The Writer's Toolbox: Simple and Complex Emotions · 1:06am Apr 23rd, 2014
It’s been a while since I did a writers toolbox post, so let me give a quick refresher on what this post is and is not.
A writer has a toolbox in their head, with different ways of looking at a story, different theories on writing, different bits of trivia about humans and how they think and act. Some of those are tools like hammers or screwdrivers, that they use all the time. Some of them are tools like jigsaws or star wrenches that one doesn’t need for every project, but when that project does come along, they’re just the tools for the job.
What I’m offering here is a tool, in the form of a way of thinking about writing. It’s not advice and it’s certainly not a rule. It might never be useful to you, or it might be just the tool you need. But it’s here for the taking, and feel free to discuss how useful or useless this is in the comments!
The other day, TheJediMasterEd expressed some dismay that some stories tend to pile misery on their characters, giving them tragedy after tragedy. I made a comment attempting to explain this phenomenon:
There are some emotions that, as a writer, I tend to view as "cheap." They're useful, sure, but they're also easy to pull from people-- arousal, disgust, "happiness," and pity are among the ones that come to mind first.
Interestingly, I've found at all of these have some audience that loves reading a story just for these reasons. So much so that they all have stories written that obviously serve no other purpose than to elicit this emotion.
Arousal has, of course, pornography. Both the short, "one-handed reads" as they used to call the one published in each issue of Bitch magazine, and longer novels that obviously only serve as a loose plot to string together this sort of scene (I've never read them, but Laurel K Hamilton's later novels often get accused of this.)
Disgust has the gorier aspects of horror-- the stories like Cupcakes that exist only to show off how outrageous the blood and torture can be, and slasher or torture-porn movies and books that exist only to string these together is increasingly bloodier and more disturbing ways.
Happiness (and here I mean the simplest version of the emotion-- things like actual joy, and triumph, can be much trickier) often takes the form of slice of life fiction where there's little to no conflict; in romance fanfiction we call this "fluff" and there are certainly people who can string this out to novel length, and fans who love it.
And pity... well you found some of those yourself. But shorter versions that prove the "cheapness" of the emotion are things like My Little Dashie, or "crying on graves" fics (where one of the mane six has outlived her friends). There are real novels that do this too, Nicholas Sparks' novels being an example that comes to mind, along with the YA author Lurlene McDaniel.
Anyway, my point is that those are all actually the same thing: an easy way to make people feel a strong emotion. And all of those have an audience of people who just want to feel that emotion over and over again. They have a very hard time being enjoyable stories for people outside of their intended audience, because those people would rather feel different emotions over the course of the story, but there's a reason why people keep writing them. There's an audience out there who want more to read.
I’m not entirely happy with the way I put that. I think a better word for those kinds of emotions is simple. There’s nothing wrong with them, they’re perfectly useful in serious works. So, what makes them simple compared to other emotions?
They say that a picture is worth 1000 words. I think this is pretty much true. I put 1000 words as the minimum I need to write a full scene. And as I was thinking about these simple emotions, the thing they have in common to me is that they can all be pretty handily transferred to people via a single picture, free of outside context.
One picture can make us feel happy (cute baby animals, ponies, etc), pity (injured animals or people), disgusted (gore), or aroused (porn). You don’t need a story to go with those things to trigger an emotional response in most people. More context might drive the point home, but if you’re just looking for your emotional fix, a quick look at some cute kittens/monkeys/whatever will make you smile, or a look at <whoever does it for you> doing <whatever does it for you> will make you aroused.
I believe that any competent writer can evoke these emotions in 1000 words or less. It really should be easy. You might not want to do it; you might be embarrassed to make people aroused, for example, or have no interest in making yourself or other people disgusted. But if you look at it in theory, you can easily see how it’s done.
Now, there are a lot of emotions that a picture devoid of specific context can’t really make people feel. We might recognize that the runner crossing the finish line is feeling triumph, but it doesn’t make us feel that triumph. We might see the clues that the man in the picture is cheating on his wife, but we don’t feel betrayed. These emotions are more complex, and they require context-- we need to know who these people are, how they got here, and why they’re doing this to feel the emotion behind the scene.
