Bleeding Red: Emotion and Editorial Ink in Bringing Feelings Into Writing

Ready, set, feel!

Emotions aren't controlled by a starting pistol, they emerge in response to human connection to experience and relationships. with this in mind, I suggest that emotion is best conveyed in writing --fiction, non-fiction, and poetry--through the use of

Action/reaction
figurative description
resonance

It's also important to allow your writing to earn the emotional response vs. trying to lead readers to the reaction you want them to have.

Let me explore these ideas in turn. First, action and reaction.

You could say a character was steaming mad, but then you'd be telling rather than showing and drawing on over used language "steaming mad." Or you could say, "After hanging up the phone, Steven plunged his hands into the spaghetti he'd been draining tore it apart like he was shredding paper, flinging stick bits around the kitchen like starchy confetti.

Here, I did two things, showed his anger and established a comedic tone through the way he acted and my use of descriptive detail.

Let's take another go. Hanging up, Steven dropped the phone into a boiling pot of water, replaced the lid, then left the room.

Again, the action conveys emotion and the description conveys mood.

Descriptive language. Emotion is an abstract thing we try to make concrete through our descriptions. If we do it in a way that attempts to lead the reader, then we're relying on loaded language.

His heart was raw--as if it'd been sanded down by cruelty and malice.

This kind of writing convey's the emotion, but it tends to tell people how to feel rather than allowing the readers to experience the emotion with the character.

Button his cuffs, Ellis coughed, feeling as if his heart had also been starched and pressed.

I'm still deciding, this image may be a little too forced, but it does show how you can use concrete description to show how someone feels. having him getting dressed allows me to undercut the description. Undercutting is when you use a contrasting emotion or tone (tearing apart spaghetti when your mad) or understatement (Wynn attending the funeral shortly before his 1:30 appointment with the tax adjuster) to allow the emotion to stand on its own rather than to force the emotion.

Resonance is quite a bit harder to illustrate in a blog, but let me give it a try. Resonance requires setup, echo, and resolution throughout a text.

Let me use the poem "Moon Baby" from Pretty Omens to illustrate my point. Pretty Omens

Moon Baby

Moon rose so full
it rogued up right proud
looking every bit the
fox, slinking
through a forest of bushy
clouds.

Under that rogued-up,
foxy moon a
baby came squalling
into the arms of a
mama who’d been
waiting-

waiting for that
heart-tugging cry
through
thirteen lip-cracking Virginie winters,
three blue-faced births,
three thread-box funerals in
wet dawn gloom.

Mama Sela, daddy Cale
named that rosy
as-the-rouged-up-
red-moon baby
Cass Anne Marie
after them three babies
the Lord took back.

Loved that baby up so fine,
Sela cooed like a morning dove
high in the weather-worn rafters
of the barn, cooing,
“Moon baby,
Moon baby,
stay with me
a while.”


Resonance can be used to show emotional growth or change over the course of a text or it can be used to amplify or build emotion. This poem has an example of amplification--we invest more and more in the emotion the story because it is further amplified or personalized through this process of resonance.

First, a baby comes "squalling" which has a slightly dark or suffering tone, so we care for this baby, then we find out that it went into the arms of a mama who had been waiting.

Then, I upped the stakes because she'd been waiting 13 years and suffered through 3 still births which are amplified when we see the funerals with thread-boxes as coffins and "wet dawn gloom" as the weather.

when the identity of those babies shifts because they're named, the suffering is amplified through the echo of another detail. This new baby has three names because she's named after the three who died.

As the poem ends, the details of how the mother coos add tone, longing, and sadness "weather worn rafters" also works to add the rhythm and sound of her coos. The ending words linger "Stay with me a while" as if she might not live. This creates resonance in that it has an open ended resolution to the birth and it pulls us emotionally into the story because we want to know if the baby does stay.

Emotion is best served with concrete detail, undercutting, action, and resonance, but we often want to load our emotion which means the red that runs on the page is most likely the editor's pen because they want readers to experience the emotion rather than be told how to feel. That's because writing that is made vicarious through the use of concrete and specific details makes us feel as if we're within the story of the text and we empathize with the characters within the words.

Explore emotion in the work of other writers you admire, see how they do it. Mix that new found knowledge with a little advice from me for spice, then make it all your own-- riffing makes for the best recipes and jazz and that's how I feel about that.