Ginormous Guide to Adding Emotion to a Story (Part I)

Dog Jack Russell Terrier looks at the water.

Image © Audit2006 | Deposit Photos

Peggy wanted emotions, and it’s been an area I’ve been trying to understand more about. My apologies for any formatting problems. It looks like WordPress was updated again, and its being fussy.

But before I get to the topic:

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Back to the blog post.

When I was a teenager, we had two dogs, Digger and Snoopy. Digger was a Golden Retriever with a bad attitude toward food. Snoopy was a Chihuahua mix, an old man long before he qualified.

They were escape artists.

Nearly always together, they seized the opportunity and loped into the street for adventure. My heart wrenched when they did this; my imagination went into hyperdrive, picturing them dead in the street. Daily, I spotted a dead dog or cat struck by a car. So much so that when I lived in other locations, I found it a relief not to see that.

The adventuring dogs followed each other, weaving like drunken sailors, their dog tags jangling.

A writing class I attended was like my two dogs. The class had a message board, and one of the writers posted a warning that everyone needed to add emotion in their fiction. Me, being one to always rock the writing boat, asked “How do you identify it?” All the writers followed each other like the dogs, saying, “You need to add emotion to your writing.”

Sigh.

It’s another area in fiction writing that few talk about. Yes, there are books like the Emotions Thesaurus (which I do not have). But this is a complex skill that requires other skills going in. Writers following each other often pass along bad advice discouraging the very thing they want to do.

So let’s start with a basic:

Readers are smart.

They may not know the difference between a protagonist and an antagonist or what an elison is (a word I’ve wanted to use; go look it up. It is writing technobabble and is something you’ve done).

But they’ll know if the story is missing something. They won’t read on to find out more; they’ll simply stop and move on.

Onto the skills…

The first is a foundation skill; if you aren’t doing this, it’s impossible to get t the next step.

Description

Description—good description—is challenging to do. Encouraged by writing exercises that separate description from character, writers churn out florid descriptions that drone for pages.

So many writing gurus recommend taking a minimalist approach, creating fear that you’ll do too much.

It’s only too much if you write it badly.

What’s badly?

Treating it like a writing exercise. The reader is a fickle animal. He wants character. When you do a description like a writing exercise, you yank the reader away from the character and shove him away from the story.Using vague details. This is where the mugshot description comes in; serviceable, and not interesting.Trying to control the exact image the reader sees, much like what we see on film. That pulls in a lot of irrelevant details.Not making the description matter. Readers will understand when you’re checking the box.

The four above keep the reader on the surface, and away from the emotions. Kristen Lamb talks about that on her site.

I’m not including “too much” because that’s deceptive. We want concrete rules to direct us. But it depends on the scene’s context and the characterization. A good rule though is to start with three specifics. If you have to do more, start a new paragraph and do another specific.

Once you start working on this skill, it will be easy to overbalance. We hear “too much” and get an immediate visceral reaction to a book we read where the writer went on and on. We think, “Take all of it out.” The fix might involve taking one or two sentences or removing unnecessary words. The latter is tough to see. ProWriting Aid and Grammarly can identify wordiness. Once you see patterns in your wordiness, you’ll do less of it as you write more.

Caveat: Change the wordy sentence yourself. Don’t let the tool decide what you change.

So how does this get you to emotions?

Well, If you write minimalist, that leaves only the dialogue to convey emotion. Sure, you can say “he ejaculated”—a legitimate dialogue tag—but repeated use of dialogue tags is annoying. Readers are smart. They will notice.

Going minimalist also overbalances, forcing the dialogue to do all the heavy lifting. We all know that sometimes what seems like a simple line doesn’t always get the right emotion across. I sent an email to a coworker, thinking nothing of it, like we do with most emails. She responded with, “I’m sorry if I offended you…” Huh? I had to reread what I wrote. I’d gone a little too concise, and it could have been interpreted as snippy. I hadn’t intended that, and it’s easy to do.

In a story, if the description isn’t helping the dialogue, the reader may misinterpret what you wrote.

Is description once and done? You know, do a description of the setting at the beginning and then that’s it?

No. It’s throughout each scene.  You might have a more detailed description of the setting at the beginning, then bring in sentences here and there with the dialogue that builds on it.

But there will be more on that throughout this guide. Description is the umbrella encompassing everything else.

Action/Movement

The first thing we all think when we hear “action” is a movie hero surging through a battle, gunfire blasting dangerously close, and exploding next to him. I’m not talking about that action.

I’ll call this the Law and Order Principle. Law and Order was a TV series that ran for twenty years. In the first half of each episode, the cops interviewed witnesses. This had huge potential to turn into talking heads; people asking questions and people answering questions. So the characters interacted with the setting. The witness loaded a truck with crates of food; another arranged a display of flowers.

Movement keeps description from being static.

Conveying it is fairly simple, though it takes some thought. A cycling pass may be an opportunity for creating movement; you may not come up with the right word immediately:

Default: The sky was cloudy.

Better: Clouds scuttled across the sky.

This is only rephrasing the sentence with better words. The first is three words, but the description with movement is five.

And guess what? Movement is an opportunity to put in an emotional word.

Adjectives and Adverbs

When I subscribed to The Writer’s Digest, once a year, they cycled to an article or a top ten list lecturing, “Eliminate all adjectives and adverbs.”

I won’t post the link here, but I ran across a writer using his writing as an example of what killing adjectives and adverbs could do. He thought the one without them was better because it tightened the description, but it jettisoned the emotion. The “bad” example was, indeed, too wordy. But if the writer changed a few words and tightened it up, he’d have nailed fear.

So let me be clear: It is NOT a zero-tolerance policy for adjectives and adverbs.

Can you overuse them? Absolutely. If someone critiques your description as boring or too long, snip one adjective or adverb out, reword some sentences. Try replacing one adjective or adverb with a better one. Everyone reacts as if they must go on a serach and destroy mission when careful pruning is more appropriate.

D.J. Wood spoke on editing at both Books20 in Las Vegas and also at Superstars He identified words to avoid because they don’t have subjective meaning. These include:

Odd

Strange

Repulsive

Unsettlingly

Surprising

exotic

unusual

pleasant

beautiful

handsome

ugly

delightful

striking

weird

Some of these come off as vague to me. What does unsettlingly mean? This is an opportunity to use a word that slides in emotion.

The challenge with all of this is that we want to think concrete with emotion in fiction. But concrete is also boring and doesn’t tell the reader anything interesting. “He was angry.” Okay, I’m the reader, and I’m thinking, “So what?”

A book I’m reading, Writing for Impact, states that certain words have a deep cultural meaning and will resonate emotions. When I wrote the story about Digger and Snoopy, I thought about that. I could have written, “I was terrified when they did this” (7 words). In fact, it was my default sentence! Terrified felt like a vague word, so I rephrased the sentence (same number of words) as: “My heart wrenched when they did this.”

So your task is to see if you can spot some of these emotional words in the fiction you’re reading.

Next time, we’ll hit up on some more tools!