how to write fiction

How to Use Layers to Create Rich Character Emotions

August 5, 2016 by • Marcy's Blog, Writing • Tags: , , , • 0 Comment

By Marcy Kennedy (@MarcyKennedy)

One of the least effective ways to convey character emotions is to tell the reader what the character was feeling: fear, love, jealousy, anger. Before I go on to look at how we can create a rich emotional life for our characters that will touch our readers’ emotions, I think we need to break down why telling an emotion doesn’t work.

When we’re in the middle of an emotion, we don’t stop to think about what emotion we’re experiencing and to name it—we just experience it. The nature of emotions is that they tend to inhibit our ability to think logically and rationally. So when we label an emotion at the time our character is experiencing it, it feels like someone else is talking about that character or like our character is unrealistically self-aware.

Labeling an emotion also strips out everything that makes that emotion individual and fresh. It takes the personality out of it so that it lays flat on the page. We don’t learn anything about the character.

Despite this, many of us are tempted to label the character’s emotions in our writing because we don’t want to risk confusing the reader about what our character is feeling. We want to be sure they know.

Context should help alleviate confusion. (After all, if our character is grabbed from behind while walking down a dark alley, her racing heart probably isn’t due to love.)

But the real key to clear emotion that’s also going to resonate with the reader is adding in layers.

Layer #1 – The Physical Symptoms of the Emotion

Emotions affect us physically in visceral ways we can’t control. Our palms sweat. Our hands tremble. We gasp or yelp or screech. 

When we put these reactions on the page, we’re not only reminding the reader of times they’ve felt those same physical symptoms. We’re also bringing them in close to our character so they’re experiencing the emotion from the inside rather than simply watching it from the outside.

(If you want to know more about visceral reactions, check out my guest post over at Jami Gold’s blog.)

Layer #2 – Character Thoughts and Dialogue

What a character thinks and what they say can give away what they’re feeling as well. Even more interesting at times is when what they think doesn’t match up with what they say. In those cases, we’re showing their true emotions and how those emotions contrast with how they feel they need to portray themselves to the people around them.

Layer #3 – Actions Your Character Would Do When Experiencing That Emotion

Our bodies speak to our emotions in big and small ways. An impatient character might bob the foot of their crossed leg. A character who received shocking news might sink into a chair. A character who is desperate might stretch their hands out toward the person they’re pleading with.

Allowing our characters to transmit their emotions in this way helps the reader understand what they’re feeling and it also adds depth.

Let’s look at a quick example. To add some context, our viewpoint character Becky has been waiting by the window for her husband to come home. He’s late.

The Telling Version:

A police car pulled to a stop in front of their house, and two officers got out. Fear shot through her.

The Showing Version With All Three Layers:

A police car pulled to a stop in front of their house, and two officers got out.

Trembling started in her fingers and worked its way up her arm like some kind of a localized seizure. She dropped the curtain into place, and took one step, two, back away from the window.

Craig wasn’t that late. He was flat tire late. Or traffic jam late. Or the-meeting-ran-long late. He wasn’t uniforms-notify-the-next-of-kin late.

Not every emotion needs this much emphasis. Not every moment in your story will be important enough to warrant it. But if your characters feel flat or if your emotions are coming across muddy, especially at times when their emotions are essential, then try adding in more layers.

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Using a Montage to Handle Time in Fiction

February 11, 2016 by • Marcy's Blog, Writing • Tags: , , , • 8 Comments

Image Credit: Zoli Plosz/freeimages.com

Image Credit: Zoli Plosz/freeimages.com

By Marcy Kennedy (@MarcyKennedy)

Welcome back to my mini-series on handling time in our fiction. Today I want to talk about what I call the montage.

If you watch movies, you’ve likely seen a montage. It’s a quick collection of images used to compress time or information. In other words, it’s a pacing tool.

And a montage can help us handle the passage of time in our fiction. What I mean by that will make more sense when I show you how they’re used, so let’s dive in.

Montages for Compression of Time

As an editor, I often have a discussion with writers over “empty” scenes—scenes without enough happening in them to justify their existence or where the character’s goal isn’t exciting in and of itself. They make the story feel slow, but the writer will argue that the scenes are important because they need to show time passing. What they often need instead of all those extraneous scenes is a time-compression montage.

In movies, time compression montages are used when it’s important to know that something is happening—for example, a character is learning a new skill—but it’s not important enough or interesting enough to spend a long time showing it happening.

