How do you feel?
Mood:
Contemplative
Read/Post Comments (5)
January 17, 2006
Bear with me....
Star Trek IV. We have Spock, having died in II, reborn, albeit younger and missing his, um, uh, soul/brain, whatever, having been regrown and re-integrated, in a cave at 3-D computer consoles playing a kind of Vulcan version of Trivia Pursuit. Then the computer says: How do you feel?
He's unable to answer this, totally confused by the question.
My point here? Readers want to feel. Something. Anything. Sadness. Happiness. Fear. Laughter. Grief. Terror. Exhilaration.
This is tough. Very, very tough. I tend to be analytical and rational. So do the characters in my fiction. Yet somehow I need to make my readers feel ... something.
This is also classic show-don't-tell. I prefer to have my characters act in ways that indicate their emotions, except when they're being smart-asses. A character's hands may shake, may feel chills up and down their spine, have sweat bead up on their forehead. It's much more effective than, "...a wave of fear crashed across my soul..." Yech.
How to have a character feel pleasure or joy or happiness is a much more complicated thing. A smile. A laugh. A lightheartedness shown ... how?
By the same token, I always, like many of us in real life, want my characters to be... perhaps this is hard to describe, but I think, inappropriately unresponsive. That is to say, somebody says something horrible to them or they realize something, and their first response isn't to slap their hands to their mouth and cry, "Oh my!" It's to stand frozen, eyes watering, staring blankly and struggling for an appropriate response. The pregnant pause, so to speak. Say your suburban housewive visits her neighbor, finds the door ajar, walks in and finds her neighbor's head lopped off, body eviscerated, blood everywhere. Screaming? Vomiting? Panic? Yes, possibly. But shock doesn't always react that way. People freeze up. They don't know what to do. They don't know what to FEEL.
I visited the medical examiner's office to take a tour, and I was deathly afraid that what I would encounter would be the one thing I probably couldn't deal with--a dead child being autopsied. I envisioned rotted corpses, bloated drowned corpses, and felt I could deal with those. What I got, actually, was an autopsy of an obese man who died in a house fire. First, he was naked, which is a shock in and of itself. Second, the skin was burnt. Not blackened or reddened, but it had the appearance of chicken that's been cooked too quickly on the grill. And thirdly, the top of his head was gone and they were sticking what looked like Barbeque tongs into the skull.
Did I faint or vomit? No. I got ever-so-slightly lightheaded. I got tingly (weird sensation), and I focused all my concentration on Phil Predmore, the toxicologist who was giving me the tour. And I kept taking peeks. And I was glad to get out of there.
Derek Stillwater, in the upcoming The Devil's Pitchfork, is a tough guy, former Special Forces. During events he tends to be heroic and action-oriented. But just prior to entering a hot zone, he's a mess. Pale, shaking, sweating, nauseous. One character calls him on it and he says, "Stage fright," and finds a sink to vomit into. But in the hot zone, he's fine. Why? Partly it is stage fright. He knows what the potential is for him in a hot zone--death, whoever's there and his own. There's a certain courage, also, in being terrified, yet doing what you have to do. Also, and this goes unsaid, but I think it's there, there are control issues involved. Prior to entering, things aren't in his control. Once he's moving, he's in control.
In an interview David Morrell gave, he said his first works were very intellectual, which he was comfortable with. Then he realized that what readers wanted was romance, and by romance he didn't mean love and sex, but romance in the way knights and damsels in distress viewed romance--adventure and high emotions and the sweep and glamour of life being a drama.
So when you're writing, keep in mind that we're trying to transfer more than actions and thoughts, but emotions, as well.
Oh, and, like Spock, I feel fine.
Best,
Mark Terry
Bear with me....
Star Trek IV. We have Spock, having died in II, reborn, albeit younger and missing his, um, uh, soul/brain, whatever, having been regrown and re-integrated, in a cave at 3-D computer consoles playing a kind of Vulcan version of Trivia Pursuit. Then the computer says: How do you feel?
He's unable to answer this, totally confused by the question.
My point here? Readers want to feel. Something. Anything. Sadness. Happiness. Fear. Laughter. Grief. Terror. Exhilaration.
This is tough. Very, very tough. I tend to be analytical and rational. So do the characters in my fiction. Yet somehow I need to make my readers feel ... something.
This is also classic show-don't-tell. I prefer to have my characters act in ways that indicate their emotions, except when they're being smart-asses. A character's hands may shake, may feel chills up and down their spine, have sweat bead up on their forehead. It's much more effective than, "...a wave of fear crashed across my soul..." Yech.
How to have a character feel pleasure or joy or happiness is a much more complicated thing. A smile. A laugh. A lightheartedness shown ... how?
By the same token, I always, like many of us in real life, want my characters to be... perhaps this is hard to describe, but I think, inappropriately unresponsive. That is to say, somebody says something horrible to them or they realize something, and their first response isn't to slap their hands to their mouth and cry, "Oh my!" It's to stand frozen, eyes watering, staring blankly and struggling for an appropriate response. The pregnant pause, so to speak. Say your suburban housewive visits her neighbor, finds the door ajar, walks in and finds her neighbor's head lopped off, body eviscerated, blood everywhere. Screaming? Vomiting? Panic? Yes, possibly. But shock doesn't always react that way. People freeze up. They don't know what to do. They don't know what to FEEL.
I visited the medical examiner's office to take a tour, and I was deathly afraid that what I would encounter would be the one thing I probably couldn't deal with--a dead child being autopsied. I envisioned rotted corpses, bloated drowned corpses, and felt I could deal with those. What I got, actually, was an autopsy of an obese man who died in a house fire. First, he was naked, which is a shock in and of itself. Second, the skin was burnt. Not blackened or reddened, but it had the appearance of chicken that's been cooked too quickly on the grill. And thirdly, the top of his head was gone and they were sticking what looked like Barbeque tongs into the skull.
Did I faint or vomit? No. I got ever-so-slightly lightheaded. I got tingly (weird sensation), and I focused all my concentration on Phil Predmore, the toxicologist who was giving me the tour. And I kept taking peeks. And I was glad to get out of there.
Derek Stillwater, in the upcoming The Devil's Pitchfork, is a tough guy, former Special Forces. During events he tends to be heroic and action-oriented. But just prior to entering a hot zone, he's a mess. Pale, shaking, sweating, nauseous. One character calls him on it and he says, "Stage fright," and finds a sink to vomit into. But in the hot zone, he's fine. Why? Partly it is stage fright. He knows what the potential is for him in a hot zone--death, whoever's there and his own. There's a certain courage, also, in being terrified, yet doing what you have to do. Also, and this goes unsaid, but I think it's there, there are control issues involved. Prior to entering, things aren't in his control. Once he's moving, he's in control.
In an interview David Morrell gave, he said his first works were very intellectual, which he was comfortable with. Then he realized that what readers wanted was romance, and by romance he didn't mean love and sex, but romance in the way knights and damsels in distress viewed romance--adventure and high emotions and the sweep and glamour of life being a drama.
So when you're writing, keep in mind that we're trying to transfer more than actions and thoughts, but emotions, as well.
Oh, and, like Spock, I feel fine.
Best,
Mark Terry
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