photo by Joanna

Sometimes we’re tempted to explain to our readers how our characters feel. It’s as though we don’t trust the power of our own writing. Even when our scene is inherently frightful – our character is being held up at gunpoint let’s say – we might fall back on something like, David shook with terror.

That’s pretty abstract. And as far as your reader is concerned,  meaningless.

Readers don’t want to be told about your character. They want to become them. They want to feel their pain, their joy, and everything in between.

So there’s got to be something tangible in the real world for them to connect to. We’re sensual beings, after all. And the way to our most primal emotions is not through our intellect but through concrete images.

The poet Wei Tai once said, “Poetry presents the thing in order to convey the feeling. It should be precise about the thing and reticent about the feeling, for as soon as the mind responds and connects with the thing the feeling shows in the words.”

Great writing evolves most intently by our attention to the objects in our story or novel. So the way to get the greatest, most imaginative and emotional resonance is not by focusing on your characters’ feelings or their thoughts, but by selecting a world for them to inhabit.

We are what we see.

Or as Charles Baxter once said, “…when people look at things, things look back.”

So if you’re going to give us the contents of your character’s bedroom, or describe the street he’s standing on at night, ask if those details are anchored in your character’s consciousness.

What our characters pay attention to and how they perceive the world around them often reveal more about their feelings than an explicit explanation of their mood can.

A view of the sun rising over the bay, at the same exact moment, will look different to a woman whose child is missing than to a woman who’s just fallen in love.

Emotions are loaded. And they’re pretty complex.

We never feel just one emotion, but several simultaneous and conflicting emotions. Anger can be wrapped up in fear, hurt, disappointment, even love.

The world observed by and in relation to character can embody the full spectrum of emotional layers, feelings that the characters themselves are not equipped to articulate, much less understand.

Take this excerpt from Suzanne Berne’s novel, A Crime in the Neighborhood.

Here, ten-year-old Marsha is reacting to a series of upheavals; her father has just deserted the family to carry on a love affair with her Aunt Ada, and Boyd Ellison, a young boy in the neighborhood, has just been found murdered behind the Spring Hill Mall.  Shortly after these two events collide, here is how Marsha observes the objects in her house:

 I noted the worn patches in the hallway’s Oriental runner, the scuff marks on the stairs, the scorch at the back of the lampshade in the living room. The screen was coming away from the screen door in one corner, curling away from the metal frame like a leaf. The volume-control knob had fallen off the hi-fi, leaving a forked metal bud. Steven had spilled India ink on the sofa, and if you turned over the left cushion, you found a deep blue stain shaped like a moose antler. I had never realized our house contained so many damaged things.

Berne doesn’t tell us Marsha feels sad about her father’s absence. Or fear about Boyd Ellison’s murder. She doesn’t explain that everything Marsha’s learned to trust has been suddenly, irrevocably turned upside down. She lets the objects in her house carry those feelings. Her sadness becomes embodied in “scuff marks on the stairs,” in the “scorch at the back of the lampshade,” in the deep blue ink stain on the sofa cushion.

We know she feels malfunctioned, damaged, broken, and stained herself.

There’s camouflage and, at the same time, revelation.

The narrator tells us something essential about herself, but by shifting the focus to the things in her house, she avoids self-pity and sentimentality.

Objects then can be figurative representations for what our characters can’t, won’t, or refuse to acknowledge about their own condition.

The poet T.S. Elliot called this the objective correlative, and it’s a great way to put “show, don’t tell” into action. He believed the most important element in writing is this:

Rendering the description of an object so that the emotional state of the character from whose point of view we receive the description is revealed without ever telling the reader what that emotional state is or what has motivated it.

Here’s a writing challenge for you adapted from an exercise by the late John Gardner.

A single mother is waiting at a bus stop. She has just learned that her young daughter has died violently. Describe the setting from the woman’s point of view WITHOUT mentioning the daughter or the death. How will the street look to this woman? What are the sounds? Odors? Colors? What will she notice? What will her clothes feel like? Write a 250-word description.

This exercise is demanding. But it’s probably one of best ways I know of to break the urge to explain how your character feels.

The idea is to recreate the character’s experience of the emotion, to come at it aslant rather than directly.

Try it.

And share your insights in the comments below.

photo by Colin Cubitt

Happiness might be great in real life. But it’s fatal in fiction.

Few things numb readers more than a character surrounded by birdsong and puppies, who isn’t risking something deeply important.

There’s no payoff when everything works out all hunky dory. Or when the outcome is as simple as a character getting what he wants. Or not.

