dr_mabeuse
seduce the mind
- Joined
- Oct 10, 2002
- Posts
- 11,528
Reading the Holiday contest entries, I feel an overpowering urge to lecture. The subject is on conveying emotion without actually showing it. Conveying emotion by showing the world around the characters.
Case in point (all examples are made up): Betty Ann has just been married 6 months, and hubby just gets notified that he's beeing shipped to Iraq. You can tell us, "She was upset. She was disappointed. She worried how she would get through the year alone. Anger and despair fought within her, but she was a good wife and wouldn't object."
Or you can show us something. You could show us a picture of her standing at the sink, looking out the window at the back yard, where the little tree they planted last summer stands forlornly in the harsh winter light. Now we have a picture that conveys emotion. We can see her at the sink, and we can imagine what she feels, because we know what that image of the lone little tree does to us..
A symbolist would tell you that the sink and the backyard are symbols of domesticity, the tree reprsents her hopes for them, and the winter light is this threatening news, but that's all academic hand-waving. The point is, everything in the world around us has emotional value, and the perceptive author uses those things in creating tone and feeling in his or her story.
Another example: Joe comes home to find his wife's run off with the UPS man. You could tell us that he was at a loss, that he didn't know what to do, that maybe that he wasn't even sure whether he was sorry or not (it hadn't been a happy marriage.) But I like something else: I like the image of him sitting down in the living room and staring at the dust motes swirling in a patch of late afternoon sunlight.
How do you feel when you sit there and stare at dust in sunlight? You're vacant, thinking about nothing. The dust just swirls about meaninglessly; the late afternoon sun is melancholy, it means night is coming. That image gives you an entire emotional tableau by using one, vivid picture based on the external world.
There's a theory that says that all our emotions have a symbolic expression in nature and the world around us, from things as obvious as a storm during a fight, to slightly more subtle things like Betty's tree or Joe's dust motes. Crumbs on a table, a polished name plate on a door, the sound of a dog barking in the night, an unmade bed—these are emotional states, just waiting to be exploited.
We all already use them. We want our lovers to reconcile outside in the swirling snow. We don't know why, it just feels right to us. My academic symbolist would say that the swirling snow represents their emotions, and the way the snow isolates them from the reat of the world represents their love, but as authors we don't think that way. It just feels right to us, so we use it.
My point is, stuff like this should run throughout your story. If you find yourself always having to explain to the reader how your characters are feeling, consider using the scene to do it for you. Chances are that the way you feel about crumbs on the table is pretty much the way everyone else feels about crumbs on the table too. We'll get it, even if we don't even know that we're getting it.
But one last thing, use a little subtlety too. Putting your orphans in a drizzle is okay, but you don't want to have them staggering through a hurricane Katrina as a way of showing their vulnerability.
Okay. Lecture over.
--Zoot
Case in point (all examples are made up): Betty Ann has just been married 6 months, and hubby just gets notified that he's beeing shipped to Iraq. You can tell us, "She was upset. She was disappointed. She worried how she would get through the year alone. Anger and despair fought within her, but she was a good wife and wouldn't object."
Or you can show us something. You could show us a picture of her standing at the sink, looking out the window at the back yard, where the little tree they planted last summer stands forlornly in the harsh winter light. Now we have a picture that conveys emotion. We can see her at the sink, and we can imagine what she feels, because we know what that image of the lone little tree does to us..
A symbolist would tell you that the sink and the backyard are symbols of domesticity, the tree reprsents her hopes for them, and the winter light is this threatening news, but that's all academic hand-waving. The point is, everything in the world around us has emotional value, and the perceptive author uses those things in creating tone and feeling in his or her story.
Another example: Joe comes home to find his wife's run off with the UPS man. You could tell us that he was at a loss, that he didn't know what to do, that maybe that he wasn't even sure whether he was sorry or not (it hadn't been a happy marriage.) But I like something else: I like the image of him sitting down in the living room and staring at the dust motes swirling in a patch of late afternoon sunlight.
How do you feel when you sit there and stare at dust in sunlight? You're vacant, thinking about nothing. The dust just swirls about meaninglessly; the late afternoon sun is melancholy, it means night is coming. That image gives you an entire emotional tableau by using one, vivid picture based on the external world.
There's a theory that says that all our emotions have a symbolic expression in nature and the world around us, from things as obvious as a storm during a fight, to slightly more subtle things like Betty's tree or Joe's dust motes. Crumbs on a table, a polished name plate on a door, the sound of a dog barking in the night, an unmade bed—these are emotional states, just waiting to be exploited.
We all already use them. We want our lovers to reconcile outside in the swirling snow. We don't know why, it just feels right to us. My academic symbolist would say that the swirling snow represents their emotions, and the way the snow isolates them from the reat of the world represents their love, but as authors we don't think that way. It just feels right to us, so we use it.
My point is, stuff like this should run throughout your story. If you find yourself always having to explain to the reader how your characters are feeling, consider using the scene to do it for you. Chances are that the way you feel about crumbs on the table is pretty much the way everyone else feels about crumbs on the table too. We'll get it, even if we don't even know that we're getting it.
But one last thing, use a little subtlety too. Putting your orphans in a drizzle is okay, but you don't want to have them staggering through a hurricane Katrina as a way of showing their vulnerability.
Okay. Lecture over.
--Zoot
You saved me a lot of words by that concise statement. That's exactly why my story is so tell-y.
)
