the equivalent of emotional fire-hoses, spraying everywhere, so if this character is more buttoned up, that's how you should write him.

As ever I don't think there are any rules beyond "Does it work?" Though from a position of great age and greater ignorance I'd have thought YA would have more rather than less emotion, not only because teenagers are full of angst and everything turned up to max, but also because *unscientific generalisation alert* each new generation seems to be more extrovert than the one before and emoting is part of that, I'd have thought.

The prize is to get the reader to feel emotion. That doesn't necessarily follow from the character doing so. As a reader, I sometimes find that a character emoting will suck out of me the emotion I might otherwise have felt.

Two things I consider are: What is the overall emotional tone I want to have? What emotional display or behaviour fits with the personality of the characters. I try to see things from my character's perspective and let that determine the level of emotions. A sweeping display may be what one character may do and another may simply give a gentle touch.

I love writers like Dickens where the characters are emoting all over the place. But I also like authors who are more subtle, more restrained, like Jane Austen. On the other hand, the things Austen writes about don't usually call for heightened emotion. When they do, she doesn't hold back. Since I've brought up Sense and Sensibility lately, I'll use that as an example. After Marianne gets Willoughby's letter, as Austen describes it, "she put all the letters into Elinor's hands; and then covering her face with her handkerchief, almost screamed with agony." It's all the more shocking, of course, because it is Jane Austen and not Emily Brontë who wrote that scene. (For Brontë's Cathy Earnshaw, that could just be her daily temper tantrum.)

As with most things, I think it's about the specific details, about choosing the one right detail that strikes readers right through the heart and keeps on going. And that might be something as subtle as the brush of a thumb, or as overtly emotional as someone beating their knuckles raw against a wall. It's about the circumstances, and the character, and whether you've already been escalating the emotion since scene one. If no one has shown any restraint for 300 pages, it's a bit late to start on page 301. If everyone has been tightly controlled for those 300 pages, then a twitching muscle in somebody's jaw could signal volcanic emotion ready to go off ... just ... about ... any min— BOOM!

Well to be fair @springs, you just suggested a tweak, not that I went back and upped the run-up so that the scene became gut-wrenchingly painful. That was me.

So, two things -- first, sometimes you want the character to be understated, to do something understated, and that can be as effective -- or more -- as a page of dialogue and a great explosion of activity; second, sometimes you don't want much emotion from a scene -- you don't want to elicit it, even though you can, because it turns the feeling of the book (or that section of it).

An example, in lots of traditional fantasy, people get killed, often by the hero. By and large, it's skipped over pretty lightly. Each killing is the opportunity for emotional impact, but rarely actually provides that impact. If it did, the books would be very different, much darker, probably pretty unreadable.

I don't like Marianne! I only read Sense and Sensibility if I've read all the others very recently. Maybe it's the emoting (I like Cathy far less). I think along with almost everyone, my favourite Austen character is Anne.

I never cared much for Marianne, either. But a lot of what makes her difficult is the arrogance of youth, her conviction that if people don't think and feel the same way that she does there must be something wrong with them. I think Cathy is simply hateful. Yet I know that some readers feel that there are excuses for her, and they revel in the intense emotion.

But most of the time, I find, characters who wallow in their own misery aren't as sympathetic as they would be if (once it has been clearly established that they are wretchedly unhappy, or in pain, or whatever) they suck it up and get on with what they have to do. So that is one reason for not overdoing the emotion, aside from not wanting to make a scene or a chapter or a book too dark. If we want our characters to be sympathetic through all their trials and tribulations, we have to be careful they don't come across as whining.

But there is also the fact that people do adjust to things that would be intolerable if they didn't learn some detachment. They grow accustomed to chronic pain. They deal with stress, with exhaustion, with heartache, when they have a clear goal in sight (even if that goal is just surviving) and then fall apart later. And that hero who has to kill several times in the course of a book or series, he learns to distance himself to some extent, so that it's not the same gut-wrenching experience each time. He may or may not reach a point where he feels little or nothing, but even if on some level he still hates what he is doing, he has to block it out in order to do what he feels has to be done. And to be honest with readers we have to show that detachment. Which is another thing that has to be handled carefully, or he may end up looking like a cold-blooded b-----d when we don't want him to. (If that's what we want readers to see, then maybe writing the story is less challenging, because we get to be detached too. I've never written that kind of main character, so I don't know.)

If we want readers to understand what a character is feeling, we have to give them the clues, the right clues, as effectively as possible. We can't just assume readers will figure it out. They may get entirely the wrong impression. Yet another danger is that we may anesthetize readers early on by showing too much of the kind of thing that we want to shock them or move them in some way later. Some readers have read so much sensational literature that they are almost beyond being shocked. We have to ask ourselves if those are the readers we are writing for (maybe the answer is yes) or if we want to write for readers who are not yet so desensitized.

