The most emotionally intense book I ever read is Sarah Chorn's The Necessity of Rain. In fact, the experience of reading Chorn's impassioned prose led me to a desire to improve my own skills in writing emotion into my stories. So I got on Amazon and ordered The Emotional Craft of Fiction by Donald Maass (a well-known literary agent).
In chapter two, he describes the art of showing emotional content without telling. One master at this was Hemingway, and Maass shares a practical, persuasive bit of advice from Papa:
Find what gave you the emotion; what the action was that gave you the excitement. Then write it down making it clear so the reader will see it too and have the same feeling you had.
And then he shares the opening paragraph of Hemingway's "Now I Lay Me":
That night we lay on the floor in the room and I listed to the silk-worms eating. The silk-worms fed in racks of mulberry leaves and all night you could hear them eating and a dropping sound in the leaves. I myself did not want to sleep because I had been living a long time with the knowledge that if I ever shut my eyes in the dark and let myself go, my soul would go out of my body. I had been that way for a long time, ever since I had been blown up at night and felt it go out of me and go off and then come back. I tried never to think about it, but it had started to go since, in the nights just at the moment of going off to sleep, and I could only stop it by a very great effort. So while I am now fairly sure it would not really have gone out, yet then, that summer, I was unwilling to make the experiment.
Maass gives us a simple exercise to produce an emotional scene like the one Hemingway wrote so effectively. Choose a moment when your protagonist is shaken or touched powerfully in some way. Make a list of all the emotions and reactions you can imagine. Then write out a list of ways your protagonist could act out. What can they do that will be explosive or fascinating? What can they say that will deliver a punch? Is there something symbolic to consider in their actions and words? How can they do something unexpected?
The next step is key. Note how Hemingway did it with the mulberry racks of silk-worms chewing in the night. Choose a detail of the setting that the protagonist will notice while others may not, or which the protagonist will see differently.
Then, drop all the emotion words you listed. They were part of the exercise but do not belong in the final product. This is showing, not telling. Show with actions and words. All the better if the actions are unexpected or excessive. Don't hold back. Bigger is better. Intensity is called for. The out of the ordinary fascinates.
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