How do we writers distinguish between an idea and a feeling?

[AG31]

Presumably feelings involve some level of somatization. Or do they?

Examples might be surrender, acceptance, attraction, anger.

Is this a subset of telling vs showing? But maybe, with an idea, there's nothing to show?

Thanks to @NotWise and his post about ideas for inspiring me to post this and one other post.

P.S. It's annoying to use "post" as the subject and verb in the same sentence. What does one do with a post other than post it???

 

[NotWise]

The definition of "feeling" might not be clear enough to draw a clean line between an idea and a feeling. If "feeling" refers to an emotion and "idea" refers to rational thought then an author could distinguish between them by showing an idea to be a logical conclusion, and a feeling to be an emotional reaction.

If you're talking about that core of eroticism that resides in people's minds, then I'm not sure there is a distinction. The underpinnings of eroticism date to childhood development. It lies there in waiting until something stirs it, and by then the origin may not be clear.

 

[ElectricBlue]

@AG31 it's not the word that you want, but I found this today, which is a useful word all the same:

“The Portuguese call it saudade: a longing for something so indefinite as to be indefinable. Love affairs, miseries of life, the way things were, people already dead, those who left and the ocean that tossed them on the shores of a different land — all things born of the soul that can only be felt.”

Anthony De Sa, Barnacle Love

It's definitely a word I can identify with, a bit like my nostalgic erotica.

 

[Cagivagurl]

An emotion is felt....
An idea is a thought...
They may or may not be interlinked... An idea may evoke an emotion... Pride...
Reversely, an emotion may engender an idea... Buying a birthday gift...
That's my opinion only...

Cagivagurl

 

[yowser]

“Life is a comedy to those who think, a tragedy to those who feel.” ― Jean Racine

 

[SimonDoom]

Probably another one of those topics that everybody thinks about in their own way. I think of myself as an idea or concept writer. I have an idea in mind and I build the story around that. "Lust" is a feeling, but it's not enough for a story. "Jimmy lusts after his hot cousin after seeing her bikini top fall off at the beach" is a kernel of an idea you can build a story around.

 

[Cagivagurl]

Probably another one of those topics that everybody thinks about in their own way. I think of myself as an idea or concept writer. I have an idea in mind and I build the story around that. "Lust" is a feeling, but it's not enough for a story. "Jimmy lusts after his hot cousin after seeing her bikini top fall off at the beach" is a kernel of an idea you can build a story around.

Lust is most definitely enough for a story....
It is after all the centre of almost every story...
Lust, desire, passion, yearning need.
I think if you read every story posted in Lit, you'd find lust...
It certainly can carry a story. In fact it's impossible to have an erotic story without it...
In my opinion...

Cagivagurl

 

[NotWise]

Lust is most definitely enough for a story....
It is after all the centre of almost every story...
Lust, desire, passion, yearning need.
I think if you read every story posted in Lit, you'd find lust...
It certainly can carry a story. In fact it's impossible to have an erotic story without it...
In my opinion...

Cagivagurl

You could write in Toys and Masturbation with little more than lust to go on. Other categories, you need more: two or more characters, a setting, some action... Unrequited lust alone doesn't get you very far.

 

[Britva415]

Presumably feelings involve some level of somatization. Or do they?

For me, this goes without saying.

I’m constantly surprised that there are people who don’t take this for granted and don’t even know what is being said here.

The reason they’re called “feelings” at all is because emotions are physical sensations. Some people seem to be so disconnected from somatic experience that they don’t understand this.

Our brains interpret the sensations and we give the name of an emotion to the whole experience: The combination of the body process, the causative situation, and the meaning we mentally assign to it all is what adds up to emotion.

It can go the other way too: A situation can cause a mental interpretation which can cause a certain mental attitude which can result in physiological reactions - this is also emotion.

One can prove it by using physiology to change mood. Hold a frown or a pout for a little while and see that your mind reacts as if something bad had really happened. Hold a broad, beamy smile for a little while and see that your mind reacts positively.

 

[Britva415]

How to put it in writing? I wouldn’t necessarily break it down as a matter of naming the emotion vs stating the physiological element. We can do either one of those and to me it doesn’t touch the “show vs tell” issue.

Instead, one can show how a situation affects someone by telling their emotions about it - whether we name the emotion or describe the red face, giddy breath, or leaden-weight feeling.

Or one can tell the situation vividly and evocatively enough that it shows how a character feels as a result, then later when they behave a certain way we understand it without being told how they felt. The way the situation was written is enough to show it.

That’s how I personally think about show-vs-tell here. write about the feeling when doing so is either a tell (when that’s called for) or a show (when that’s called for) with regard to something peripheral to the feelings.

