Writing about Complex Emotion

It's so easy to fall back on those first-thing-that-pops-into-your-mind clichés when presenting the emotions of our characters.  What a laugh it would be to read over the early drafts of some of my old stories--loaded with pounding hearts and sweaty palms, no doubt.  Not to mention single tears rolling down flushed cheeks; clenched fists; and nervously tapping feet.  It's much more difficult--and consequently much more rewarding--to come up with fresh, new ways of depicting character emotions.

In Creating Character Emotion, the one writing book I probably revisit more often than any other, author Ann Hood talks about creating character depth through emotional complexity:

Take a look at this example from Anton Chekhov's short story "The Kiss" in which the main character, an officer named Ryabovitch, suffers all kinds of emotional turmoil when he unexpectedly finds himself invited to tea at the home of General Von Rabbek and his wife.  The man is an emotional mess.  It's not simply nervousness he feels, but also shame, envy, delight, mortification, and anxiety⎯just to name a few:

"…. At first, on going into the room and sitting down to the table, he could not fix his attention on any one face or object. The faces, the dresses, the cut-glass decanters of brandy, the steam from the glasses, the moulded cornices -- all blended in one general impression that inspired in Ryabovitch alarm and a desire to hide his head. Like a lecturer making his first appearance before the public, he saw everything that was before his eyes, but apparently only had a dim understanding of it…. After a little while, growing accustomed to his surroundings, Ryabovitch saw clearly and began to observe. As a shy man, unused to society, what struck him first was that in which he had always been deficient -- namely, the extraordinary boldness of his new acquaintances….

Ryabovitch stood near the door among those who were not dancing and looked on. He had never once danced in his whole life, and he had never once in his life put his arm round the waist of a respectable woman. He was highly delighted that a man should in the sight of all take a girl he did not know round the waist and offer her his shoulder to put her hand on, but he could not imagine himself in the position of such a man. There were times when he envied the boldness and swagger of his companions and was inwardly wretched; the consciousness that he was timid, that he was round-shouldered and uninteresting, that he had a long waist and lynx-like whiskers, had deeply mortified him, but with years he had grown used to this feeling, and now, looking at his comrades dancing or loudly talking, he no longer envied them, but only felt touched and mournful." 

One way to render genuine emotion in our stories is to draw from our own life experiences.  Kim Edwards, author of The Memory Keeper's Daughter, tells how she mined her own experiences as a young woman to discover just the right way to depict her character's complex emotions:

In "The Kiss" Chekhov uses concrete detail and comparison to render the shame and inadequacy that Ryabovich experiences at the party: "the faces, the dresses, the cut-glass decanters of brandy, the steam from the glasses, the moulded cornices […] inspired alarm and the desire to hide his head."  When Ryabovich watches as another officer takes "a girl he did not know round the waist and offer her his shoulder to put her hand on" we see the comparison and understand his feelings of mortification and envy.

Ann Hood: Creating Character Emotions
Kim Edwards: "Icebergs, Glaciers, and Arctic Dreams: Developing Characters," essay in Creating Fiction (edited by Julie Checkoway)
Anton Chekhov: "The Kiss"

Writing About Guilt

This first exercise is from one of my favorite writing books: Creating Character Emotions by Ann Hood:

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Guilt is taking the responsibility for wrongdoing. Or for perhaps even something larger – breaking a law, committing a sin. We have characters who are adulterers, murderers, liars, cheaters, thieves. Often, a story is shaped around a guilty character who feels remorse or finds redemption at the story's end.

Sometimes, however, simply confessing to or revealing the wrongdoing (or sin or crime) is the end of the story. This implies that true guilt is never really relieved. The character gives us her side of the event, demonstrates the guilt, but cannot be unburdened.

An bad example (a not so great way to show guilt):

My heart is ripped apart by guilt. I will never be the same again.

The weight of guilt is not so easily confessed or explained. It is too complex an emotion for such glib self-awareness. For this reason, the reader doubts the confession. The character simply wants to feel guilty, perhaps as a way of forgiving himself for whatever he has done.

A good example:

The narrator in Amy Hempel's short story "In the Cemetery Where Al Jolson Is Buried" cannot stay with her dying best friend while she dies. In fact, she leaves her to die alone. What follows is a description of that moment of deciding to leave…. Hempel turns around the cliché of twisting hands by pointing to it as a cliché:

"I have to go home," I said when she woke up.

She thought I meant to her house in the Canyon, and I had to say No, home home. I twisted my hands in the time-honored fashion of people in pain. I was supposed to offer something. The Best Friend. I could not even offer to come back.

I felt weak and small and failed.

Also exhilarated.

Exercise: (part 1): What is the worst decision you can imagine making? In Amy Hempel's story, it is leaving your best friend to die alone. Find a place in the story or novel you are currently working on, in which a character must make a moral decision that will leave her guilty for the rest of her life (if none of your characters make such a life-altering decision, find a place where they feel at least some small amount of guilt over an action or decision that they make). Show the reader this character's guilt in 500 words or less. Remember, that at the point of deciding, Hempel's character feels "weak and small and failed. Also exhilarated."

Objective: To show how the roots of guilt are not necessarily in evil, and that guilt, like all emotions, is a complex blend.

Exercise (part 2): Take the same character you used in the above exercise and have her confess her guilt to a different person. How does she feel after the confession? Relieved? Embarrassed? Does she feel unburdened or does she still feel the guilt?

Objective: To explore the complexities of the emotion of guilt and to see whether a confession leads to redemption or not.

Creating Character Emotions by Ann Hood is available to order online: IndieBound