Emotions: your character’s and your own
I wrote a chapter of “Fae Death”, a work I’m collaborating on, the other night. It wasn’t very lengthy, only around 2,000 words, but by the closing sentence I was exhausted, both physically and emotionally. I couldn’t bring myself to do so much as look over what I’d written until the next morning.
Was I forcing the story? No. The dialogue very nearly wrote itself. My characters had veered slightly from my original road map, but that’s almost never a bad thing, it’s what gives them character after all. All that was needed was a slight nudge on my part to move them back in the direction they needed to go. The chapter ended well. Very well. So why was I so tired by the end of it?
The simple answer is that my characters were having a fairly heated discussion through most of the chapter. Their emotions were high, and their level of emotion forced me to pour a lot of my own into their conversation. If I hadn’t poured that level of intensity into them, the whole situation would have read as flat. By the time their conversation had ended neither they, nor I, had anything left to give. It was only by sheer coincidence that the scene was set at night so both my characters and their writer headed off to bed.
It’s this level of emotional involvement with your characters that makes them jump off the page and into the hearts of the reader. If you find that you’re writing what is supposed to be a deeply emotional scene, but you’re not feeling the emotions yourself, then you might want to try to put yourself a little farther into the minds of your characters. If you aren’t feeling what they are, how is your reader supposed to feel it?
And in the end, it’s the reader that we all write for, isn’t it?
January 11th, 2007 at 3:51 pm
Do the emotional states of the characters have anything to do with inner conflict and goals?
This is something I’m thinking a lot about these days as I write. Is her inner goal coming through? Is this conflict related to these goals?
There’s just so much more to writing than BIC. You have to understand psychology and create a whole world!
January 11th, 2007 at 8:00 pm
I would say that a character’s emotional state can have everything to do with their inner conflict and goals as well as the complete arc of a story. If a character’s mood changes significantly or if something occurs that changes his/her outlook on life, then their position in the tale has just been altered. There is no coming back form that.
As you said, you have to understand people. The world you’re walking them through should have been thought out before you’ve put them there. If the world hasn’t been constructed, you’re sure to run into inconsistencies. This is something that should be avoided at all costs.
If you don’t know all the rules, how can the character possibly have a chance?