Once we know who we are writing for and what we want them to feel, it's all about striking the right balance. Even then, we aren't going to have the same effect on everyone. If we think we can, we'll be disappointed. But of course we have to try.

Hi,

The first rule of writing in my view is that you have to write for yourself because no matter what you write it'll never please everyone. So my thought would be to ask why don't you want to feel as a reader what your MC feels?

I would guess that it's because there's a cut off switch in the brain that says you can take so much pain and no more. By the sounds of things you are torturing your MC - (which is I assume necessary for the story and not simply for pleasure!) - but you want your reader to know he's being tortured but not feel it. The truth of the pain etc he feels would be too much. I.e. it's too much for you.

This leaves you a couple of options. You can lesson the pain for the reader who identifies with the MC by doing something like going to an outside POV so the reader isn't in his head. This can work but it runs the risk of being inauthentic. You end up with Superman like characters who when they suffer do it for only a short time and then bounce back as if nothing's happened. They feel a little false, two dimensional. Or else the story fails because you as the reader don't believe the character can behave in a certain way given what he's endured.

Or you can go with it, let the suffering flow, and be true to your character and story but risk upsetting readers. Here the example that springs to mind would be the Gap series by Donaldson. I've read the first book and the first bit of the second but gave up then because the visceral suffering of the characters was too much. Many others did the same, and it's one reason why I keep saying the man needs to take his prozac. The books are practically an exercise in sado masachism. But it's important to remember that as much as I and many others hate the books for that darkness, others love them for the same reason.

Cheers, Greg.

It came as a surprise to me (somehow -- I'm not sure how I missed it before) that I didn't want to emphasize the emotion in all scenes. And it was even more of a surprise to discover that when I did, it threw everything else off (as far as I was concerned).

I quite like stories where the gruesomeness is passed over. The Hunger Games is a book that does that -- it's awful and appalling, but there are only a couple of scenes where the character really allows herself to be overcome by it, and then she's back up being tough and determined again and getting on with surviving [or not, just to avoid possible spoilers].

I think you have to be true to you and true to your style. The fact is no writer is going to do everything perfectly and we all have our strengths and weaknesses. If this works for you and your voice then do it the way you are comfortable with.

The one thing I've learned as I've become more confident in myself is that sometimes the reviewer isn't right. I was terrified pushing back at the BBC final edit but I am so glad I did now. The work now feels more like mine - even if it isn't wall to wall jokes.

Like you the emotion for me in a story is secondary to the story sometimes. And as a writer and reader I do realise there is no need to state the bleeding obvious. We are all human and as readers we can have empathy for a character. If the character is going through a situation we can have a basic understanding of how we would feel in that situation and work things out.

I realized a while back that every plot has 2 parallel tracks. One is the action, and the other is the emotional thread. Many times, I put too much attention into the "what" happens and I neglect the other part. Action for action's sake falls flat, or worse, the characters get disjointed and behave illogically. The artistry comes when you can inform the reader of the emotional plot without using too-obvious descriptions of tingly feelings, clenching jaws, employing the caps lock key, and so forth. Above all, it must ring true.

In terms of what goes into the story, I think you're right, Hex, that you might want to tone the emotions down. For one thing, if character X is bereaved, he or she might actually not be a lot of use as a lead for some time, due to grief. The same probably goes for stories where the character goes into another world, or meets aliens for the first time, etc: the experience might just break your mind for a while (Stephen King and Peter Straub did this in The Talisman, and while it worked, the character it affected was a bit of a fifth wheel).

Also, there are characters who just won't show much emotion, either because they're numbed/hardened to the events around them or they consider it culturally wrong to do so. It's possible to imagine some futuristic space army where the soldiers have a group cry after every mission, but until then, it will be unpopular. It's not just some tough-guy machismo thing. George MacDonald Fraser, who fought in one of the nastier bits of WW2, wrote that nobody ever asked if anyone else was scared: of course they were, and asking it risked lowering morale, so the question was worse than pointless. And then there's the fact that a low-emotion story packs much more punch when the emotion comes. I find old war films far more powerful than newer ones, because of the understatement. The need to tell the viewer "This is tragic and you should cry now!" (cue slow motion and string section) often undermines the power of the story.

And finally, people get tired of constant emotion. A lot of fiction isn't there to tell you how bad the characters' circumstances are: it's about how the characters deal with those circumstances, internal or external, and whether they succeed or fail. So the continual sense of feeling bad about something can't really last all that long before the reader starts to wonder what the character is going to do about it.

