For today’s guest post, I decided to tackle the subject of
depicting emotions because I’ve been in the middle of writing highly charged
scenes in the current WIP (which isn’t SFR). The characters’ emotions are always
one of the key components of the story. When I first started writing seriously,
I struggled with the whole concept of “show
not tell” when it came to what my characters were feeling inside. It was so
enticingly easy to just tell the
reader my heroine was sad, my hero was mad, my villain was bad…ummm, can we
say, not very involving LOL??? Who cares, right?
Trying to satisfy the comments from my early editors, I
grappled with how to show these key elements of the story. My daughters have
both been actresses, among other pursuits, and they said to me, “Mom, what you
need is stage business.” OK, great. Not being an actress, the concept didn’t
come naturally to me but I was game to try.
Here’s a snippet from my most recent SFR,
Mission to Mahjundar( a recent SFR Galaxy
Award winner):
Having gotten Mike to meet
with her, the princess seemed unaccountably at a loss for how to begin. She
sipped at her fruit drink and toyed with the hem of her gown and then her
jewelry, rubbing her fingers over the whorls of the pendant in a slow circle.
Facial expressions and body language are clues to emotion as
well. I read a lot of helpful blog posts by authors who had trod this path of
learning long before I came along. I read several books on body language. I
even read an FBI profiler’s book on the “tells” and signs he used to determine
if people were lying to him or telling the truth. The best resource I found was
The Emotion Thesaurus by Angela Ackerman
and Becca Puglisi. This is an excellent reference and quite helpful if you’re
struggling as I was in the early days to do show not tell. I highly recommend
it!
Eventually I internalized much of what I read and got better
at writing the physical details into the manuscript early on. I do know some
people who will do an editing pass of the completed WIP just to focus on
enhancing the depiction of the characters’ emotions. Here’s a recent example of
mine, again from Mission: His cousin’s furrowed brow and thinned lips
suggested he felt the same concerns Mike had about what Vreely might be
planning.
Of course the words the characters speak are major ways to indicate their
emotions. More from Mission: “So,
this is our high-and-mighty princess, girls, come to be a bride of the chief,”
Arananta said. “Not so grand now, is she?”
Extending one
hand, catching the chief wife’s sleeve, Shalira said, “Please, tell me who’s
here? Introduce us?”
The woman yanked
the fabric out of her grasp with a sniff. “Your betters, that’s all you need to
know.”
I don’t do too
much with metaphors and similes but in Mission
I do use a local Mahjundan fairy tale to illustrate Princess Shalira’s
desperate situation. Here’s the excerpt when she explains it to Mike:
“Playing
the Princess of Shadows won’t protect me after his death.”
“Princess
of Shadows?” Nothing about that in our briefing. He remembered the empress had
also used the term to refer to Shalira.
“It’s
an old folktale about a girl of royal blood who hid from her enemies in the
shadows of the palace walls, disguised as a beggar, until her true love rescued
her.” Gesturing to her eyes, Shalira said, “It’s meant as an insult to me,
since I can’t see, not even shadows, and I’ve lived the past fifteen years on
the fringes of the court, out of the ‘sun.’ I’m tolerated, protected only
because my mother was the emperor’s Favorite till she died. If I reach the
safety of my bridegroom's people, then I’ll be safe, free of the empress’s
plotting and hate. My mother’s clan is among his subjects.” Shalira blinked hard,
and then her face crumpled as she wept.
Used
to comforting younger sisters in distress, Mike didn't hesitate. Moving closer,
he gathered her against his shoulder and let her sob without interruption for
several minutes.
So that’s the short version of where I am currently, in terms of
showing what my heroes and heroines are feeling as they undergo the trials and
tribulations of my plots. What kinds of techniques have you found most helpful
or compelling in your own writing? Or in books you’ve read from your favorite
authors?
Veronica Scott is a three-time recipient
of the SFR Galaxy Award
and has written a number of science-fiction and paranormal
romances. Mission to Mahjundar is her latest. She’s also the USA Today/HEA
SciFi Encounters columnist. Her SFR novel Escape to Zulaire won a 2014 National
Excellence in Romance Fiction Award. You can find out more about her (cats,
earrings, Mars rovers and bagpipes are among her favorite things) and her books
at http://veronicascott.wordpress.com/ Veronica can usually be found on twitter at @vscotttheauthor