In other words, the fact that this time passed or that this skill was gained is more important than the details of what happened during that passed time or skill acquisition.

I’ll give you a quick example of how a time-compression montage might look on the page.

Let’s say we have a woman in the 1800s awaiting a letter from her husband, who has gone ahead of her across the continent to set up a home for them and was supposed to send for her once he arrived.

Each day I walked to the post office to check our box. Each day the clerk came back empty-handed. At first it was, “Is there something special coming, dear?” and then “Are you sure he has the right address?” and finally “Letters get lost all the time. I wouldn’t worry.” By the time winter set in, she didn’t say anything at all. When I asked if I had any mail, she simply shook her head. She wouldn’t look me in the eyes.

In the movie Notting Hill, when Hugh Grant’s character is walking through the market and the seasons change around him, that’s a time-compression montage. A Knight’s Tale (starring Heath Ledger) used multiple montages in this way. The novel version of Bridget Jones’s Diary by Helen Fielding uses at least one montage. If you watch for them from now on, you’ll see how frequently time-compression montages show up in fiction, on both screen and page, across all genres.

Montages for Backstory

I could write a whole series about backstory (and I might eventually). The biggest danger of backstory is that we insert it in such a way that it stops the present-day action dead. (A close second is adding unnecessary backstory, even in small bites.)

I could name on one hand the number of times I’ve come across a flashback (a piece of backstory turned into its own scene) that was essential enough to justify its existence and worked well. Very rarely is a scene-length flashback the best way to handle backstory. That’s not to say that the backstory itself isn’t essential—sometimes it can be—but we need to handle it properly.

There are many ways to do that. One particularly effective method for emotionally charged bits of backstory is to use a backstory montage.

The best way I can explain how this works is to point you to the movie K-Pax. Near the end, the psychiatrist, Mark Powell, has gone back to the home of Robert Porter, the man he believes is Prot (a patient who claims he’s an alien). As the sheriff tells the story of the rape and murder of Porter’s wife and daughter by an ex-con, we see these flashes of images of what happened.

We can use the same method in our stories when we want to share backstory or have our character relive a particularly traumatic event in the past, but we also want to keep the present day story moving.

Share a present day event, then a flash of images or sounds or smells. A present day event, and then a flash of the memories it triggers. It works like a chain of links as the character struggles to face the past without losing touch on what’s happening in the present. The montage flashes should work in sequential order to tell their own mini-story alternating with the present-day story of the character.

Montages for Altered States of Mind

Sometimes we run into a spot where our character is very sick, drugged, having a mental break, or is in an otherwise altered state of mind. For example, when Katniss has been stung by the tracker jackets in The Hunger Games and she’s hallucinating, stumbling through the forest.

These are moments when we need to cover what could be a large area of time in a fast, interesting way. We also need to be able to do it in an authentic way that feels like we’re still inside the viewpoint character.

Let me show you how this might look.

Angie struggled to stay awake—some part of her brain screamed at her that she should after a head injury—but her whole body felt strange. Achy and heavy and hot. Black dots swam in her vision and the world was upside down. No, the world was right side up. The car was upside down. Windshield smashed and glass all over the floor-ceiling.

Her eyes slid shut. Flew open.

Sirens. Red and blue and white flashes of light. A voice saying “on three.”

Daggers of pain plunged into her whole body and blackness swallowed her again.

White walls in a moving room. Someone taking her pulse. An IV line dangling from her arm.

Beeping machines. A mask over her face. The stench of skunk.

She fought her way back to consciousness. The room smelled of antiseptic and sweat, and she brushed her fingers over a thin, rough blanket. This wasn’t her house and it wasn’t her bed. The crash. Someone had t-boned her on the way home from work, right? She couldn’t quite pull all the pieces from her memory, but how else would she have gotten here.

The curtain around her bed pulled back, and a woman in smiley face scrubs leaned over her. “Nice to see you awake again. On a scale of 1-10, how would you say the pain is today?”

Angie has been drifting in and out of awareness for nearly a week by the time she finally comes fully awake.

While we have the option of skipping over times like this, a montage can show the passage of time in a natural and interesting way.

Have you ever tried to write a montage? Or would you like to share an example of a montage from a book or movie that you felt worked particularly well?

Interested in more ways to improve your writing? Deep Point of View is now available! (You might also want to check out Internal Dialogue or Showing and Telling in Fiction.)