These more complex emotions are the emotions we write stories about. We don’t write a story (in any serious sense) to make people feel pity, we write to make them feel betrayal or despair or disappointment or existential angst because these are emotions that require context, and that context is what a story is. We don’t write about happiness, we write about triumph, love, or contentment. We write about passion, trust, and intimacy rather than arousal, and we write about horror and fear rather than disgust.
Our stories are there to build this more complex emotion, or several of them. We teach people information about the situation we’re showing, and build or combine the simple emotions along the way into a strong emotion.
So, if we think of stories like this, what can it tell us?
Well, first of all it means that a story can be broken down into the components needed to contextualize the scenes as they progress. If you think it would be awesome to write about the travel weary CMC fighting a dragon to save Equestria, you need to convey the facts to people-- where did the dragon come from, why is he threatening Equestria, why are the CMC doing this, what skills do they plan to use, etc. You also need to think about what emotion you want in the scene, and what emotions you need to build to that. You need to make people feel the happiness of living in Equestria that could be lost in this battle, you need to make people feel the weariness of the journey to get to the dragon, you need to make people afraid of the dragon, and hopeful for the fillies’ eventual success. So the scenes leading up to the dragon battle will need to establish this.
OR, if you want to write a short story, your story needs to manage all of this in a handful of scenes via implication, evocative language, choice bits of exposition, etc.
Another thing related to this is that when one is working with established characters, whether in fanfic or as a writer for any continuing fictional universe, some stories will be easier to tell with some characters because people already link them with certain emotions. We know about Rainbow Dash’s dreams of being a Wonderbolt, we’re invested in what it means to her, so a story about her becoming a Wonderbolt will be easier to make feel triumphant than a story about Flitter becoming a Wonderbolt. In the later case, you have to establish all of those feelings of determination and worry that we already see from Rainbow Dash on the show.
This also might explain why certain tropes exist in fanfic, like Rainbow Dash losing her wings. We don’t have to establish a lot of emotional investment for the payoff of anguish and despair, the emotional investment is there already. If the fic was about Fluttershy losing her wings, first we’d need a bunch of extra scenes about why she really cares about her wings, we’d have to make people feel like her wings were important to her before we took them away. So if your aim is for a story about the emotional reaction to a future that was hoped for and then ripped away, Rainbow Dash is the easy way to do it.
On the other hand, let’s talk about establishing a character, and jump back to those easy emotions for a minute. Showing those things that are easy to make an audience feel, and letting a new character feel that way with the audience, is a good way to make the audience begin to sympathize with the character. If we just spent a thousand words feeling happy with Flower Petal playing with a litter of kittens, we don’t want bad things to happen to her! If we feel the same arousal that Gumshoe feels when the seductive unicorn walks into his office, we’re on the same emotional page that he is from the start. Beginning with a more complex emotion might not work as well, but keeping it simple and relatable might be a good trick to try when introducing an OC, or a character in original fiction.
Anyway, another implication of this is a new way of looking at pacing. If a story feels rushed, it could be that you’re not giving people enough emotional context for the emotions you want them to feel. Even if they’re reading the scene and understand the situation perfectly well, they can’t connect with it because somewhere along the line they weren’t feeling the emotion. Similarly, a fic that’s too slow might spend more time establishing various emotions than it spends on paying them off. Most people can only read about one emotion for so long before they’d like for the character to experience another one.
In either case, the problem with a scene might be in the scene itself, or it might start in an earlier scene and it’s only now you’re realizing the problem. If a story feels rushed or slow, it’s worth thinking about where the reader should be emotionally at this point, and what sorts of scenes it would take to get there. Do you have all of them? Are they successful at conveying the emotion they’re supposed to? Are there any that are emotionally redundant?
That might not help you any, it might be that your problem is something totally different. Maybe you can’t wrap your head around breaking down emotions that way. Maybe you’re a natural at plotting and have never had to revise an outline in your life, and all of your stories are wildly successful anyway. And that’s all totally fine.
But if you’re stuck, this is a tool you can try to see if it does what you need for fixing a story. Or if you feel like it, you can write a story just to mess with this tool and see if it works for you. It’s just something to think about.
I don't have anything to add here except "thanks, bud." Always good stuff from you in these.
This is an interesting perspective. I hadn't really thought of it like this before, but I had noticed the pattern of "emotional porn" stories that exist only to be cute, sad, etc. I just hadn't pegged emotional complexity as the difference between those and the stories that I could get more into.
So, do you think the most important thing to try and do while writing is evoking emotions in readers, and knowing which emotions you're trying to evoke?
