Three Steps to Creating Believable Character Emotions
By Marcy Kennedy (@MarcyKennedy)
I’ve been a mother who accidentally killed her only child. I’ve been an orphan stalked by the man who murdered her family. I’ve been a barbarian warrior struggling with how to survive in his brutal, pagan culture now that he’s come to faith in the one, true God. I’ve been all these things without ever actually giving birth, losing my parents, or swinging a sword in battle.
As a fiction writer, you’re also going to need to write about characters who are nothing like you and who are in situations you’ve never been in. And to make it work, you’re going to need to convincingly convey their emotions. Even in plot-driven novels, readers want characters whose emotions seem real and powerful. The question for us as writers is, how do we write emotions our readers will be able to feel and participate in when we have no personal experience with what our character is facing?
Identify the Foundational Emotion
When we’re dealing with something new, it’s easy to fall back on clichés. The first step to real emotion in your characters is to set aside your “knee jerk” reaction. Look at the character you’re created, within the story you’ve created, and go deeper.
Take the example of Miriam, whose husband cheated on her. What’s Miriam feeling?
Anger of course, you say. She probably is angry, but anger is usually a shield for other emotions.
Is her anger motivated by fear that he’s going to leave her? Wounded pride and self-esteem because she wasn’t enough for him? Jealousy because he spent time with this other woman when their son needed him?
On the other hand, Miriam could be feeling relief because she’s wanted to divorce her husband for years and now she has an excuse. Or because she cheated on him as well. Her anger is only a cover. She’ll get more in the divorce that way.
Just maybe, Miriam is secretly happy that her husband cheated. He’s always pretended to be so perfect, telling her how lucky she is that he puts up with her, making her feel like an inconvenience, like the rock stuck in the tread of his shoe. Now she has proof that other people won’t be able to ignore. Yet she can’t let them know she’s happy. She’d lose the sympathy she craves if she did that.
Do you see the difference it would make? You need to know the deep emotion before you can try to write it.
When Have You Felt That Emotion?
While as human beings we can experience an almost infinite number of unique situations, those situations elicit a limited number of emotions. If you can pinpoint the emotion and a time when you’ve felt the same one, you can expand on it to make it fit the situation, even if you find the character you’re writing about to be disturbing, frightening, or morally reprehensible.
In my short story “The Replacements,” Natalie returns home after years on the street only to find that her parents have “replaced” her by having two new children. She decides that she needs to kidnap and kill her brother and sister so that there will be room for her in her parents’ lives.
I’ve never been in that situation. I doubt you have either. But I have felt unloved and unwanted. I have felt second best. I know the lengths that a person will go to feel like they belong.
If you’ve felt guilt, you can write about a mother who accidentally killed her child.
If you’ve ever wanted to make someone pay for how they hurt a person you love, you can write about a husband who murders his wife’s rapist.
The situation doesn’t need to be the same as long as the emotion is.
Jot Down Your Memories
What did your body feel like when in the throes of that emotion? What did you do? What were you thinking?
You’ll also want to look for concrete details. What smells brings back that moment? What sounds, what tastes? You might not use that exact stimuli in your story, but you’ll be able to use it to find similar sensory details that will mean something to your character.
You can also learn a lot by seeing how people close to you react under certain emotions.
It might seem counterintuitive at first, but the more time that’s passed between when you felt the emotion and when you’re writing about it, the better. Time clears away the clutter and leaves you with details that will touch a reader’s heart.
With this exercise, you’re simply building a foundation to grow from. Your character isn’t you, so you’ll need to customize each emotion, but this lets you “become” people that you originally thought you had nothing in common with and to “live” situations you’ve never been in. When you do that, your characters’ emotions will come across to your reader as genuine.
Can’t I Just Tell the Reader They Were (Insert Emotion Here)?
The simple answer is no.
If I told you I was sad, what would you feel? Maybe a little pity for me (if you’re a softy). But you’re not emotionally invested if I only tell you what I’m feeling. If you see my sadness, watch me struggle with it, and learn the details, suddenly it might touch your heart enough that you find yourself crying along with me. That’s what you want your readers to do.
