How to write emotion
The first in a series—with examples
Sometimes, “he said, angry” is enough. You are not required to unpack every feeling that every character is having in every scene. You can trust your readers to intuit some of it, rely on the setting and tone of voice to fill in the blanks. But you cannot avoid the general problem of how to express emotions with the right words, of finding new ways to express emotions without always resorting to angry, sad, hungry, horny.
Sometimes, the wheel of emotional words helps. If you’re working on a novel, however, with emotions evolving for many characters over a longer span of time, you may need to adapt a more strategic approach.
Over the next few weeks, I'm going to review different ways to write emotions—with examples, of course.
Today, using setting and interaction with that setting, with examples from Gianfranco Calligarich’s Last “Summer in the City”.
I picked up the Calligarich, because I wanted to read more Italian writers. I am loving this novel so much, that I’m limiting myself to only a few chapters a day and I already know that I will be rereading it. In the first few pages, our main character Leo Gazzara tells us:
Every day I would go to the sea. With a book in my pocket, I would take the metro to Ostia and spend most of the day reading in a little trattoria on the beach. Then I would go back to the city and hang around the Piazza Navona area, where I'd made a few friends, all of them adrift like me, intellectuals, for the most part, with the anxious but expectant look of refugees. Rome was our city, she tolerated us, flattered us, and even I ended up realizing that in spite of the sporadic work, the weeks when I went hungry, the damp, dark, hotel rooms with their yellowing furniture squeaking as if killed and desiccated by some obscure liver disease, I couldn't live anywhere else.
This one scene sets the tone for everything Leo says and does, at least until further developments come to change that baseline. Apathetic, disconnected, directionless. He has no work, lives in squalid hotel rooms, but there remains a little hope in him—Every day I would go to the sea and I couldn’t live anywhere else. He is still looking for connection, direction, and Rome will be his saviour or his downfall.
If Calligarich had placed him in another city or in other accommodations, we would be dealing with a different mindset. Or Calligarich could have dropped Gazzara in, say, the Venice carnival for contrast, but then he would have had to use other devices to tell us how Gazzara is feeling.
A few chapters later, the beautiful Arianna is trying to seduce Leo.
I put my hands on her small, flat belly, but couldn't move her. I was frozen and unhappy and there was nothing in me, not even a little of that warmth I would have liked more than anything else in my life, that all-consuming warmth that would have spread from my belly through my body so that in the end I'd be able to reach her. And that low, imploring voice of hers was even worse. Instead of bringing her closer, it made her even more distant, more unattainable, and I was ice cold, inert, filled with sadness.
Truly great writing comes from using a combination of techniques to express the evolution of a character’s feelings. In this passage, Calligarich uses more direct language. Unhappy, sadness, ice cold. The Leo that we met earlier is still there, he’s undeniably disconnected from this woman he’s ostensibly falling in love with, but his inability to bridge that gap is now causing his suffering. When Leo is forced to confront his apathy, the language becomes more direct, less detached because he is not numb in this moment. The words have to cut closer to the bone because Leo is starting to feel more emotions here. Masterful example of matching tone to the emotional shift the character is experiencing.
Do you have some examples of how the setting and interaction with that setting expresses emotion? Every new example deepens our understanding of the technique and how it can be used. Send me your favourite passages!