“I’m getting the feeling you don’t love me anymore.” Sally sat down, smiling, into her chair at the coffee shop. “I love you. I just love my friends at ACFW and MBT too,” I said from the coffee counter. Between school starting and the various writers conferences over the past two months, we’d barely had time to chat. “Prove it,” she said. “Show me the love.” “I’m here, aren’t I?” I was dressed in a football sweatshirt, wearing my Uggs and old jeans. “On my way to a football game. Doesn’t that say love?” She raised an eyebrow. “Which brings me to the topic of our conversation today – showing emotions through action. And I’m not talking about facial expressions or even physical reactions. I’m talking about […]
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Techniques for Layering Emotion into a scene: Other People
“Hi Susie. Um, Susie?” Sally sat down in a chair opposite me, handed me a coffee. “Kathy said you’d forgotten this.” I took it, tearing my eyes from the woman I’d been watching across the room. She wore a pair of sweatpants, the baggy kind, an oversized sweatshirt and a bandanna over her hair. Curled up in a leather chair, she was drinking coffee while buried in a novel. I sighed. “I want to be her. Just take a day off and read.” “That’s apparent, by the look on your face,” Sally said. “I know you’ve been busy these past few weeks – hello, I completely feel abandoned, but you look like you want to go rip that book from her hands, push her out of the chair and take […]
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Techniques for adding emotion: using other “Voices” in your scene
I love to watch people. Especially in an airport. Yes, I admit I compare myself to others (it’s a woman thing, I think), and I discovered that it’s a great way to reveal the emotional landscape of a character. See, we often project how we feel in how we might describe a character. Consider this description from the POV of our test subject, Darla, a woman who is afraid to fly. She sees this woman in the gate area: Across from her, a woman’s sandaled foot tapped to unheard music, her eyes closed, her hand draped over her carryon bag. In her other hand, an empty coffee cup from Starbucks – had she passed a Starbucks on the way in? — as if she’d started her morning early. Sure, fatigue […]
Read the RestConversations: How to write Emotions part 2
Yesterday, I told you the story of Darla, and how she showed us 2 of the four layers of emotions. Today, let’s talk about the final two layers. Just as a review: The first layer of writing emotions is simply that surface emotion – the name of the emotion. The sectond layer is called: Just Under the Skin Layer. This layer names the emotion and pairs it with a physical response. But let’s go deeper: Sweat dribbled down her brow. She gripped the seats with whitened hands. She practiced early labor breathing. Even if I hadn’t heard her on the phone, seeing her actions, I would have gotten it. I don’t need to know the emotion to know she afraid. The next layer is simply the physical response only. […]
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