(For the next two weeks, I’ll be expanding on this and talking about showing vs. telling, so stay tuned!)
What book have you read where you connected with the character even though you’d never been in a situation like theirs?
I hope you’ll check out the newly released mini-books in my Busy Writer’s Guides series–Strong Female Characters and How to Write Faster–both currently available for 99 cents.
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Jan 23, 2013 @ 13:17:00
great article Marcy. thanks so much
Jan 23, 2013 @ 14:30:45
You’re welcome 🙂
Jan 23, 2013 @ 14:24:30
I am writing pages involving lots of emotion at the moment. Your post helps. Thank you.
Jan 23, 2013 @ 14:30:13
I’m glad it helped. Characters are my favorite aspect of writing.
Jan 23, 2013 @ 15:14:09
You wrote this just for me, didn’t you? LOL. Love this post!
Jan 23, 2013 @ 16:28:30
I think your critique just happened at the perfect time in my posting schedule 🙂
Jan 23, 2013 @ 16:23:06
Love the idea of a jotting down our memories to better describe emotion. Great post!
Jan 23, 2013 @ 16:27:43
I’ve never been one to keep a journal, but I try to jot down a few notes as I’m coming out of a really rough situation. For example, when my front tooth fell out and I knew I was facing painful surgery and huge costs to fix it, my notes are about sitting on the stairs and cracking jokes to my dad so that we laughed, until I broke down and cried. I didn’t want to cry. I wanted to be brave. I can see using that some day for a character who doesn’t want to admit how upset she is about something so she makes fun of it, but her laughter breaks down her walls, allows her to cry and be comforted by someone else.
Jan 23, 2013 @ 16:49:04
Excellent post, Marcy 🙂
Jan 23, 2013 @ 18:37:17
Very good information, Marcy. When you’re really deep into your characters’ heads it is so much easier to create the scene then when you’re just a narrator telling a story.
Good examples!
Patricia Rickrode
w/a Jansen Schmidt
Jan 24, 2013 @ 11:39:10
I know everyone else has said it already, but this really is a great post. So often I feel that writing posts and writing blogs just regurgitate the same information I’ve heard a thousand times. But you give us information that expands on the known and new ways to actually put it into practice. You are so right that there are only a certain number of emotions, and we’ve all felt them in our lives. I love the different emotions that you’ve shown a character can have about the same situation. I want to save this post so I can come back to it later.
Jan 24, 2013 @ 18:55:30
Great write up Marcy. I love it in a book when you suddenly uncover why someone is acting in a particular manner. It’s so much more involving than being told that someone is simply doing something (that usually just suits the author).
Cheers
Jan 25, 2013 @ 05:44:39
Hi Marcy!
I really like the way you break craft down into bite-size pieces so that we can digest it easier. Thanks! 🙂
Jan 25, 2013 @ 06:22:21
Ooh…I never thought about writing down memories of emotions. That’s a really good idea! 🙂
Jan 25, 2013 @ 22:28:50
Wonderful post! I love the idea of journaling emotions. Great tips for getting the reader invested in our stories.
Jan 26, 2013 @ 02:47:10
I can’t think of a book at the moment, but I loved your story “The Replacements”.
Your examples of showing were outstanding and the questions you want writers to ask when thinking about our characters were as well. Sometimes, when people are angry they won’t even look at you.
Jan 27, 2013 @ 04:12:22
I do really well with conveying emotion via dialogue, but not as well elsewhere. I will have to delve further into my own memories to dig up appropriate feelings. I’m sure this exercise will help. Thanks for the great tip! 🙂
Feb 08, 2013 @ 04:15:02
Marcy, good information. This is probably one of the hardest parts of writing fiction, because we all are such complex beings. Yet it’s also so rewarding when we get that scene perfect with those emotions playing out as if the story was fact and not fiction.
Your short story sounds wild! I’ll have to check it out.
Thanks for sharing!!