Ginormous Guide Adding Emotions to Fiction (Part 2)

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Ginormous Guide Adding Emotions to Fiction (Part 2)

Cute dog in room with operating electric fan

Photo © serezniy | Deposit Photo. The humidity is so high that even air conditioning doesn’t help.

This is part 2 of a freaking huge topic: adding emotions to fiction. The foundation skill for it all I discussed last week in Part I is description.

When I was on writing message boards, a writer would ask how much description to do.

Another popped up and declared, “I don’t do description (or describe characters). I leave that up to the readers’ imagination.”

You could almost hear them sniffing at what they thought was a stupid question.

They’re deceiving themselves. The reason readers imagine a scene or character is because the writer provides the details so they can do so.

“The purpose of description is to make a reader believe in the story.”
Walter S. Campbell, The Writer, October 1939

Readers don’t come to a story for the plot (which might be a horrifying thought for those fixating on plot). They come to the story for the characters, and that comes through description.

Onward to the next skill to add emotion to your writing: Setting.

Setting is also a big foundation skill.

A lot of writers treat it like it’s not important if the book isn’t a fantasy or science fiction novel. They pay scant attention to the setting, like in one I started reading. The first scene opened in a mine.

That was all the author told the reader. Two pages in, and I put the book down. Setting was that important. Was the mine drilling into a mountain or an open pit? Was it dangerous? You know, like dry rotted timber, collapsing walls? Flooding? Were there spider webs? (and readers have emotional reactions when we mention spiders.)

A big red flag is having trouble with your characters always looking, nodding, or smiling. (Guilty, guilty, guilty. I once found eight ‘lookings’ on one page). These become alternatives for repetitive dialogue tags and become repetitive themselves. It isn’t enough to replace look with glance (which may be incorrect itself, since they don’t mean the same thing). I once read a book where critique groups must have told the author everyone was smiling too much, so she did a search and replace with smirk. Sigh.

This problem results from not having enough setting in the story.

Every moment of every page, your character is interacting with a setting, just as we do in real life (unless you have your nose buried in your cell phone while walking your dog.).

The writer’s job, and pleasure, is to pick specific details about the setting to share with the reader.

But it’s also not a check-the-box and tell the reader it was hot outside. According to Writing For Impact, readers get engaged when you, or in this case, your viewpoint character, gives opinions.

I had a lot of trouble getting setting into my stories for a while. Unfortunately, many of the writing resources I ran into didn’t give it much importance. In fact, I had to unlearn some very bad habits that had been developed over many years.

It was so hard that I got stuck on every scene trying to come up with what I needed for my setting. So I just typed at the top of my chapter (that placeholder method!) what I knew about the setting in that scene. In some cases, I drew it in PowerPoint, mainly when I realized that I had differing pictures in my head. I’ve gotten better at it, but it took a lot of work to unlearn what the beginner culture taught me.

Setting things to think about:

1. What’s in your setting? If a room, what kind of furniture? Carpet? Air conditioning? What does it smell like? If outside, where? What kind of plants are around?

2. Time of day. This will change the lighting of the scene. Dave Farland recommends establishing the light in each scene.

4. Day of the week: Different things happen on different days of the week. Your character could be complaining about getting over the hump. At least identify it to yourself so your teenage protagonist doesn’t go to school seven days a week!

5. Month, time of the year. Make sure of holidays, seasons. Fall colors are fun to do.

6. Weather. In 318R, Dave Farland talked about writers who simply say, “It was raining.” Well, what kind of rain is that? Is it a thick curtain coming down? Is it drops hitting the hot pavement and drying immediately? Is it just enough to annoy you when you turn on your windshield wipers? (And that is emotion). Can you imagine a character in a crisis…has to get somewhere now. Gets in his car, roars out, and a downpour starts? This is how setting can bring out your character’s emotions.

Start first with establishing the setting at the beginning of every scene. A good rule of thumb is to hit three unique things and make one of those have movement. And of course, do the fun part, put your character’s opinion in there.

Then, as your character moves through the scene, instead of “he said,” have them interact with the setting. They sprawl in a chair and slouch. They eat food.

Or two characters talk to each other about the setting. Don’t we all complain when the weather’s bad?

But setting is incomplete without the five senses. Most writing skills are taught as separate parts. When I took a Forward Motion writing class, the instructor said, “Here’s the setting. Put in the five senses.” No mention at all that it should be from a character’s viewpoint. Most of the writers promptly trained a movie camera on the scene and described everything.

You can’t do setting without the five senses. ALL setting comes from the five senses.

You can’t do five senses without a character who experiences them.

If you do the five senses right, down into the viewpoint, the reader will be experiencing the same emotions. This is gold.

But if you’re following the minimalist trend of description, it’s nearly impossible to get enough of the five senses into the story. You’re fighting the uphill battle, and it’s a steep hill that eats snowplows.

My early, meager experiments started with the Margie Lawson Academy’s Edits System (I purchased it years ago, so this version may be updated). One piece of it is using highlighters to mark the various senses. Just an audit to see how much you were doing.

Of course, I discovered a lot of “yellow” (sight), and only sporadic other colors. You could try this either by printing your manuscript or using Microsoft Word’s fill tool. The fill tool has more options for colors than the limited ones on highlighter.

I tried adding it manually, but it was surprisingly hard. Felt mechanical. It wasn’t until I took Dean Wesley Smith’s Depth class that I began to understand that I needed to better connect characterization to it.

Five senses aren’t simply checking off that you got them into the story. It’s about your character’s interaction with the setting, and they are always surrounded by setting. Every scene, every moment.

It’s the Law and Order Rule again. If you focus entirely on plot, your characters turn into talking heads. If they’re interacting with the setting, they can do all kinds of things that will help bring emotion into the story (and we will have two more big skills coming that no one talks about in this context: Action and Reaction and Context).

What’s curiously absent on topics about the five senses is how much you have to add to your story. I went through a bunch of links, all describing adding the senses adequately—except for how much.

Figure all five every 500 words, or about every three pages. That’s a lot!

There’s other conflicting advice, so you’ll have to pick what you think is right.

In his 318R class, the late Dave Farland said to do them in this order:

1. Emotions

2. Actions

3. Sounds

4. Sights

5. Smiells

6. Tactile

7. Thoughts

In Writing For Impact, the author recommends targeting these three (though doing all five):

SightHearingSmell