A really cool breakdown of how stories work. Thanks, BP.
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I don't think anything is the most important thing in writing. Evoking emotion is a very important thing, but it might not be the most important thing in an intricate mystery that people are reading as a kind of puzzle, or anything else where the plot or setting are meant to take center stage more than the characters.
It will never hurt, of course, and situations where it is the most important thing clearly outnumber situations where it's not.
Nice analysis. I particularly like your take on the benefits of linking simple emotional scenes to character introductions.
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I tend to view emotions like spices in your kitchen. A dish completely devoid of them is flat and bland, but one filled to the brim with fancy exotic oils harvested from the belly buttons of sexy virgins and all that tripe is just a muddled mess. Similarly, there are a couple baseline emotions and any decent story has to have one of them in there somewhere, a la sugar, salt, pepper, and acid. Even if your recipe calls for the rare Bhut Gochokeonit pepper which can only be harvested from a single plant in Nepal, it's going to have a pinch of damn salt or an ounce of sugar in there as well.
These kinds of blog posts are half the reason I follow you, Book. You just helped me to organize and better grasp a concept that's been bothering me for months on end, and I am definitely going to bookmark this blog post for easy reference.
Current project's main emotional objectives: anxiety and despair punctuated with relief and concluding with triumph of survival and flourishing in better conditions.
A real emotional roller coaster, but of different and varying emotions so that each one stays fresh.
Or maybe you're someone that has no idea what the problem is, and takes all the advice he/she/Not Worthy can get.
Anywho, I find the delineation between the simple emotions and the complicated ones to be interesting. I can't say what's superior (nor would I really want to; I like being surprised when I read a story [and I'm not assuming you don't, in case you come to that conclusion from that comment), but thinking about them is interesting. I think I understand what you're getting at, but I think another readthrough when I'm more awake will do me good.
But in an attempt to appear helpful, I would like to offer one more insight that might be useful here. Any emotion, simple or complex, requires a situation to go along with it. Humans, as fr as I know, don't deal with emotions directly, but rather experience them through various scenes we experience, witness or conjure up in the mind. When a story seems bland, it's usually because the writer/author (I honestly don't know the difference between the two) did not magnify the situation. Maybe it requires a subdued tone, or maybe the feeling is dead on, but a story, in my opinion, can be looked at in two manners: as being told by a god-like person (the writer) or witnessed as it is.
I think this view is important—although, to be honest, I don't think I've given the matter an adequate amount of thought—because it seems to reflect how stories are crafted in general. Either a person recalls events that spark a grand emotion within them, or they take pieces of the reality they know and/or can conjure up in order to recreate an event. And I think it's important to acknowledge this because if you can't pull off an emotion you intend, it's either because you don't have the right pieces together in the created reality, or something before the intended emotional climax (or perhaps even maintenance) contradicts the emotion you're setting up too greatly.
I believe greatly in the power of a story's internal reality, both in its own right and how it reflects our own. If an emotion is felt within us, then most likely something within the internal reality resonated within our own reality, either reminding or revealing; I've seen bad stories that have that one moment of resonance. The internal reality must be able to place the emotion in a place where it deserves to be experienced, and this is where the contextualization comes in. Proper attention must be given to things necessary to understand in order to establish the desired effect, and those things must have influence on the person or thing the emotion can be found in.
I find my sentences becoming more clunky as I type this, so I'll move on.
There are two things that complicate my view on the matter. The first is the idea of mystery; how much information is too much, and how much is too little? With open-ended stories, how does one establish proper emotions without there being a payoff in the reader's mind? The second is the concept of wonder; should we expect all emotional cues to happen in the same general matter, and should we WANT to?
Is that even an issue?
I think I'm making myself look like an ass by continuing, but I wanted to offer my two cents on the matter. I apologize for any clumsy, bungling, and/or idiotic comments made. I do appreciate the tool you offer here, and I thank you far typing it.
One little aside:
A picture is worth a thousand words is quite literally an advertising slogan, it isn't actually even close to the true value of a picture, which is actually more than an order of magnitude less. The average picture is worth less than a hundred words, in fact, according to at least a few studies I've found, and this isn't terribly surprising if you think about it; most pictures really don't communicate a whole bunch.
