Uncomplicated

While hiding one’s feelings helps in real life, such as during a domestic negotiation, it defeats what you are trying to do as a writer: connect with your readers. If they do not know how a character reacts to an obstacle, such as a fight with a partner, they are not allowed to participate vicariously. Instead, they are kept at arm’s length.

A routine element of my editing practice is writing suggestions to insert what a character is feeling at a given point in the manuscript. The responses, which I read in the next draft, reveal a great deal about how guarded the author is about revealing emotions in general. When I pen 100 or more of these suggestions, which is quite common, an author’s natural tendency to shield himself can reach neurotic proportions.

Writing down feelings in the first-person narrative voice can help, but only if you use the immediacy of the voice to be direct. Let’s say a wife upbraids her successful husband about a secret he has been hiding. How does he react? Here is one response: “I always wanted the warm fuzzy stuff from her, and now here I am being challenged to meet the most threatening pieces of my life.” The language is down to earth, but the author is being too fancy. Do you know any wives that are “warm and fuzzy”? And what are pieces of a person’s life? Lay it on the line, with a variant like: “She was always so docile—that’s why I married her—and now she was threatening to expose me.” Now the reader can feel worried.

Another trap I see commonly is naming the emotion. “I had no clue about the fragility she imposed on me until I felt it.” You might think at first that the sentence is awkwardly constructed, but in fact the problem is using the abstraction “fragility.” When a person is feeling fragile, she is about to scream, have a nervous breakdown, break down in tears, etc. Emotions surge forward from the primitive part of our brain, and primitives, I imagine, spoke plainly.

The same logic applies to loading up a sentence. Often a promising start is made, but then the author feels he must pile on to make the emotion authentic. That’s why a sentence like “My frightened distraction about being discovered overrode being embarrassed” doesn’t work. Sticking all those big words in the same sentence puts up a veil between me and the character. Break it into two simple sentences—using “discovered” and “embarrassed” as the verbs.

Exercise: Literary really means: more honest. If you want to describe how a person feels during a domestic fight, remember a fight you once had. It didn’t have to be with your spouse; a parent will suffice. Remember what you said, or better yet, what you wished you had said when you relived it afterward. If the emotions sting, or burn, you’re on the right track.

“It's in literature that true life can be found. It's under the mask of fiction that you can tell the truth.” —Gao Xingjian

Copyright @ 2024, John Paine