Tag: portraying emotion

Categories
Courting the Muse

Why Advice Columns Might Just Give You Your Next Story Idea

These days, anyone who wants to write short stories of an unconventional bent has their pick of quirky venues to showcase their work.

By way of example, just look at Taco Bell Quarterly, a self-professed rival of the storied Paris Review. One of the hottest literary magazines to emerge in the past year, it only accepts work related to America’s favorite fast-food purveyor of Crunchwrap Supremes. Microverses, an even newer journal of speculative flash fiction, limits itself to “tweet-length work” — minute narratives of no more than 280 characters.

Then there’s r/relationships, a wildly popular advice forum on the social media giant Reddit. Frequented by some 3 million visitors worldwide, it’s come under fire recently for being filled with lies. As it turns out, many of those posting on the forum aren’t actually lovelorn sufferers in genuine need of advice — they’re fiction writers, flexing their skills in an unusual form.

That brings me to my favorite source of narratively rich and formally intriguing short fiction: the old-fashioned advice column. That’s not to say that everyone corresponding with the likes of Dear Prudence and Ask Polly is a fabulist, honing their craft in the inbox of an agony aunt (though readers have made a sport out of spotting the fake letters for years). Even if most letter-writers are seeking advice in earnest, this oddball genre remains fertile ground for literary inspiration.

Directly adapting a letter into a story might raise some eyebrows — especially if you assume the mind behind it belongs to a genuine advice-seeker, not a fellow fiction writer. But even if turning a stranger’s vulnerability into a literary project, detail for detail, doesn’t strike you as the right move, advice columns can still inspire good writing.

Glance at any given advice column, and you’ll find a treasure trove of emotionally resonant stories, from the heartrending to the absurd. For me, these accounts aren’t just intriguing because of their wealth of hyper-specific detail: the exact infractions committed by an overzealous homeowner’s association, the strange scent clinging to an adulterous spouse’s clothes. The little narratives they encapsulate are valuable to writers primarily because of their nuanced — even outright messy — depictions of human feeling.

Advice columnists, and the people who write to them, acknowledge that we don’t always react to emotional stimuli in ways that make sense. Betrayal can evoke relief as well as heartbreak, and the most passionate love can be complicated by mutual resentment.

When it comes to crafting complicated, true-to-life emotional arcs for your stories, there’s almost no better source of inspiration than the advice letter. If you find one that touches a nerve, consider exploring its palette of emotions through an analogous — but distinct — scenario of your own invention. All you need to do is meld the letter-writer’s narrative with your own experience, adding dash of imagination and empathy for good measure. You just might find yourself looking at your next short story.

When you try to turn that initial spark into a well-executed work, you might try seeking inspiration from the advice column in terms of form as well as content. While we don’t typically think of advice letters as high art, they have a lot to teach short story writers about style and presentation.

Advice column letters are perfectly crafted for communication, clueing readers in on the emotional stakes of a situation with maximal efficiency. As such, they deploy unpretentious language and tight plotting to get readers invested in the most bizarre scenarios. Next time you write a story, try channeling their economy of expression for a narrative that packs a punch.

Lucia Tang is a writer for Reedsy, a marketplace that connects self-publishing authors with the book industry’s best editors, designers, and marketers. To work on the site’s free historical character name generators, she draws on her knowledge of Chinese, Latin, and Old Irish —  learned as a PhD candidate in history at UC Berkeley. You can read more of her work on the Reedsy Discovery blog, or follow her on Twitter at @lqtang.

Categories
Talking Character

Five Questions for Portraying Anger

Anger comes in many shades, from miffed to murderous. Each shade looks and feels different. When a person is miffed, he might roll his eyes or make a snarky comment. When a person is enraged to the point of being murderous, adrenaline is pumping through his body, making him tense, flushed, and ready to punch someone.

Anger expresses itself differently in different people. No two people respond to anger the same way. Some tend towards melodrama while others keep a tight rein on their emotions. For example: Some teachers constantly yell at their students in order control the classroom. Others rarely raise their voice. I remember being more terrified the one day my normally serene homeroom teacher raised his voice than I ever was at the threats of the constant shouters.

[bctt tweet=”With all this variability, writers must take care to describe anger in convincing and imaginative ways.” username=””]

Here are five questions to ask when a scene calls for anger.

