Gut feelings

[readingredhead]

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 (

Comments

[rondaview]

1) At first they show me something, but if I start becoming aware of the repetition of words, the phrases lose their power over me. Like, even stock phrases about different parts of the body would (I think) be enough to blend discretely into the background, while repetitions of words (or very similar variations on a theme, like phrases relating to the word "gut") draw attention to the author's complacency, and therefore to the storytelling artifice, where the author wouldn't necessarily want it.

2) I think a large part of it is really just plumbing the depths of your creativity (tm), and not just, as you say, resorting to stock phrases because they're easy and close at hand. Also, you could express emotion in other ways? Perhaps they don't react physically. Maybe there's a delayed reaction, where they stand totally impassive and then when the bad guy departs goes off and vomits in a bush. so that the very lack of reaction translates something to the reader. Or maybe the POV itself is briefly jarred -- like a narrative omission of some sort.

[readingredhead]

Oh look at you being all literary with narrative admission and jarred POV :) I think this is possibly how I write extreme shock, just naturally and without thinking about it as such -- suddenly giving NO emotional cues in the text as a way of showing character detachment.

This is just frustrating because there is no easy formula to follow in order to know when you need to give emotional cues and when you don't. I'm a fan of letting dialogue and interaction show tension between characters, or get across an emotional state, but this is hard to do in early chapters when you're still establishing characters so your readers aren't going to be familiar with these people, and won't necessarily know how to "read" their interactions without some cues being provided.

asfdljkadfs writing is hard.