Showing Character Emotion: The Secret Weapon to Engage Readers
Last week I wrote about 5 Ways to Punch Up Your Prose. Those are things to keep in mind to make your fiction more engaging, like varying sentence structure, using strong verbs, describing with vivid details, and so on. Today I want to focus on something that is a next-level area to keep in mind: showing emotion on the page.
This is challenging for many writers. We’re always told “show, don’t tell,” and this is especially true when the reader needs to know how a character feels about something.
It’s easy to slip into cliché here: pounding hearts, hands balled into fists, and so on. These can indicate how a character feels, but they are external description, best used sparingly, or when a point of view character needs to describe what they infer someone else is feeling:
Jake’s face flushed a mottled red, and he leaned forward as though about to leap over the desk and throttle me.
Then, you can add to the tension:
“Don’t ever talk over me in public again,” he growled.
I swallowed and forced myself to sit up straight and not shrink back. He thought he was so tough, but he wasn’t going to push me around. In fact, he ought to thank me for jumping in before he could make even more of a fool of himself in front of the CFO. Dumbass.
As you can see, I've mixed in physical indication of emotion and your most potent weapon for indicating emotion – direct thought.
Notice that I never say that Jake is angry. I never say the narrator is nervous or indignant. We don’t actually know who is “right” here – maybe Jake is a blowhard and an idiot; maybe the narrator is always rushing in, thinking they know better than everyone else. But we’re seeing the interaction from the narrator’s point of view. We’d need to read much more of the story to understand whether the narrator is reliable or not.
(Unreliable narrators – where the reader understands that there is something profoundly wrong with their view of the world – are delicious to write, but need to be handled carefully.)
This all points out the power of interiority. You don’t need to tell the reader directly what is happening. You don’t need to have your characters screaming in anguish, pounding their fists on the table, or other overwrought visuals. You definitely don’t need exclamation points for emphasis.
What gives a scene its power is the reader’s immediate experience of the emotion, along with the character, even if it’s not the way we ourselves would react in that situation.
The policemen strode up the walk, two of them, faces grim. Rose’s heart slammed once, suddenly – and everything receded, becoming small and narrow as though seen from the wrong end of a telescope. The two figures in dark blue. Fallen leaves scattering in a sudden gust of wind. Steel-gray clouds, heavy with rain. She walked to the door as if pushing through water. Some part of her noted that it felt, indeed, exactly like a wave about to crash down over her. As long as she could maintain this distance, everything would be fine. Once she opened that door, she would cross a threshold. She did not want to cross it, but she had no choice. She could do this. Remain calm, deal with it all later. Yes, later.
Hopefully you can feel the character’s jolt of fear, her apprehension, the knowledge of a terrible oncoming grief. We get a sense that Rose is a rather self-contained person, who isn’t going to break down right away. Her grief may tear her apart inside, but she’ll never let those policemen see it.
Contrast that with:
The doorbell chimed and Rose almost danced out of the kitchen. As she passed the livingroom window some part of her registered that the familar sporty red car – that ridiculous car! - was not in the driveway, but she threw open the door, expecting Jenny to bound in with her usual huge grin and bear hug.
Instead, two policemen stood there, grim and deferential. Before either of them spoke, Rose knew. Something snapped, sharp as a wire, cutting now from every other previous moment of her life. Cold gripped her; she could manage no words.
Their mouths moved. Before they’d finished speaking, a scream ripped from her. They led her inside, gripping her arms firmly. Sat her down on the sofa. They were still talking – accident – CPR – dead on arrival – but this wasn’t really happening, was it? It was someone else’s life. Some nightmare she’d accidentally wandered into, and soon she’d wake up, and everything would be fine.
This is longer, but also a stronger, more visceral reaction. Rose is a very different person here. Not frozen, controlled, as in the first example, but more emotional, even though they’re both experiencing the same denial in the face of tragedy. How your character reacts must be part of her character: Is she a tightly controlled person, or an emotional one? Of course, a shock might mean she reacts very differently to her normal way or being. In this case, you have to work on making her reaction believable.
She felt the scream rip from her throat, heard it as if it came from some other person. How could that be? She’d told herself she would stay in control, at least until these terrible men could leave her in peace. But here they were, leading her inside, gripping her arms firmly but gently, seating her on the sofa as though she were a piece of fragile china.
Here Rose is used to being in control, maybe even prizes that control, but this news is so devastating she can’t contain her reaction.
Learning how to convey emotion effectively through the interior thoughts of your characters comes naturally to some writers. For others, it must be more consciously learned. You don’t want to write as though you’re outside the scene, describing it. You want to write as though you’re inside it, experiencing it directly with your character.
This can be tricky to master, but it gives your story depth and resonance. Your characters will feel more like real people, and not puppets you’re moving around on the page.
Want to know more about this? Check out Making a Scene: How to Go Deep to Maximize Action and Emotion. And How to Express Character Thought and Emotion.
Also, study passages from some of your favorite writers. Note when you feel a reaction to something the protagonist is going through. Pick it apart: how does the writer make you feel what you’re feeling?
Be aware that if your favorite is decades old, there may be more psychic distance between character and reader. In contemporary stories, readers want to be right in it with the characters. Some literary writers make a different choice, opting for a particular style to convey an affect. However beautiful or dazzling the prose, it may distance the reader from the character’s direct experience. As long as it’s deliberate, it can be an effective choice – we come to literary works with a different eye, and expecting a different experience. Even so, in this era many writers are trying to marry the best storytelling skills (including interiority) with literary craft, in order to maximize readership.
Some writers also use a strong, particular voice that subsumes everything else. In humor or satire, for example, the voice may carry the weight of character emotion. Take this example from Douglas Adams’ The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, where our hero, Arthur Dent, has just been rescued from an Earth destroyed to make way for a hyperspace bypass:
“England no longer existed. He’d got that - somehow he’d got it. He tried again. America, he thought, has gone. He couldn’t grasp it. New York has gone. No reaction. He’d never seriously believed it existed anyway. The dollar, he thought, has sunk forever. Slight tremor there. Every Bogart movie has been wiped, he said to himself, and that gave him a nasty knock."
We understand that he’s in shock, something terrible has happened - and yet the humorous tone is still there, overriding any actual shock and horror that would be permeating the scene if it were written in a more realistic way, when someone had actually lost their home and everyone they knew.
You can do this as well, of course, if you have the skill to maintain the tone throughout the novel. We’re meant to identify with Arthur - he’s our guide and avatar in this crazy new Galaxy he finds himself in - but we don’t empathize in quite the same way as we would with a more realistic story. The humorous tone carries us along through all Arthur’s crazy adventures.
How do you deal with emotion on the page? Do you find it easy, or challenging? Which writers do you think do this well? Let us know in the comments!
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