How To Make FEELS (Or Drawing from Within)

In our weird little society, both inside the internet and out of it, we're always trying to put on a brave face and chase away those emotions we don't quite like. We show people our successes (Got a book deal! Wrote X amount of Words today!) but shy away from sharing anything really negative about ourselves. After all, who likes a Negative Nancy? People who are constantly negative bring you down and you don't want to spend time with them (let alone a whole book with them), but the opposite holds true as well. When we're all sunshine and roses and success stories, sometimes people can find it hard to relate to us. No one's life is perfect. I believe this stands through in writing as well as real life. Struggle helps us sympathize with others. If you have the Mary Sue MC who never runs into any troubles, it's easy to dismiss her as unrealistic.

So why do we insist on dulling down our negative emotions, hiding them away, and pretending the world is simply full of Mary Sues?

Emotion and writing go hand in hand because emotion and life go hand in hand. If you as a writer are feeling something really strongly while writing-- if your own story pulls anger or surprise or general shock from you, you have a greater chance of eliciting that response in the reader. But how do you tap into that swell of emotion? How do you find the right words to bring it out?

I believe the first step is acknowledging your own emotions throughout your day to day life.

Do you try to shut down anger, or put it away for later? Do you hide feelings of grief or sadness behind a big smile? Why? Because other people might be put off of your negative sides?

Currently, I set today out to write. Write, write, write. But I woke up in a horribly depressed mood. I just want to openly weep over my keyboard for no good reason. Usually I use this as an excuse to avoid writing. After all, it's next to impossible to form decent sentences when it feels like my brain is moving through molasses. But the scene I'm currently writing is a sad one, so I forced myself to sit down and write, because as I feel nearly exactly like my character would feel, it gives me an opportunity to look inside and understand what that really feels like and then find the words to convey that to someone else.

Often when I'm writing, my character may come across a situation I couldn't even imagine. Their best friend is killed. They have to undertake a massive responsibility. Yes, I can go with the most obvious way they may feel about those things, but I often feel like that's not enough. We don't have a "boo hoo" moment when someone close to us dies, we have a long lasting grief that can affect us in multitude of different ways.

When you hit those moments where you're angry beyond belief, when you're shattered inside, or even when you're so overjoyed you don't know what to do with yourself, take a moment. As a writer, take yourself inside your own experience. Try to describe to yourself how it feels. How would you make a reader understand what this feeling is like? You may not be slaying dragons or dealing with your friends being murdered, but the foundation of those feelings is there in your everyday life. When putting characters through those larger than life situations, we can take what we've learned from introspection and what it feels on a small scale, and then blow it up to larger than life proportions that suit your character's situation.

We specialize in the human condition. Life is long but unfortunately book pages are few. To create something really poignant, you need to take as many opportunities as possible to really make your character feel. Utter disappointment. Failure. Depression. Motivation. Joy. Elation. Lust. More so, those emotions are much more powerful when you can touch on what it really feels like. How many times have you had minorities of any kind (Disability, mental illness, POC, LGBT, etc) look at something and say, "This isn't right. This isn't what it's like." The same can be happen for feeling, for events that cause those feelings, and for inaccurate responses to those situations. It's why I take some time to think how my character (not just anyone, but the character I've built so far) may feel about something.

We'll never get it perfect, because everyone is different and experiences things differently. There will always be people who say, "That's not right," regarding how your character reacts to a situation, how they feel about something, what they get angry at, etc. It's because of the diversity of the human race, and it's that diversity that we really want to capture. If every character reacted how they were "supposed" to, it would create the same story over and over again, invoke the same feelings. As artists, we're always looking for something new.

So take some time each day and consider how you're feeling. Take a break from reality and ask yourself how you reacted to that snide comment from a coworker. Consider how missing breakfast made you feel and affected your mood. Often there is so much going on within us that we disregard in favour of focusing on the outside world, but that inside world is where we find humanity, which every reader is looking for.

What are your thoughts? How do you go about capturing emotion? Let me know!

How To: Tension

Okay, so I know I haven't dabbled in writing about... well, writing, so I figured I'd give it a shot. Although I've got to put in a disclaimer here: What I found is, if you're trying to improve your writing, read books on writing, study the craft, that's all awesome. But the best way you're going to improve is if you do it yourself. Take what I've said here and experiment with it, play with it. If you decide my advice doesn't work for you, toss it away and do what does work for you. There are a million different ways to write, don't feel limited by my advice. (Or anyone's!)

So today, I'm going to do a little coaching about TENSION.

*Cue music that goes DUN DUN DUN*

Tension is one of my favorite parts of writing or reading a novel. It's not always easy to understand, or easy to implement, but once you have it down you will have readers up all night to read just one more chapter. And isn't that what we all want? Depriving our readers of sleep so in their confused and fuzzy mindset they put down half their paychecks on several hundred extra copies of our books? (You know. Just in case.)

What is tension anyway? Why do we need it? Tension is, essentially, the mystery of the book and its stakes. 90% of the time, it's what draws your reader deeper and deeper into the story, wanting to find out more. It should be on every. Page. Of. Your. Novel. Sometimes it can be hard to put in tension that relates to your main conflict on the first page, or even on every page. And rightly so. How can you give hints or anticipate an event your characters have no idea is coming? Simple. You don't.

