Authors: Jerry Cleaver
affect the outcome of things. When we're desperate, we try anything. And fiction is about people who are desperate, driven, in crisis.
I've put together a list of some kinds of emotional thoughts someone might have in this situation. It's by no means complete. You will become aware of more as you write. The character's thoughts and emotions are what you will spend the most time trying to figure out. I'll give you my list, then a simple technique to help you find the emotion in the character. Here's my list of the kinds of things we do in our heads when we're upset.
Disassociate:
Thinking of something totally unrelated in order to protect yourself from pain.
If I die, I won't get to eat lobster ever again.
We're all capable of this. Disassociation is what severely abused children do when they develop multiple personalities. They become another person in their mind to avoid feeling the torture.
Deny:
It's OK.
He only wants my money. He doesn't want to hurt me.
Face It:
This is the opposite of denial. More like rubbing your nose in it.
He only wants your money. Don't be stupid. You saw his face. You can identify him. Now he has to blow your brains out for sure.
Negotiate:
Beg, pray to, plead with God or other powers. Make deals with, promises to, yourself.
Displace:
Look at what the world's come to since the Republicans (or Democrats) took over.
How about something like this:
Ah, now you did it. You knew you shouldn't park here this morning. But you were in such a hurry to get your fancy coffee and too damn lazy to walk an extra block. See what it got you? He should shoot you. You deserve it.
So, not only are you in a jam, but you PUNISH yourself for being there. This is the kind of thing I get into myself, since I'm from a strict Protestant background. My parents were not religious and never went to church, but their parents were strict Methodists and Baptists, guilt was the main ingredient in their brand of religion and their upbringing, and it was passed on to me. Everything that happens to you is your fault, they believed. I tell you this so you can see how your own personal traits or quirks can serve you in creating characters. John le Carre, author of many novels
{The Spy Who Came in from the Cold,
for one), said that every character he created was a dimension of himself. That has to be true in a sense for all of us, since all we have is ourselves and what's inside of us.
Think Positively:
This will be good for me. It'll make me stronger.
This was the philosopher Nietzsche's creed: "That which does not destroy me makes me stronger."
Question:
Why is this happening? What does this mean? What am I going to do? How can I get out of this?
What makes a thought emotional? It can be the words themselves, such as,
Help! Save me. I'm too young to die.
Or a thought can be emotional because of the
situation.
If I'm sitting in a theater at the end of a movie and I think,
It's over,
that's not an especially emotional statement. But if when the robber sticks the gun in my ribs, I think,
It's over,
that's an emotional thought. So, you're not necessarily looking for emotionally charged words; everyday objective words that express emotion in a particular situation can be enough. And often if you just concentrate on what the character would be thinking in such a situation, it will lead you where you need to go.
Planning:
A lot of thinking in crisis is about what to do to protect yourself and to escape without injury (psychological injury, most of
ten) and what to do if you fail:
What should I do if he raises the gun to my head?
or
What'll I do if my wife leaves me? Who'll get the house? Lord, I couldn't stand to date again,
or
What should I do to keep from getting fired? Who'll hire me at my age?
The mind is a dramatic place. A lot of action (planning an attack or a defense) takes place before we act outwardly. I've given you a short list of some of the kinds of thoughts we have in emotional situations. Now that you're aware of them, you can work on your own list.
Reaching the inner workings of your character, the secret life, is
a lifetime process.
It's important to realize that, just as in life, emotion is the hardest and trickiest part. So, if you're having trouble with it— and you will—don't panic. It's
the part of your story that tends to come last,
the part you will have the least of in early drafts. You will know that your character is having a big emotion at a particular moment, and you will have some sense of what it is, but you will not be able to pin it down. When that happens, when you can't reach it, don't fret. Just be aware of the kind of thing that's needed and move on. The next time around you'll get more of it. Each draft will give you more, and you'll piece it together bit by bit. It's the trickiest and most elusive ingredient of all, but it's the most rewarding. When you deepen the connection to your character, you deepen your connection to yourself.
WORRIES, FEARS, HOPES
I've devised a simple, direct method for helping you find out what's going on inside the character. With this technique, you go through your story and ask, every place it could possibly apply, "What are the character's
worries, fears, and hopes?"
There should be plenty of places where emotions are kicking up—on every page and in every
scene. Stories are about conflict, about threat. If something of great value to you is truly threatened, you have to be
worried and fearful that
you will lose it while at the same time
hopeful
that you will be able to save it. These worries, fears, and hopes will be running through your mind until the problem is resolved.
If your boss calls you in and says that if you don't improve your work, he'll have to let you go, you're
worried
and
afraid
you'll get fired, but
hoping
that you can work overtime for a while and save your job. Romeo wants Juliet, but he is
worried
and
frightened
that their marriage will be discovered and he'll lose her before they can escape. He
hopes,
with all his heart, that they will succeed and be united. In the parking lot stickup, you would be
afraid
you'll be killed, but
hoping
that you'll come out of it alive. If the character isn't worried and afraid, you don't have a dramatic conflict, and your story will flop. If your character doesn't care, the reader won't care. The reader cannot care more than the character.
