Margot Livesey
ONE OF THE MAIN AMBITIONS OF ART IS TO DEPICT AND evoke emotion. By the end of a story or a novel, we hope that both characters and readers will have felt something: pleasure, sorrow, amazement, curiosity, awe, humility, fear, trepidation, intellectual satisfaction, humor, the delight of solving a problem or of understanding how this particular world works, whatever we call that emotion summoned forth by beauty. But how to do this in the twenty-first century is a challenge.
Two ferocious dragons guard the source of true feeling: sentimentality and frigidity. Sentimentality is the too easy expression of excessive or obvious emotion; frigidity is when neither author nor characters seem to care sufficiently; see, for example, the way murders are typically presented in thrillers. In both cases the reader feels no incentive to experience an emotion. Why should readers care if someone else is feeling too much or too little? And if we manage to negotiate these two dragons then there is a third one to slay: cliché. So much has been written and sung about the emotions that many of our most common phrases—her heart leapt, his eyes filled with tears—can be used only with the utmost awareness and caution.
Writers have been aware of this dilemma for some time. Chekhov admonished his brother in a letter to use details and beware of commonplaces. “Best of all is to avoid depicting the hero's state of mind; you ought to make it clear from the hero's action.” And in 1919 T. S. Eliot famously claimed that emotion could no longer be expressed directly: “The only way of expressing emotion in the form of art is by finding an ‘objective correlative’; in other words, a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events which shall be the formula of that particular emotion; such that when the external facts, which must terminate in sensory experience, are given, the emotion is immediately evoked” (“Hamlet and His Problems”).
So what is to be done? One strategy is to withhold depicting or commenting on obvious emotion, and again we see writers experimenting with this for well over a hundred years. Kleist, Lermontov, and Robbe-Grillet all resolutely avoid the statement, and sometimes even the depiction, of emotion. This can work wonderfully well but only, I think, if it is obvious that emotion is being withheld—as, for instance, in Hemingway's famous story “Hills Like White Elephants.” If the reader doesn't intuit the buried emotion, this kind of withholding turns into frigidity.
Another strategy is to surprise the reader. Your heroine comes home to find an eviction notice on the door. Don't have her burst into tears or swear. Have her laugh or use the notice to line the bottom of her parrot's cage. Flannery O'Connor claimed that at the heart of a story lies some action or gesture quite unlike any other in the story. “This would have to be an action or gesture which was both totally right and totally unexpected,” she said. “It would have to be one that was both in character and beyond character; it would have to suggest both the world and eternity.”
A third strategy is to find a new way of describing familiar emotions, or to find an action that conveys how the character feels. As writers, our primary tool for creating emotion is language, which is to say that in writing we need to take account of both the connotation and the denotation of words and also to be aware of how the rhythm of our prose conveys meaning. Our secondary tools are action, dialogue, gestures, setting, narration, and exposition. Clearly how expression is conveyed in fiction depends on the voice of your story.
Take a story or a chapter you've written and choose a scene that you hope depicts and conveys emotion. Try one or several of these strategies:
Go through it checking for the word feel. Wherever possible, replace the word with something stronger and more precise. Check for clichés and obvious emotions: women crying, men being tough. Again replace with something more precise and appropriate for these particular characters. Or something more surprising.
Try radically overwriting the scene. Don't be afraid of purple prose, outrageous metaphors, piling on details, excess of all kinds. Reread and see what you've written that might be useful.
Try withholding all obvious expression of emotion. Can you signal the missing emotions in other ways—through gestures, pauses, descriptions of setting, having a character say or do something that's the opposite of what she actually feels? Imagining your characters on a stage can be helpful.
Follow T. S. Eliot's advice and invent an objective correlative.