Emoting and Emotions

When I was six years old, we got our first television. Neighbors came and returned to watch movies and programs with us, or so I thought. The story goes that my facial expressions and involvement in the moving scenes were as much a part of the entertainment as the actual programs. I would laugh or cry or thrill with the story line. I became the characters and lived their lives with them. According to my husband, I haven’t changed one bit. In fact, when I write my own stories, I’ve been told I’m inclined to be grinning stupidly as I madly type across the computer keys or sobbing hysterically as I’m finishing some devastating encounter.

I realized this fact for myself and noticed I emote, not just the first time I write a story line, but on every rewrite. In “The Spirit Bundle” I have a scene with a husband dying. I still cry every time I read it, but at least I’m no longer keening.

To determine the best way to describe all kinds of emotions, I tried to become clinical. I analyzed sections of best-selling novels by counting words in paragraphs and whether they were short words or long, and what kind of verbs were used. With the classic authors I like, I mix-matched adjectives to test shades of feelings and meanings and diagramed sentences to determine how tension was paced in a chapter. In my own work, I made a particular scene into a poem then returned it to prose. One short story was revised twenty-seven times.

What I’ve learned is that I can copy what others have used to create tensions, pathos, fear, anxiety, jealousy or shame, but the best way to illustrate these emotions is for me to be willing to dig deep into the well of my own experiences.

Living other people lives through movies and books as a kid and teenage was a basis for understanding what emotions are. Being honest about my own feelings and learning to describe how different parts of my body react to such feelings as fear and love, hate and passion, and all the rest have come back to me as a two-fold gift. When I develop scenes and characters for my readers, I’m getting more in touch with my own reactions and feelings. Hopefully whoever picks up my stories will be touched as well.