Pictures are really quite bad at communicating a lot of things - if you want to give a view of a landscape, or a image of a character, that's something they do well. But actually communicating in the same way that stories do, pictures just aren't nearly as efficient at that as words are - many pictures really aren't worth a whole lot, and it can take a whole lot of pictures to tell a pretty simple story.
As for the actual topic... when you talk about introducing a character on a single note, I think back to the very first episode of My Little Pony, as this is how every one of the characters is introduced, and only later are they given more flesh. Their first meetings are all pretty one note - Applejack is folksy, Rainbow Dash is awesome, Pinkie Pie is crazy, Fluttershy is shy, and Rarity is vain and obsessed with haute couture. They're given a single "hook", and then more is added on.
The danger, I think, is that it is very easy for said hook to come to define the character - if you look at these same characters, Rainbow Dash, Rarity, and all of the CMC other than Apple Bloom had their hopes and ambitions shown to us within a minute of their first appearance. The only character who got a motivation after their introduction was Apple Bloom; everyone else may have short-term ambitions, but they never ended up with any long-term plans or goals. While these aren't crucial to a character, I think that Pinkie Pie, Fluttershy, and Applejack have all suffered for the fact that the writers didn't have easy, obvious motivational hooks to tug on them with, and while this can lead to creativity, it can also lead to Fluttershy's upteenth "getting over being shy" episode.
So while for bit part characters this works out fine (they don't show up for terribly long), if you're actually planning on developing a character, I think figuring out how you're introducing them can lead you into something which lets you add a lot more flesh onto that character later can be very helpful, and frequently that first impression that you give with a character can really define them to a great degree, both to you and the audience.
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I'm trying to get to bed, but I wanted to address this quickly.
That wasn't really what I was talking about, really. I was talking about introducing them on a single emotion. For example, the mane six are all happy when they meet Twilight, or soon after, and one thing it's easy for images to make people feel is happy. We see each of the mane six smiling and being friendly, and it makes us smile too. And that makes us like them, and worry when bad things might happen to them (or even when Twilight just doesn't want to be their friend.)
Introducing Rarity in the middle of an argument with Sweetie Belle might have been more difficult, because that's a more complex relationship and without any context we wouldn't know how we were supposed to feel about Rarity. It would be easy for us to get the wrong impression, or to disconnect. Which isn't to say that it can't be done, just that it's harder, and using a simple emotion like pity or happiness might be kind of a cheat towards likable characters.
Edit: I actually thought of an even better example. Pity is another of those emotions it's easy to make people feel. In the Harry Potter books, Rowling introduces Harry this way, she makes us pity him for his life with the Dursleys. The treatment is such that it doesn't really matter who Harry is, we feel bad for what he's going through. In the openings of the following books, his interactions with the Dursleys feature more complex emotions and situations-- Harry doesn't remain a one note character that we should pity-- but to start off with she uses something easy for people to feel an emotional connection with before she moves into scenes where we needed context about what kind of person Harry is in order to understand why he feels this way.
Welp, time to write that Flitter fic I had on backburner before someone else does!
I've often had trouble with scenes that felt rushed, like I was trying to pile too much character or plot development into too little space.
I don't have a solution yet, and god knows I still write plenty of scenes that feel rushed, but I've found the best way to deal with it is to try and balance the amount of action and description in a scene. This balance varies depending on the scene, of course -- an adventure, where the characters are discovering a new locale, probably includes more description than a conversation piece, while an action scene is just that, action. But every scene needs a balance, and when my writing feels off, that's one of the first places I look to fix it.
I was forming a response, but you actually covered everything I was gonna say, so I'm just going to inflict the awful story idea I crafted to use as a bad example:
That covers all four, right? :D
Is the whole post about one tool, and that tool is to study the emotional context of a scene if it has pacing problems?
2038248 INSTANT FEATURED BOX!
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No, the tool is the way of looking at the story, as a way of conveying emotions of various complexity, and how those might be broken down or built up to. Similar to looking at a story as being placed in the MICE quotient, or looking at scenes as action/reaction.
What you described is one of the potential uses I identified for the tool. Another is the idea of introducing a character using a "simple emotion" so that it's easier for readers to identify with immediately, or in fanfiction looking at whether the character you're writing about comes with emotional context for more complex emotions, or if you have to build that. There might be other uses I haven't identified yet.
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I am now considering writing this.
2040321 Only if you also review it afterwards.