How to write emotion, part 2
How does it feel in the body?
Emotion is a cornerstone of storytelling. When done well, it makes readers care about your characters, it underlines your main themes, but it also sets the mood for your novel and allows you to express your writing style.
When writers struggle with writing emotion, it often comes down to lacking the vocabulary or not knowing the devices for articulating emotion. In that space, your writing can feel flat or repetitive: How any times can I write ‘he felt sad’ or ‘she said, angrily’? When an adjective won’t do, when you want to explore what kind of angry, and why, you need to dig down to uncomfortable places and be vulnerable with yourself.
A good question to start with is, how does this emotion feel in the body? Describing what an emotion feels like in the body helps readers better feel it in their bodies—but it also requires you to feel it in your own body first.
My first novel is about grief and guilt. My father was dying as I wrote the first draft, so the theme was inevitable (even if unconsciously so). It was hard-going to relive that pain over and over again, on the page and in real life, but my deep understanding of grief made the writing more rich (and the writing alleviated my grief, but that’s a topic for another day).
Even if your main character is nothing like you or is living through moments very different from your current reality, the way certain emotions are experienced in the body are universal. Joy is joy. Anger is anger. What is not universal is why that emotion is being felt, but that, also, is a topic for another day.
Here are some examples of expressing emotion through the body.
In “Bad Dreams”, a short story by Tessa Hadley, a young child wakes up before the rest of her family and plays a harmless trick. When her mother later discovers all of the chairs in the lounge turned upside down, she thinks her husband is the culprit:
This time, for once, she was clearly in the right, wasn't she? He had been childish, giving way to his frustration—as if she didn't feel fed up sometimes. And he criticized her for her bad temper! He had such high standards for everyone else! From now on, she would hold on to this new insight into him, no matter how reasonable he seemed. Her disdain hurt her, like a bruise to the chest; she was more used to admiring him. But it was also exhilarating: she seemed to see the future with great clarity, looking forward through a long tunnel of antagonism, in which her husband was her enemy. This awful truth appeared to be something she had always known, though in the past it had been clouded in uncertainty and now she saw it starkly. Calmly and quietly, she picked up each chair, put back the cushions which had tumbled onto the carpet, straightened the goatskin rug. The room looked as serene as if nothing had even happened in it. The joke of its serenity erupted inside her like bubbles of soundless laughter. Nothing—nothing—would ever make her acknowledge what he had done, or the message he'd left for her, although when he saw the room restored to its rightful order, he would know that she knew. She would wait for him to be the first to acknowledge in words the passage of this silent violence between them.
The mother-martyr carrying her family like a bruise on her chest, wanting to be right, to be appreciated, to be seen. Bubbles of laughter that are soundless. You can feel her insecurity, her despair at being invisible, her embracing this resentment because even if it’s pain, it’s her pain, she owns it, no one else can take it away from her.
Our second example is also a mother, but this time taken from Katherine Mansfield’s “Bliss”, one of my favourite short stories of all time. Read this opening!
Although Bertha Young was thirty she still had moments like this when she wanted to run instead of walk, to take dancing steps on and off the pavement, to bowl a hoop, to throw something up into the air and catch it again, or to stand still and laugh at—nothing—at nothing, simply. What can you do if you are thirty and, turning the corner of your own street, you are overcome, suddenly, by a feeling of bliss—absolute bliss!—as though you'd suddenly swallowed a bright piece of that late afternoon sun and it burned in your bosom, sending out a little shower of sparks into every particle, into every finger and toe? ... Oh, is there no way you can express it without being 'drunk and disorderly'? How idiotic civilization is! Why be given a body if you have to keep it shut up in a case like a rare, rare fiddle?
I get a dizzy, fuzzy feeling every time I read this. Bertha’s words like a little shower of sparks on the page. It’s crucial for the reader to feel it so viscerally because when Bertha’s world come crashing down a few pages later, the devastation is all the more… devastating. And some appreciation for Mansfield’s repetition of “rare, rare” to create an extra burst of enthusiasm at the end of that sentence.
What did you notice about these examples? Did they resonate? Why or why not?
Do you struggle with writing emotion?
What questions help you access the words you need?
And if you missed the first in this series, you can still read it here 👋🏼