Readers are hungry for danger.

We’re just hardwired that way.

We all have within us remnants of that fight-or-flight response inherited from our primitive ancestors. As we’ve evolved, opportunities to test our mettle have largely diminished. Rarely do we encounter saber-toothed tigers or barbaric enemy tribes.

And while we don’t necessarily need your characters to wage life or death battles, we still crave that primal adrenaline rush. We want to live dangerously with your characters, through them.

But it’s not physical danger we crave so much. It’s emotional danger.

To get your characters into trouble, and for their own good, they must be confronted with choices. Hard choices. The kind that shake their sense of who they are, or thought they were.

The Trouble With Conflict

We’re often told that characters must want something. And want it badly.

To create tension, there must be obstacles thrown into your character’s path. By the story’s end, your character either gets what he wants, or doesn’t.

At first glance, this may seem like an easy formula for plot structure. The trouble is, human desire and the messiness it dredges up are far more complex. That’s because we tend to have simultaneous desires rubbing up against each other. The conflict may arise from external circumstances, but they’re fought largely within, between our own emotional dualities.

And, as it often turns out, when we get what we want, there’s something equally important we’re forced to let go of. It might be our feelings about a loved one. A prejudice. What we believe is true about the world.  Or true about ourselves.

Conflict is an often misunderstood and overblown concept.

I think a better question to ask of your character is this:

What’s at stake? What hangs in the balance?

In Andre Dubus’s classic, A Father’s Story, Luke Ripley is faced with a choice: report a hit and run accident in which a young man dies, or hide the evidence to protect his only daughter.

If he reports the accident, he must also turn his daughter in to the police. If he covers up the evidence, he robs the victim’s parents of emotional closure and, at the very least, knowledge of what happened to their son. The latter goes against the very core of what Luke knows is morally and legally right.

The stakes would be high for any father in this situation.

But Dubus raises the stakes even higher by rendering a father who is also devoutly religious. Luke’s morning ritual centers around talking to God. He prays daily. Attends Mass each Sunday. His best friend is a priest.

So when the moment of decision comes, he’s wedged between two powerful but conflicting urges.

What hangs in the balance, what he is forced to question, is his relationship with God, the fulcrum of his very identity.

When writing your story, instead of asking, What is the conflict? try asking, What’s at stake? What does my character stand to gain? What does he stand to lose?

Whatever the outcome, something will  be lost, while something entirely unexpected might be gained.

That’s where the danger lies. And that is what your readers are hungry for.

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A common criticism that comes up in writing workshops is that a particular character isn’t “sympathetic.”

I once had a student who seemed pleased with this response. “You’re not supposed to like him,” she said.

Her character was the stereotypical bad husband; Tucker cheated on his wife, Gina, and to make matters worse, had initiated the affair during the months Gina was recovering from a crippling auto accident.

Now at face value, there’s nothing sympathetic or remotely likable about this guy.

But when readers yearn for sympathy, what they’re really after is connection. After all, we don’t necessarily have to like a character. We don’t even have to feel sorry for him. We just need to understand him.

Compassion

Junot Diaz once said that his growth as a writer was commensurate with his ability to become a more compassionate human being. In my view, compassion is an essential quality for writers to cultivate.

But summoning compassion can be a challenge, especially when writing about people who have harmed us in some way. Even characters wholly invented can suffer from our own pre-conceived notions.

I’m not suggesting you abandon your feelings about your characters. Just don’t be enslaved by them. Because here’s the thing:

Our feelings about our characters, however justified those feelings may be, often get in our way, presenting only a limited number of characteristics and circumstances that satisfy those emotions. If we’re going to create our best work, we need to seek the humanity in our characters. Including our oppressors.

To quote my wise teacher, Larry Sutin, “Love your villains.”

1. Start From the Premise That Most People Are Basically Good

They’re just flawed. Often fatally.

Even the best of us have imperfections. And the most troublesome people, if observed long enough and from enough angles, have traits we can identify with, admire, even root for.

The truth is, good people do bad things. And bad people do good things. In our weakest moments, all of us are capable of making immoral choices.

2. Explore Your Character’s Desire

Desire is the one thing we can understand even when the action taken to satisfy that desire is beyond our comprehension. We can’t fathom a woman killing her baby, but we can sympathize with her desire to save him from a life of slavery, as in Toni Morrison’s Beloved. We can’t condone a man covering up the evidence of a fatal hit and run accident, but we can understand a father’s desire to protect his daughter, as in Andre Dubus’ “A Father’s Story.”