Every bit of tension doesn't have to relate back to your main conflict. In fact, it shouldn't. With every piece of the puzzle that fills into your story, the tension should grow.

There are three kinds of tension: The things your characters keep from your reader, the things your narrator keeps from the characters and the reader, and the things your narrator keeps from just your characters.

So let's start where it's simple: the first five pages. How do you introduce tension in the first few pages? One of the easiest ways is to have your character keep something from the reader.

I'm going to use examples from Guardian of the Dead by Karen Healey, because this woman wrote the book on tension. Seriously. It's fantastic. Anyway, in Healey's opening pages, two of the main characters wake up in a dorm room, and our MC realizes that not only are they late, but they're going to be in trouble. Immediately, the reader is interested. Why are they going to be in trouble? True to her 1st person narrator, Healey doesn't keep the info from the reader for long. We find out the two characters have been drinking, which is against school policy, and the guy with her has to sneak out of the window because he's not allowed in the girl’s dorm.

Well, tension broken, right? We know what the fuss is about. Except Healey doesn't stop there. For a moment the characters discuss what they talked about last night without revealing what they talked about. The reader is immediately interested again because, quite frankly, who can resist gossip?

And so Healey builds on this. Introducing tiny mysteries that seem almost insignificant, but keeps the reader interested long enough for her to get to her main conflict.

So go back and look at your opening pages. Is there anything you could leave to a bit of mystery? It can have absolutely nothing to do with your main plot. It doesn't even have to be that important to the main character, but as long as it keeps the reader interested, it'll keep them turning the pages.

For example, say your main character has to meet her teacher to discuss a grade. If your original text looks something like this:

I was supposed to meet Mrs. Sherman after seventh period to discuss our papers, but I dragged my feet all the way there. Dread was building in the pit of my stomach. Would Mrs. Sherman actually fail me? What if I didn't make that scholarship?

Try to heighten the mystery:

I dragged my feet as I walked, dread building deep in the pit of my stomach. Being late would cost me, I knew, but I couldn't force myself to move any faster. Meeting fate's funny like that. My entire future rested on what Mrs. Sherman thought, and some stubborn part of me refused to be punctual.

The first is pretty standard, and there's nothing overly wrong with it. But the second, if you didn't know the character was meeting a teacher, can trick you into reading further. Though it's not life or death, the reader wants to know why Mrs. Sherman holds so much power over our main character. More so, when dealing with tension, remind the reader of the stakes: The character’s future depends on this meeting, so you understand why this may be crucial to her, even if it’s not crucial to the plot.

This leads me into another point. Some writers like to play Keep Away. This is when the characters all know something, but the reader has no idea what they're talking about. POV characters can only keep things they know from the reader for a little while, but if it doesn't come out, the reader can get frustrated. It's like being left out of a conversation. It's best not to use this method of tension for the whole book. Characters keeping info from readers should be used as tiny bridging tensions that can help bring you to your main conflict.

When you get into your main conflict, you're going to want to use the second form of tension: Your narrator keeps info from both the reader and characters. This is just saying your characters have no idea how the story will turn out, and neither should your reader. Again, we want to tie this further back into the stakes of the novel.

Let's take The Hunger Games as an example for this one. Throughout the Games, we know that Katniss is probably going to win, but we don't know how. And neither does Katniss. This adds tension, but what adds more tension is when we're reminded of what's at stake. Katniss could lose her life, but she could lose more for the people of her district. If you keep reminding the reader why this is so important, they'll feel more of that tension, that desperation that your character is feeling.

So instead of something like:

With the bundle of bread clutched under one arm, Margo ran until her breath was short and every part of her ached. The Marshall was behind her, his horse barreling through the woods as if the twists and turns were no more bothersome than flies.

Let's remind the readers why it's so important Margo escapes:

With a bundle of bread clutched under one arm, Margo ran until her breath was short and every part of her ached. The Marshall was behind her, his horse barreling through the woods as if the twists and turns were no more bothersome than flies. She ducked behind a log and skid down a hill. She couldn't be captured, not here, not now. Not while her brother lay on the edge of death at home. He needed her, and she couldn't let him down.

The last kind of tension is a bit tricky, and should be used sparingly. The information that your narrator keeps just from your characters. If you need an idea of this, imagine a scene in your novel from another point of view, farther from your MC than you've gone before. Usually this is from your villain’s POV. I've used this both in Crash and Shell and it is effective, but not something you want to overuse. Having a scene from a villain’s point of view is great for tension, especially near the climax. All it does, really, is remind the reader what's at stake, and sometimes reveal information that the MC may not know. Perhaps the villain knows the MC is coming and has set a trap? Suddenly the reader is fearful, because they know the MC is in trouble.

If you have your characters feel the desperation, then your reader will feel it too. The clock's ticking, time's running out, your characters have to complete their quest before the villain can thwart them. Show the stakes. Make it seem likely that your good guys will lose. It will keep the reader on the edge of their seat, for sure.

Peace,

-Katie