Emotional Excavation!
( Inspired and indebted to Donald Maass’ Emotional Craft of Fiction and Damon Suede’s Verbalize).
The problem.
How do you make readers experience your characters’ emotions? Feelings are dynamic and often contradictory. Feelings are sometimes duplicitous, embarrassing, or ironically elsewhere. We might feel joy, shame and fear, all within the same time frame and a writer needs to capture the surprising aspects of human emotional experience in order to convince the reader of the feelings involved. If writers offer a ‘limited menu of emotions’ then our stories may fail to connect with our readers. Working only with primary, expected emotions can place limitations on the depth of our writing and dull the reactions of readers. So writing that is somehow surprising and generates emotional layering creates connection with the reader, even when the situation might be very different from the reader’s daily experience
Task One. ( Rediscover a friendship).
Think about a time of your life (or your character’s life) when a friend made an impact and write a short recollection in which your friend appears. Start with ‘I remember…..’ and keep writing for 5 minutes.
Task Two.
Now read your writing and make a note of the dominant feelings you experience as a reader when you review the recollection.
Task Three.
Read both extracts below and make a note of your responses to the questions about them.
Extract A.
On going down in the morning, I found my aunt musing so profoundly over the breakfast table, with her elbow on the tray, that the contents of the urn had overflowed the teapot and were laying the whole table-cloth under water, when my entrance put her meditations to flight. I felt sure that I had been the subject of her reflections, and was more than ever anxious to know her intentions towards me. Yet I dared not express my anxiety, lest it should give her offence.
My eyes, however, not being so much under control as my tongue, were attracted towards my aunt very often during breakfast. I never could look at her for a few moments together but I found her looking at me – in an odd thoughtful manner, as if I were an immense way off, instead of being on the other side of the small round table. When she had finished her breakfast, my aunt very deliberately leaned back in her chair, knitted her brows, folded her arms, and contemplated me at her leisure, with such a fixedness of attention that I was quite overpowered by embarrassment. Not having as yet finished my own breakfast, I attempted to hide my confusion by proceeding with it; but my knife tumbled over my fork, my fork tripped up my knife, I chipped bits of bacon a surprising height into the air instead of cutting them for my own eating, and choked myself with my tea, which persisted in going the wrong way instead of the right one, until I gave in altogether, and sat blushing under my aunt’s close scrutiny.
‘Hallo!’ said my aunt, after a long time.
I looked up, and met her sharp bright glance respectfully.
‘I have written to him,’ said my aunt.
‘To -?’
‘To your father-in-law,’ said my aunt. ‘I have sent him a letter that I’ll trouble him to attend to, or he and I will fall out, I can tell him!’
‘Does he know where I am, aunt?’ I inquired, alarmed.
‘I have told him,’ said my aunt, with a nod.
‘Shall I – be – given up to him?’ I faltered.
‘I don’t know,’ said my aunt. ‘We shall see.’
‘Oh! I can’t think what I shall do,’ I exclaimed, ‘if I have to go back to Mr. Murdstone!’
( Chapter 14, David Copperfield)
Q) How does David Copperfield feel in the above extract? Are his feelings in competition with each other?
Extract B.
Here’s an example that Maass uses from Daphne Du Maurier’s My Cousin Rachel. It’s about a young man named Philip Ashley who’s been raised by his older cousin Ambrose. Ambrose leaves on a trip and Philip is miserable without him. Then he gets a letter from Ambrose announcing his marriage to a woman named Rachel.
The letter came about half-past five, just after I had dined. Luckily, I was alone. Seecombe had brought in the post-bag, and left it with me. I put the letter in my pocket and walked out across the fields down to the sea. Seecombe’s nephew, who had the mill cottage on the beach, said good-day to me. He had his nets spread on the stone wall, drying in the last of the sun. I barely answered him, and he must have thought me curt. I climbed over the rocks to a narrow ledge, jutting into the little bay, where I used to swim in summer. Ambrose would anchor some fifty yards out in his boat, and I would swim to him. I sat down, and taking the letter from my pocket read it again. If I could have felt one spark of sympathy, of gladness, one single ray of warmth towards those two who were sharing happiness together down in Naples, it would have eased my conscience. Ashamed of myself, bitterly angry at my selfishness, I could raise no feeling in my heart at all. I sat there, numb with misery, staring at the flat calm, sea. I had just turned twenty-three, and yet I felt as lonely and as lost as I had done years before, sitting on a bench in Fourth Form, at Harrow, with no one to befriend me, and nothing before me, only a new world of strange experience that I did not want.
Q) As with the first extract, make a note of the feelings you experience as you read about the narrator’s reaction to the letter. Do you sympathise with the narrator? Why?
Task Four. ( Using Donald Maass’ exercise-it’s superb! )
Now return to your own writing and try the following, after identifying a significant, emotional moment:
- Ask your protagonist what else they are feeling and write it down.
- Then ask your protagonist again. Write it down.
- You have now identified the ‘third -level of feeling’ for this moment.
Try these :
- Create an analogy for the feeling. Make it into an object. What is the effect of this and how does it feel to have this feeling?
- Is the feeling good or bad? Make a moral judgement.
- What would a better person feel instead?
- Look ‘around the scene’. Draw out what makes your protagonist’s perception special? What do they see in their own ‘unique way’?
- Now rewrite your original scene using this ‘third- level’ emotion. See what happens.