Fantasies are a kind of hope and can be especially revealing of the character. Some characters have elaborate fantasies, while others have few. "The Secret Life of Walter Mitty" by James Thurber is a classic story of someone who lives in fantasy. It's a famous story. If you haven't read it, you should. We all indulge in fantasies. Thinking about what we'd do if we won the lottery is probably one of the most common. In the case of someone whose job is threatened by an abusive, fault-finding boss, the character could dream of what he'd do if his rotten boss worked for
him.
HOW MANY?
Who's a more complicated character, Dan Quayle or Lyndon Johnson? The answer is obviously Johnson. What was it that made John-
Bon
complicated? Can you guess? It's related to emotion. Quayle is seen as rather shallow and bungling. He's pretty much a one-note personality. Johnson, on the other hand, was a symphony of contradiction. He was capable of enormous generosity and great viciousness at the same time. That's why we think of him as complicated. A complicated character is one who embodies many different, often opposing, qualities at one time. Which brings us to an important issue for creating character in story.
How many emotions/thoughts can be dancing in the mind of the character at one time? How many emotions can you feel at once? Well, you might feel guilt, anger, sadness, regret, and relief at the death of a loved one. And all of them will be pulling at you at once. Now, we can't do them simultaneously on the page, or we'd be typing one sentence on top of another. But we can have these emotions affecting the character one right after the other in a scene by having the character have a sad thought, a guilty thought, an angry thought, etc.
Oh, Lord. Mom's gone. I don't know if I can stand it. She didn't deserve this. What a rotten world. And I'm one of the rottenest. I really let her down. I could have done more—a lot more. But why me? I'm not her only kid. John never even called. Let it go. She's at peace. No more pain, thank God. It's over.
What we're after in fiction is the full experience. We rarely feel only one thing at a time. Life is seldom so simple. Crisis usually involves being pulled in many directions at once, internally as well as externally. So, when you write, look for all the emotions that the character could possibly be feeling at one time. If he
could
be feeling it, he
should
be feeling it.
A LITTLE TENDERNESS
Here's a scene:
"You're a rotten, lousy, self-centered, inconsiderate bastard," she said to her husband.
"And you're a crude, ignorant, repulsive old hag," he said.
Are you sympathetic to these characters, moved by them, identified? Chances are, you're not particularly touched by them. Why is that? There's plenty of emotion. Why isn't it reaching you? See if you can figure it out. It has to do with emotion—the emotion they're having and the source of it.
Let's try it again, only differently:
"I told you I was cooking your favorite dinner tonight and we'd eat at eight o'clock. You said you'd be home in time," she said. "At eight o'clock, I had everything ready—table set, candles lit, wine poured. All the food was ready. I waited. You weren't here at eight-thirty. I sat here like a fool, watching the food get cold. Nine o'clock, nine-thirty, you're still not here. You didn't call. Now you come through the door at ten o'clock acting as if nothing is wrong. You rotten, self-centered bastard. You make me feel worthless."
Is that version more involving? If so, why? What's in this version that isn't in the first? Can you identify it? The answer is not that there's more detail or more dialogue. It's a specific emotional ingredient that isn't in the first version.
In the first version the characters are expressing
anger only.
Now, anger is a fine emotion. It's all over the place in literature and life. We
need it. But anger is a response to something else. Something that happens first, something that makes us angry. What is anger a response to? Anger is a response to injury and pain. If something makes you angry, it's hurt you or caused you pain
first.
Without expressing the injury, the pain, you're not giving the reader (or the character) the full experience. Anger is only the surface.
If someone comes in ranting and raving and cursing, you ask, "What's wrong?" If the angry person answers, "What do you mean, 'What's wrong?' I'm angry. That's what's wrong." You would ask, "What made you angry?" Intuitively we know there's more and want to find out what this person's angry about. We're always going for the
deepest cause
in fiction. It's about root causes, going to the deepest level possible—to the level of
vulnerability.
VULNERABILITY = IDENTIFICATION
Vulnerability is what we re naturally drawn to. If someone is hit by a car, we don't say, "I'll be right there as soon as I help this boy tie his shoe." No, we rush to the person who needs us most, the one who's most
vulnerable.
It's part of our nature. And it goes as deep as evolution and natural selection. It's what we've had to do to survive as a species. Ask yourself, "Who are the most vulnerable creatures in human society?" Babies. We're naturally drawn to protecting babies. Who would not freak out at seeing a baby crawling across an expressway?
Vulnerability is the natural and necessary ingredient for identification. When you get close to someone in friendship or in love, you reveal your weaknesses, your vulnerability. That's how you really get to know someone—by reaching his humanity, his tenderness, his vulnerability. When a character is faced with a serious threat, he's wor-
ried and frightened. He's vulnerable. So, even when we're writing about adults, we're getting to the baby in them, the baby in all of us— the tenderness, the humanity. Only through vulnerability can we create identification. Even when writing about macho, tough-guy gangsters, we have to get to it." 'You hurt me, Vinnie. You really hurt me,' he said, then pulled the trigger."