Readers aren’t just interested in what characters do. They’re interested in why. Don’t just focus on surface events. Probe what’s underneath.

3. Tap Into Your Own Impulses

Many great actors say that when they play the role of a villain — a killer, let’s say — they’re pulling some shadow aspect of themselves.

The thing is, as unconscionable as our characters’ actions may be, we often have the very same impulses. We’ve just learned to suppress them. And here’s the great thing about our literary counterparts: they have full permission to act out the things we may want to do, the things we may fantasize about doing, but would never do.

My mentor Diane Lefer once said, “We all have a killer inside. We all have a saint inside. We have everything big and everything small.”

4. Interview Your Character

If you ask the right questions, they will have plenty to say to you. Some questions you might ask:

What are you most afraid of?
What’s the worst thing that could happen to you?
What do you want?
What’s keeping you from getting it?
What could they do to you?
What would you do to get what you want?
What are you willing to give up?
What hurt you so much in your life that you need to hurt others in order to heal?

5. Reveal a Chink in the Armor

If you present the stock villain devoid of human frailty, we’ll have a stock reaction to your story. Said another way, we won’t care.

Back to Tucker:

When my student dug deeper, she discovered that underneath Tucker’s infidelity, there was a lonely husband grieving his wife’s absence. It wasn’t novelty he was after. It was intimacy. Once this writer tapped into her character’s desperation, she was able to imbue him with vulnerability, to catch him in odd moments when his humanity slipped through the cracks.

We then had a very different reaction. I can’t say we liked Tucker. And we certainly didn’t applaud his affair. But we did feel enormous compassion and understanding.

What about you?

How do you find humanity in your characters?
What fictional or non-fictional characters have you sympathized with? Why?

Share your insights below.

The human body is the best picture of the human soul. ~ Ludwig Wittgenstein

It’s a scientific fact: body language speaks volumes about what’s truly in our hearts and minds. Postures, facial expressions, mannerisms, gestures, movements, the way someone holds his arms, what his eyes focus on — all these things, no matter how subtle, divulge what a person may be feeling at any given moment.

Some believe that talking is our primary mode of communication. But experts have found that we make more evaluations about a person based on what we see than on what we hear. Researchers say that 93% of all communication is non-verbal. That’s right, only 7% of communication is based on what we say.

Whether we are conscious of it or not, we are constantly decoding the visual signals of the people we encounter every day.

We don’t need words to tell us whether someone is happy, anxious, defensive, hostile, affectionate, relaxed, self-conscious or sad. We’re able to intuit these feelings from an involuntary display of physical expressions.

How perfectly this works in literature that seeks to dramatize characters rather than tell about them. Yet a common mistake among beginning writers is to rely on emotional labels that merely report how characters feel. Some examples:

Sophie was terrified.
David felt enormous grief.
John stared angrily.
I felt elated.

Such labels tell us virtually nothing about these characters’ emotions. And it reduces the prose to its least interpretative level. That’s because while the reader can intellectualize concepts such as terror, grief, anger and happiness, he cannot feel them. By showing how emotions and attitudes manifest in the body, you allow readers to participate. Rather than being told about your characters, the reader is forced to see.

Deborah Eisenberg, in her story “Mermaids,” deploys a deft command of body language to convey her characters’ emotions as well as the tensions between family members. She describes the adolescent  girl who turned to her father with a look “as if she were gazing at something on the other side of a person”, who stared at him “as red waves came up into her face.” And her father who then “looked down at the table as if it were an old, old. enemy.” She describes the teenage boy who, when asked by his father how his day went, “raised his serious dark eyes and then lowered them again” before responding.

Such non-verbal cues tell us so much more than merely saying that Janey felt a mix of rage, resentment and shame, that Mr. Lasky disapproved of his children, or that his son felt intimidated by him.

For writers who wish to disclose their characters’ inner world, it’s worth exploring the nuances of body language.

Try this. Go through one of your stories or chapters and look for moments where you want to transmit emotion. Eliminate any emotional labels or shortcuts that contain the word “feel” (e.g. I felt humiliated), or adverbs (as in, “He stared at his mother defiantly.”) Now without naming the emotion, convey your character’s feelings through non-verbal signals such as facial expressions, gestures, eye and body movements, postures and so on. Avoid stock expressions like “his heart sank” or “her hands trembled.” Go for something precise, concrete, and original. Allow your reader to be simultaneously outside and inside your character.

Tell me what you discover.