 

[Cagivagurl]

You could write in Toys and Masturbation with little more than lust to go on. Other categories, you need more: two or more characters, a setting, some action... Unrequited lust alone doesn't get you very far.

That is of course true...
However... My point is, without lust. The rest wouldn't happen... The characters, the plot. None of it would happen without the spark of lust, desire...
Nothing happens without the initial spark, and that is driven by lust...

IMO of course...

Cagivagurl

 

[GPFoyle]

Presumably feelings involve some level of somatization. Or do they?

Examples might be surrender, acceptance, attraction, anger.

Is this a subset of telling vs showing? But maybe, with an idea, there's nothing to show?

Thanks to @NotWise and his post about ideas for inspiring me to post this and one other post.

P.S. It's annoying to use "post" as the subject and verb in the same sentence. What does one do with a post other than post it???

I think (or do I "feel?") that thoughts can be evaluated, whereas feelings themselves can't. If you say you feel something, that just stands. It's not subject to proof or criticism: it just is. If you say you THINK something, it's likely to be something one CAN evaluated: is it a cogent thought? Does it correspond to the surrounding facts? Feelings? They are untouchable. They just are.
That's what makes them scarier than thoughts.
Be gentle, now ...

 

[Cagivagurl]

I think (or do I "feel?") that thoughts can be evaluated, whereas feelings themselves can't. If you say you feel something, that just stands. It's not subject to proof or criticism: it just is. If you say you THINK something, it's likely to be something one CAN evaluated: is it a cogent thought? Does it correspond to the surrounding facts? Feelings? They are untouchable. They just are.
That's what makes them scarier than thoughts.
Be gentle, now ...

Perfect

 

[AlexBailey]

Thoughts are of the mind, feelings are of the heart.

Thoughts are intellectual and are effected by reason, feelings are emotional and don’t ask for permission.

 

[ElectricBlue]

I reckon thoughts and ideas need prosaic language, articulate, well defined, clearly stated. They're tangible, can be written to be touched. Feelings and emotions, on the other hand, are more elusive, and need a different language, poetic, fluid, ethereal. You're trying to catch the breeze before it's a wind, that first leaf spinning before it's autumn, the shadow before it's a darkness. Catching something before it's gone.

 

[33RPMVinylPants]

If you can put quotation marks around it and it's not complete nonsense, it's an idea.


What a wierd thing to ask, she thought. But there's a first time for everything. Maybe just the once...

Her breath caught in her throat, and she bit off the words she'd been about to say. Nobody had ever proposed doing that before! But there was a flutter in her chest that wasn't there before, and she couldn't ignore it.

Both express surprise and curiosity. One tells you what they're thinking, the other one tells you what they're feeling. But the first one could be expressed in those exact words as dialog if they weren't internal.

Like Britva415 said, feelings are called that because we feel them. They exist (at least partly; I haven't put enough thought in to say 'completely') as physical sensations -- our awareness of our body's reaction to evocative stimuli.

 

[JGittes]

For an author, another consideration with emotions is whether one portrays or evokes the feelings.

The easiest example I can think of comes from the film Goodfellas. Near the end of the movie, Henry Hill (played by Ray Liotta) descends into a cocaine-fueled paranoid purgatory. Martin Scorsese's brilliance is that he portrays the events through dialogue and plot, and through editing, lighting, makeup, and all the tricks of cinema, the viewer feels what Henry Hill is feeling.

 

[Britva415]

If you can put quotation marks around it and it's not complete nonsense, it's an idea.


What a wierd thing to ask, she thought. But there's a first time for everything. Maybe just the once...

Her breath caught in her throat, and she bit off the words she'd been about to say. Nobody had ever proposed doing that before! But there was a flutter in her chest that wasn't there before, and she couldn't ignore it.

Both express surprise and curiosity. One tells you what they're thinking, the other one tells you what they're feeling. But the first one could be expressed in those exact words as dialog if they weren't internal.

Like Britva415 said, feelings are called that because we feel them. They exist (at least partly; I haven't put enough thought in to say 'completely') as physical sensations -- our awareness of our body's reaction to evocative stimuli.

I like this.

Feelings are wordless.

That doesn’t mean they can’t be talked about, but the experience itself is not abstract. It’s visceral. Like literally. “Viscera” is physical tissue in the body. Of course the specific tissue called the viscera is not every tissue and not the only place where we feel feelings, but like how we will call a car “wheels,” calling feelings “visceral” is a synecdoche for saying “in the physical body.”

I mean, sure, it’s possible to have a wordless idea, too, but ideas and feelings just aren’t the same.