Well, apparently we are going to have a theme for this week's blog posts: responses to email! While that is perfectly fine with me I will have to warn those of you in my day to day life that this could lead to minor ego inflation which could exponentially increase my wife's need for tolerance and forebearance of my overgrown monkey ass. Please keep the questions coming though in all seriousness. Believe me, there's nothing like a twenty year high school reunion to make a brother feel old and tired . . .
Today's question comes from a gentleman named Travis. Travis has just graduated high school (congratulations sir) and is writing for the first time. He writes:
"Read your post about music bringing up emotions and stuff . . . why is that important to characters . . . don't quite get what you mean."
{Travis I will first apologize for the heavy editing of your email. Your message contained a lot of information about ideas you were developing and I try very hard not to put someone else's material out for the general public without consent. Quite honestly, I think you've got some great ideas there that should lead to awesome stories.}
Okay Travis, before I answer your question let me front load with a bit of a disclaimer. I don't pretend to be the be all and end all encyclopedia for writers. I'm so very far from being that it's truly comical. I can and will only speak from my personal experiences and style. As I've said before there are a plethora of very accomplished authors out there whose personal blogs I follow for information and advice and I recommend that you do the same as well. We are all (hopefully) learning and growing in our craft and we all have something to teach each other. There are also literal tons of books on writing and writing development available at your local library (ahem Cleveland Library) that can help you as well.
Nonetheless, you did ask the question so I will do my best to answer it.
I prefer to write characters that I have gotten to know. I want to be able to understand them as human beings so I know who they are, how they think, and how they will respond to situations. For me, that requires that they have emotions. Now, unless you are either a complete sociopath with no emotional response whatsoever or empathic and able to understand the emotions of everyone around you, the baseline reference you have for emotions for your characters is you, plain and simple. Your characters are going to feel what you feel, or at least a version thereof.
Therein lies the problem, at least in my opinion, for a lot of writers. You are sometimes limited to your own emotional skillset. If I have a character that becomes so angry he's ready to Hulk beat some kid for hitting on his wife, I'm good. I know how that feels. I can write that. Ask me to write about the bliss of a sunny summer day as two butterflies play in a field of daisies though and I'm screwed. The last sunny field of grass image I wrote turned into a character's sex dream. Sorry, but sunshine and rainbows, well, it's just not me. I don't "get it" and therefore it's pretty damn hard for me to write. The same can be said about really foreign emotions as well. If your character needs to feel something so entirely outside of your frame of reference that you have no clue about it, it's going to require some research. This is a bit of a spoiler for the new book but I'll go ahead and give it to you because it perfectly illustrates this point. One of the overall themes in By Design is sexual identity. One of the lead characters is a dyed in the wool gay woman who falls in love with her male best friend. First of all, aside from the bad old jokes, no straight man understands what it's like to be a woman, let alone a lesbian. There are very complicated emotions and life experiences involved to which we have not clue one. If it wasn't for the advice, candor, and flat out blunt to the point of occasional discomfort honesty of several very good friends I would have been left writing the equivalent of a bad Penthouse forum letter. Instead their insights allowed me to create a character that has a very rich emotional structure that is also very tortured by who she is and what she wants. It's that kind of depth that, at least in my opinion, gets a reader involved with a character and makes them want to be part of that fictional world.
Yes, you can write characters without emotional content. Jeff Lindsay did it wonderfully in Darkly Dreaming Dexter, the novel on which the Showtime series Dexter is based (and I highly recommend you read immediately by the way). I would hazard to say though that it is infinitely harder to do than you would think. Can you imagine what it would be like to have no emotional response whatsoever? Unfortunately it's also not the easiest of things to charge a character or scene in your writing with really powerful emotions either. Focusing yourself in as a writer on a really tough emotional event and rehashing to the point of essentially reliving those feelings over and over can leave you literally fucked up for hours if not days. Try explaining to your wife why you're writing with tears in your eyes or so angry you're nearly pounding on the keyboard . . .
To sum it up Travis, I think you've got to pour the emotion into your characters, by whatever means necessary, to make them real to your readers. Like I mentioned in the last blog post, I used Sarah McLachlan's "Full of Grace" to help me recall a feeling of massive loss to build a final scene in By Design and nearly everyone that reads it tells me that couldn't get through it with dry eyes. Not trying to blow my own horn at all; what I want you to understand is that the whole object of what we do as writers is to convey the story we see in our head to our readers and let them experience it fully.
Well, our main goal is that and to make enough money writing to pay the light bill, but I digress.
Hopefully that at least attempted to answer your question.
Congratulations again Travis and good luck.
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