  1. Where am I in the story? A story builds tension as it moves towards the climax. You want to slowly increase emotional intensity, and peak during the climax. That doesn’t mean your characters can’t be angry in earlier scenes, but do keep the overall arc in mind. You should allow your characters room to let their emotions grow and deepen, especially those that will be significant in the climax.
  2. What nuance am I looking for? Look up anger in a thesaurus and scan the synonyms. Select one that best captures the nuance of the emotion your character is feeling. Next, determine what sorts of physical and mental responses suit that specific emotion. A good resource for this is The Emotion Thesaurus by Angela Ackerman and Becca Puglisi.
  3. How does my character’s personality affect how she responds? Some temperaments are naturally more expressive than others. Some characters have volatile tempers while others have learned to stuff their emotions (until the clever writer forces them into a corner and suddenly they can’t hold them in any longer). Like in the school example above, one character’s shout may indicate frustration while another character would only shout when furious. Try to keep your characters’ responses consistent and appropriate for their personalities. And always keep in mind that your characters’ responses to anger are probably different from your own.
  4. Is the response appropriate for the situation? I remember a girl in high school who acted by using stock emotions that she put on and off like a mask. All angry scenes had the same intensity, regardless of the situation. If I had the emotional sophistication to detect this two-dimensional acting in high school, your readers can detect similar lack of authenticity in your characters. A character should not become irate when someone cuts in front of them in line—unless you have built the story to explain why the character reacts so out of proportion to the offense.
  5. What emotion(s) underlie the anger? Sometimes anger is just anger, but often the root of anger is some other emotion, such as fear, guilt, or shame. Humans often use anger to conceal other emotions, intentionally or unintentionally. Consider a character’s backstory and their inner issues. When is their anger response actually hiding something deeper? Do they realize it or not? How can you bring that deeper emotion to play on the page?

Anger. It’s a powerful emotion. Use it wisely.

[bctt tweet=”What other emotions does anger hide in your characters? #writer #amwriting” username=””]

Categories
Talking Character

Confused Characters Who Don’t Confuse Readers

The trickiest part about conveying confusion is to convey it clearly, without confusing the reader.  Ann Hood in Creating Character Emotions

From time to time our characters will be confused about something. Perhaps they’ve made assumptions that suddenly turn out to be incorrect. Perhaps someone says or does something that doesn’t make sense. Perhaps another character is intentionally trying to confuse them.

Whatever the situation, the writer must take pains to make sure the reader know what’s going on, even when the character doesn’t.

Two common pitfalls when portraying confusion:

  1. Sensory overload. Hit a character with enough simultaneous noises and actions and they’ll certainly become confused. However, the reader will be just as befuddled by the mass of details.

Example: Halfway to the mailbox, Sara heard her ringtone and rushed inside. Where had she left the phone this time? She almost tripped on a shoe her son had left by the front door, which woke the dog and started him barking. Gritting her teeth, Sara ran past the stupid dog to the kitchen in time to see her two-year-old dump an open box of cereal onto the floor and break into wails.

A vivid portrayal of confusion, but the reader doesn’t understand what it means unless the writer also shows what emotions the chaos creates for Sandy.

  1. Information that is meaningless to the reader. When you confuse a character with information he doesn’t understand, make sure the reader has an inkling of what it means.

Example: Jared unfolded the piece of notebook paper. Who was K. and why had she stuffed a note in his locker? What did she mean by ‘see you after school at the tree’? Which tree? There were like a million trees in this neighborhood alone.

Unless your readers know more than Jared, they will be just as confused as he is.

[bctt tweet=”Don’t make the reader befuddled just because your character is. #writers ” username=””]

Better strategies for portraying confusion:

  1. Let the reader in on the joke. Characters often mistakenly believe an action or comment means one thing, when in fact it means something else. Readers, however, don’t enjoy being purposely led astray, so make sure the reader is aware (or at least suspects) that the character is making a mistake. In example two above, imagine how much better it would work if the reader knows that K’s friend has the locker next to Jared’s. Now, instead of making the same mistake Jared makes, the reader will grin in anticipation for the awkward scenario to follow.
  2. Show the emotional source of the confusion. What readers really want to understand is why a character acts the way she does. I might improve example one by adding some of the emotions underlying the confusion, like this:

Example: Halfway to the mailbox, Sara heard her ringtone. Why did she always forget to put her phone back in her pocket? She hurried inside and almost tripped on a shoe her son had left by the front door. Uh oh. It wasn’t her turn to pick up the kids, was it? She couldn’t afford to forget again. She rushed into the kitchen. Thank the Lord, only one-fifteen. So who was calling at this hour? Had she forgotten an appointment?

  1. Show the character’s thought process as he tries to make sense of things. As the character works through a situation that doesn’t make sense, he naturally portrays confusion without the writer ever having to say as much.

Example: Jared unfolded the piece of notebook paper. Who was K. and why had she stuffed a note in his locker? Kayla was the only girl he knew whose name started with K, and she would never use sparkly pink ink. Maybe someone meant to put it in Tori’s locker instead? But how was he supposed find out? There was no way he was going to show the note to a girl as popular as Tori.

[bctt tweet=”Confused characters. We love them, just so long as they don’t confuse us, too. #amwriting” username=””]

[bctt tweet=”Pitfalls to avoid when writing portraying confused characters. #writetips #writer” username=””]