Conveying your characters’ feelings (effectively)

Last week’s email was all about staying close to character and I ended, in a way I seldom do, by being a bit mean about another author’s work. Specifically, I wasn’t keen on the amount of clenching, contorting and panicking that went on. We wanted to rustle up other ways to convey inner state. I gave some examples in that email, but today I want to give a more comprehensive, more fully ordered list of options. 

Honestly, I doubt if many of you will want to pin those options to the wall and pick from them, menu-style, as you write. But having these things in your awareness is at least likely to loosen your attachment to the clench-n-quake school of writing. 

So. 

Let’s say that we have our character – Talia, 33, single. She’s the keeper of Egyptian antiquities at a major London museum, and the antiquities keep going missing. She’s also rather fond of Daniel, 35, a shaggy-haired archaeologist. Our scene? Hmm. Talia and a colleague (Asha, 44) are working late. They hear strange noises from the vault. They go to investigate and find some recent finds, Egyptian statuary, have been unaccountably moved. In the course of the scene, Asha tells Talia that she fancies Daniel … and thinks he fancies her back. 

In the course of the scene, Talia feels curious about the noises in the vault, feels surprise and fear when she finds the statues have been moved. And feels jealousy and uncertainty when Asha speaks of her feelings for Daniel. 

We need to find ways to express Talia’s feelings in the story. 

Here’s one way: 

Direct statements of emotion 

Talia felt a surge of jealousy, that almost amounted to anger. 

Bingo. Why not? That’s what she feels, so why not say it? No reason at all. Some writers will panic that they’re telling not showing, and they’ve read somewhere that they shouldn’t do that (at all, ever), so they’ll avoid these direct statements. But why? They work. They’re useful. They help the reader. 

More complicated but still direct statements 

Somewhere, she felt a shadow-self detach from her real one, a shadow self that wanted to claw Asha’s face, pull her hair, draw blood, cause pain. 

That’s still saying “Talia felt X”, we’ve just inserted a more complicated statement into the hole marked X, but it still works. And that dab of exotic imagery gives the whole thing a novelly feel, so we’re good, right? Even though technically, we’re still telling not showing. 

Physical statements: inner report 

Talia felt her belly drop away, the seaside roller-coaster experience, except that here she was no child. There was no sand, no squinting sunshine, no erupting laughter. 

Now as you know, I don’t love text that overuses physical statements as a way to describe emotion, but that’s because overuse of anything is bad, and because the statements tend to be very thin (mouth contorting, chest shuddering, etc). If you don’t overuse the statements and enrich the ones you do make, there’s not an issue. 

Notice that here, we have Talia noticing something about her physical state – it’s not an external observation. But both things are fine.

Physical statements: external observation 

Colour rushed into Talia’s face. She turned her head abruptly to prevent the other woman seeing but Asha was, in any case, more interested in the case of funerary amulets. 

Here, we’re only talking about physical changes that are apparent on the outside, and that snippet is fine too. It doesn’t go very deep and, for my money, it feels like a snippet that would best go after a more direct statement. “Talia felt a surge of jealousy, anger almost. Colour rushed into her face, and she turned her head …” 

Dialogue 

“Daniel?” said Talia. “But he’s so much younger. I really doubt that he’d …” 

Dialogue conveys emotion. It can also provide text and subtext in one. So here, the overt meaning is Talia’s doubt that a mid-thirties Daniel could fancy a mid-forties Asha… but the clear sub-text is a catty jealousy on Talia’s part. And readers love decoding those subtexts, so the more you offer them, the better. 

Direct statement of inner thought 

“Daniel?” said Talia. “But he’s so much younger. I really doubt that he’d …” 

Doubt what? That he’d fancy the glamorous, shaggy-haired Asha, with her white shirts and big breasts and pealing laughter? 

The second bit here is a direct statement of Talia’s actual thought. We could also have written: 

Doubt what, she wondered. That he’d fancy … 

That inserts a “she wondered” into things, but as you see, we can have a direct statement of her thoughts with or without that “she wondered”. Either way, it works. 

Memory 

Talia remembered seeing the two of them, at conference in Egypt. Holding little white coffee cups on a sunny balcony and bawling with laughter at something, she didn’t know what. Asha’s unfettered, unapologetic booming laughter and all the sunlit roofs of Cairo. 

That doesn’t quite go directly to emotions, but it half-does and we could take it nearer with a little nudging. And, for sure, if you want a rounded set of tools to build out your emotional language, then memory will play a part. 

Action 

When Asha spoke, Talia had been holding a small pot in elaborately worked clay. It would once have held a sacred oil with which to anoint a new bride. Talia felt Asha looking sharply at her, at her hands, and when she looked, she saw the pot was split in two, that she’d broken it, now, after two thousand three hundred years. 

OK, is that a bit on the nose? Breaking a marriage pot. Well, maybe, but it’s better than quaking, clenching and contorting all the time. 

Use of the setting 

They were in the vault now, marital relics stored in the shelves behind them, funerary relics and coinage on the shelves in front. Leaking through the walls from the offices next door, there was the wail of Sawhali music, the mourning of a simsimiyya. 

At one level, that snippet is only talking about hard physical facts: what’s stored on the shelves, what music they can hear. But look at the language: we have marital and funerary in the same sentence. The next sentence brings us wail and mourning. This is a pretty clear way of saying that Talia’s not exactly joyful about things. Every reader will certainly interpret it that way. 

And there are probably more alternatives too, and certainly you can smush these ones up together and get a thousand interesting hybrids as a result. I said you probably won’t want to pin this list up on a wall anywhere, but honestly? If you do read back a clench-quake-contort passage in your own fiction, then you might want to (A) delete nearly all of that that clenching and quaking, then (B) check back here for alternative approaches. 

Your writing will get better, instantly, if you do that. And – you’ll have more fun. 

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FEEDBACK FRIDAY 

Take any passage in which you’ve got excessive dependence on physical statements about your character and rework it, using any mixture of the tools here. You’re welcome to keep some physical statements in your scene, but make sure you keep a nice balance overall. We want to get a rich and rounded sense of the character’s emotion – written in a way that doesn’t make me want to scream. 

What I need: 

• 250 words from your scene 

• 2-3 lines of introduction as needed 

I’ll give feedback to a good handful of you. All are welcome to participate, but I’ll only offer feedback to Premium Members. When you’re ready, upload your material here. If you’re not yet a Premium Member but would like to be, then you can join us here.

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That’s it from me. We have a new puppy in our lives. He’s called Dibble, and he’s a black-and-white poodle / papillon cross. He has four white socks, a white bib, a touch of white on his nose, and the end of his tail looks like it’s been dipped in white paint. The little lad is an absolute darling. My girls are smitten, but I’m not exactly unsmitten. 

Til soon. 

Harry