I Get So Emotional

I beg your forgiveness for inserting that insipid Whitney Houston song into your mind (and for somewhat copying Maven Erica's Monday Post Title). Unfortunately, it's the first thing that popped into my head when I thought about what I might say about emotion this week. See, I'm a sentimental fool. I choke up when I check my children late at night. Stupid songs (Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star???) trigger my sob reflex. I cry at parent meetings or watching a school play that doesn't even include my own children or any that I'm related to. It's horrifying. And I'm completely incapable of stopping it.

How does this translate into my writing? I'm not writing tearjerkers, that's for sure. What I hope I'm writing are emotionally rich characters and deeply moving themes. My favorite reads are those that make me feel what the characters are feeling. I hate when I read a book and it gets to the end where things tie up nicely and you only get one POV. You get how either the hero or heroine feels but not the other. Makes me want to throw the book. I don't have that problem so much anymore, but it seemed like this happened a lot in the books I read when I was younger. Does that mean books have changed? Maybe. It may simply mean that writers are getting better at tapping into that emotion and inviting the reader to do the same.

I think POV is an important ingredient. Probably a lot of the older books I read contain a certain amount of head-hopping, which is not always conducive to conveying emotion. It's hard to share a character's triumphs and woes if you aren't with them long enough. Deep POV is a really great way to have a direct line to emotion. And of course, as Maven Jacq pointed out yesterday, showing emotion rather than telling it is a huge part of drawing the reader in. Even in movies, I relate better to a character by their actions instead of their dialogue or facial expressions. They can look sad, but I need to feel their sadness (or whatever emotion). Think of Chewbacca. No understandable dialogue and a lesser range of facial expression than humans. Despite this, we feel his sadness when Han is tortured and then frozen in carbonite. More than that, I feel his anger, his frustration and everything in between.

And that's a tough thing: varying emotions. Deeper emotions are sometimes easier to convey because they are more black and white: despair, joy, anger, fright. But what about amusement, boredom, contentment, annoyance? These can be more difficult because they are grayer shades of those deeper emotions. Too many deep emotions and you might have a caricature. Too few and you may have a character who doesn't resonate.

I mentioned in Monday's comment thread that Elizabeth Hoyt did a great workshop in Atlanta at Moonlight and Magnolias about polishing your ms. She said to make sure that the POV character's emotions are clear in each scene. I'm doing a polish pass on Glorious using the tips from her workshop (the tidbits were too good to not go back and use) and emotion is something I'm going to be looking at very closely. I'm also making notes of emotion as I storyboard my current book. In fact, I used emotion words when crafting the arcs for my hero and heroine. You can do so much with emotion! Or maybe that's just me (see post title).

How do you use emotion in your writing/plotting/polishing? What draws you into a book emotionally? How much do you hate me for the title of this post? (Answer must be in the form of an emotional response.)

Oh, and I wanted to share this because it's pertinent: I got a great Maven crit yesterday asking how my heroine felt about something a secondary character said. Since this is the very beginning of the book (yes, new book - without a title yet!) and we're just meeting these characters, it's important information to have about both the heroine and the secondary character. What will be fun is what the secondary character's emotion really is versus what the heroine thinks it is, or better yet, the emotion it strikes within the heroine! See, emotion can be fun! Or, again, maybe that's just me.