Hex,

Would it be possible for you to post a short example of this in the cirtique section?

I often struggle with trying to write emotion in my stuff (I understand the don't state the obvious emotions, it the "not enough" that's my issue). I think it would be really benificial for everyone to see how the beta transforms.

Tempted by the (grim)dark side, you will be... In a draft of a book in a room a long long time ago, my character was forever (semi) manfully hiding his emotions which worked in one scene, but he kept doing it, and became wimpy in the end. Less is more, no doubt. Allow the reader's imagination to fill in the emotion and every reader will do it for you, saving you a heck of a lot of writing.

Creeps in, feeling the need to defend herself a little. I have no problem with sparse emotion. I don't want books brimming with it on every page. I like rayguns and action and stiff manly shoulders as much as the next person.

But I also don't want books with no emotions. Why would anyone read anything that didn't move them? And without something to hang that on, how is a reader supposed to know what to feel? Showing on its own doesn't do that.

I think it's like the balance between telling and showing. If we have no tell, we have no depth. If we have no show, we're not drawn in. The emotions are the tell here, surely? We can show shuddering shoulders, or jaws clenched and worried. We can hint all we like through actions, but sometimes, just like with telling, we need a really good line that says this is how I feel. Not pages and pages of it, just a drop in. And, if it's done well, it can be chillingly good.

In the scene Hex is working on, I felt that a little emotion was needed. Not a lot. But it was an important scene, a pivotal one in terms of the book. I haven't said your character should get in touch with his inner self and emote all over the place - I've said in this one scene I, as the reader, felt that it was flatter than it would have been with the single deft touch of something to break my heart.

An example:

It was on the morning of September 22nd that Captain Antonio Corelli of the 33rd Regiment of Artillery, knowing that hte white banner was about to be raised over the HQ at Argostoli, having had no sleep for three days, mounted his motorcycle and sped towards Pelagia's house. It was then that he threw himself into her arms, rested his burning eyes upon her shoulder, and told her, "Siamo perduti. We have run out of ammunition, and the British have betrayed us."

(so, all show here. Nothing emotional, I'm drawn in...)

She begged him to stay, to hide in the house, in the hole in the floor, along with his mandoline and Carlo's papers, but he took her face in his hands, kissed her without the tears that he was too tired and too resigned to weep, and then rocked her in his arms, squeezing her so tightly that she thought her ribs and spine would crack. He kissed her again and said, "Koritsimou, I am going to die. Remember me to your father. And I thank God I have lived long enough to love you."

(Still showing, but just the hints of a tell in there, in the dialogue.)

He drove away, the dust-cloud mantling higher than his head. She watched him go, and went inside. She gathered Psipsina into her arms and sat at the kitchen table with a cold talon of dread clutching at her heart. Men are sometimes driven by things that to a woman make no sense, but she did know that Corelli had to be with his boys. Honour and common sense; in the light of the other, both of them are ridiculous.

(and here, the small tell of emotion, the cold talon of dread, the line that tells us her understanding of him rounds off the scene. Without that little blast to finish it the scene would be half what it is.)

So, it was never about reams of emotion. But I also think this thread makes it sound like we don't want any emotion, to show it all. But then where's the balance? Surely it's about injecting it in the right place, at the right time, to the right extent?

A lovely excerpt from one of my favourite books to illustrate your point. As Captain Corelli might have said, "Bravo."

I'll do the creeping and justifying too -- I overdid my response to your suggestion, @springs, that's all. I went from a scene that you found a little emotionally flat, to one where everything was awful.

Hopefully it won't hurt to talk about this in general terms:

In the scene, my mc kills someone. In the original scene, she was an enemy, and he killed her to defend someone else, and all he thought about (pretty much) was how to stop her attacking his friend, and then how to stop his friend realising he'd killed another person.

In the revised scene, I'd gone back to earlier in the story and put in a scene where the mc and the woman he kills have a conversation and recognise the good in each other, and aspects of their shared pasts and shared fears, and he discovers her name.

So instead of killing a bad guy and getting on with his life (in this case, attempting to seduce the friend he saved), he kills a complicated and familiar person, one with a name, and it's much, much heavier and darker.

It was my fault -- I made all the changes. Now I've brought it back, and added a tiny bit of emotion, and I think it works.

(and I totally agree about emotion and telling -- sometimes it's exactly what you need).

It's important to the keep the audience in mind. In literary fiction, show don't tell is the norm. The reader is expected to draw on their own experience to fill in the emotion. Explicitly describing emotion is much more common, even expected, in genre fiction. One of the complaints about literary fiction and classics by people who read mostly contemporary mass-market fiction is that it's not emotionally engaging, or they didn't feel a connection with the characters.