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Inner Dialogue in Your Fiction: What It Is and How to Tell Good from Bad

April 3, 2013 by • Marcy's Blog, Writing • Tags: , , , , • 19 Comments

By Marcy Kennedy (@MarcyKennedy)

Inner Dialogue in Fiction

Image by Rafael Marchesini

I’ve received a lot of questions via email lately on inner dialogue (also known as internal monologue), which usually means it’s time for me to write a post on something 🙂

So welcome to the first in a three-part series on how to handle the voices inside your characters’ heads.

First we need to make sure we’re clear on what we mean by “inner dialogue” and how to tell good inner dialogue from bad.

What Is Inner Dialogue?

The simplest definition is that inner dialogue is what your character is thinking.

However, because the definition is so simple, a lot of writers get confused about the difference between the character thinking naturally to themselves and a character narrating for the benefit of the reader. Inner dialogue is not narration.

The movie While You Were Sleeping uses both, so it’s a great way to point out how they’re different. (If you don’t own the movie, search for it on You Tube and watch until the Christmas tree goes through the window.)

The movie starts with a voice over as we see a little girl and her father on a bridge with the sun setting in the background.

Okay, there are two things I remember about my childhood. I just don’t remember it being this orange…First, I remember being with my dad. He’d get this far away look in his eyes and say, “Life doesn’t always turn out the way you planned.” I just wish at the time I’d realized he meant my life. 

Lucy, the main character, is talking directly to us. It’s narration. This is what we want to avoid. (Yes, there are exceptions, but that’s another post about good narrative vs. bad narrative.) We don’t want it to feel like the main character is talking at us. It tends to come across like a lecture, and lectures are boring. And, more importantly for the issue at hand, it’s not inner dialogue.

Instead, inner dialogue should feel like we’re eavesdropping on our character’s thoughts to herself.

A little later in the movie we see Lucy trying to haul a Christmas tree through her window into her upper-floor apartment. She rants to herself…

Forty-five dollars for a Christmas tree and they don’t deliver? You order $10 worth of chow mein from Mr. Wong’s, they bring it to your door. Oh, I should have got the blue spruce – they’re lighter.

In a novel, this would have been given to the reader as Lucy’s thoughts. That is internal monologue, and it’s amazing when done well.

The Two Unbreakable Rules of Inner Dialogue

Rule #1 – Only use inner dialogue for the point of view character (unless you’re writing in omniscient POV). If you introduce inner dialogue for a non-POV character, it’s head hopping, one of the worst point of view sins.

Rule #2 – Only share thoughts that advance the plot. We don’t need to hear every passing thought that flits through your character’s head. We do need to hear the important ones. (I’ll explain what those are in the next post.)

But If It Follows These Rules, Does That Mean It’s Good?

If your inner dialogue follows these two rules, it still needs to pass the three question test in order to be deemed good. If it fails, you need to either rewrite it or delete it.

Would my character think this?

Do you normally mull over the color of your carpet? I don’t. I also don’t think about the color of my best friend’s hair (because I’ve seen it so many times). I don’t think about the sound my truck makes or even what route to take to get home.

If your character doesn’t care about it, they won’t think about it. If your character wouldn’t think about it, it’s a point of view error. You can’t try to sneak in information through inner dialogue, no matter how important you think it is.

Is this the way they’d think it?

If your inner dialogue passes the first test, you still need to ask if they’d think about it in the way you’ve written it.

Let’s say I would be thinking about my truck because it starts to make a strange noise while I’m driving home. I’m likely to worry about whether I’m going to get stranded on the side of the road in the dark. Or about where we’ll get the money for repairs if something is wrong.

If my dad is driving my truck and hears a strange noise, he’s going to describe it in words I’d never think of (a rattle, a grind, a whine, a screech), and he’s going to think about what the causes could be. He knows the parts of an engine or the breaking system.

But it goes further than this. What tone would they use in this situation? And remember all those questions we asked when talking about making dialogue unique to your characters? They apply to inner dialogue as well.

Would they be thinking this now?

Context is everything. On a normal day, I might hear that noise and think about it. If there’s a man with a gun in the seat next to me, I’m not going to think about that noise unless there’s a way I think I can leverage it to get away.

If you have questions about internal dialogue, now is the time to ask them. I can always extend the series. Do you struggle with inner dialogue?

Want to learn more? Check out my book Internal Dialogue: A Busy Writer’s Guide!

(You might also be interested in checking out Deep Point of View, Description, or Showing and Telling in Fiction.)

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