Gut feelings
The first time I remember focusing very specifically on descriptions of emotions and emotional states was for a short story called "Dead White Women" that I wrote for Vikram's fiction class freshman year (dear god that feels like SO long ago! when did I get old?!). I got a lot of feedback on the first draft that I was "telling" what characters (specifically the main character) felt rather than showing it. I made a point to pay more attention to what my emotions physically felt like after that -- the way my skull seems to tighten when I'm stressed, the queasiness of anxious fear, the limb-tingling of a sudden surprise revealed.
The Printer's Tale starts off with a lot of emotionally-trying moments for Noelle, and they really just keep coming. (Which, to be fair, is sort of what fiction IS. We don't want to read about people who are perfectly happy with their lives, and conflict demands some kind of internal uneasiness.) But I'm starting to feel like my descriptions of her emotions are incredibly repetitive. I have this tendency to describe every emotion as originating in the stomach or the gut -- a cursory search of the first three chapters reveals such phrases as "she felt her stomach plummet" and "a crawling uneasiness in the pit of her stomach" -- and especially taken out of context, these phrases seem so utterly ridiculous.
I feel like when describing emotions there are so many stock phrases to fall back on, which are not-quite-right to describe the emotion I'm going for but are closer than anything I could think up on my own, and so I sort of just go with them. But I'm wondering a couple of things now.
1) When you read descriptions of emotion that use these kind of shorthand phrases -- plummeting stomachs, nausea, stomach muscles tightening, etc. -- are they actually "showing" you something, or have they slipped back into the realm of "telling" shorthand?
2) How do you genuinely express the physical components of emotion in writing, and how do you keep those phrases from becoming stale? I might have one or two original-ish phrases but I feel like the early parts of this story involve a lot of the same character feeling different degrees of the same emotion, so it's a little difficult to keep it fresh...
So, readers and writers amongst you: I am open to all thoughts you may have on this topic!
The Printer's Tale starts off with a lot of emotionally-trying moments for Noelle, and they really just keep coming. (Which, to be fair, is sort of what fiction IS. We don't want to read about people who are perfectly happy with their lives, and conflict demands some kind of internal uneasiness.) But I'm starting to feel like my descriptions of her emotions are incredibly repetitive. I have this tendency to describe every emotion as originating in the stomach or the gut -- a cursory search of the first three chapters reveals such phrases as "she felt her stomach plummet" and "a crawling uneasiness in the pit of her stomach" -- and especially taken out of context, these phrases seem so utterly ridiculous.
I feel like when describing emotions there are so many stock phrases to fall back on, which are not-quite-right to describe the emotion I'm going for but are closer than anything I could think up on my own, and so I sort of just go with them. But I'm wondering a couple of things now.
1) When you read descriptions of emotion that use these kind of shorthand phrases -- plummeting stomachs, nausea, stomach muscles tightening, etc. -- are they actually "showing" you something, or have they slipped back into the realm of "telling" shorthand?
2) How do you genuinely express the physical components of emotion in writing, and how do you keep those phrases from becoming stale? I might have one or two original-ish phrases but I feel like the early parts of this story involve a lot of the same character feeling different degrees of the same emotion, so it's a little difficult to keep it fresh...
So, readers and writers amongst you: I am open to all thoughts you may have on this topic!