Writing Big Feelings (Minus the Maudlin)
If you’ve ever been in a writing workshop, you’ve probably heard the conversation wander into some version of “But how does the character feel?” Whenever I’ve been asked a version of this question—or told, more bluntly, that the reader can’t tell what my character is feeling—I’m stricken with panic. I’ve failed my reader!
Once upon a time, I’d run back to my manuscript and sprinkle in sentences like:
Tom looked away from his son (whom he loved so dearly), as his eyes filled with heavy tears, regret and terrible sorrow growing within him.
Yikes.
Next time my pages come up, everyone’s slashing out this sentence describing poor Tom’s emotional state. But I’m just doing what you asked me to do!
So often in writing, if we’re picking the right material—a story that renders life’s more intense and important moments—the character (or ourselves if this is a personal essay or memoir) is overwhelmed by emotion. Someone has died or abandoned them, or they’ve abandoned someone, or maybe you just lost the career you’ve always wanted. It can even be good—the cranky old grandmother who raised you finally admitted she’s proud of you, or the villagers at last killed that pesky dragon. Ultimately, most stories are about some form of hardship, so I’ll focus mostly on writing big negative feelings here.
In these moments, we as writers need to do two jobs, which are often misunderstood to be one job. They are:
Evoke emotion within the reader … help the reader feel something. Describe the emotion that the character (or author in memoir) herself is/was feeling.
But simply describing feelings can land you directly in a mess of abstraction, or it can feel maudlin. Feelings are hard to describe without resorting to cliché (his heart broke, you say?) or the kind of haziness seen above with Tom.
Fortunately, many great writers have been through this before, and we can look to them for some key lessons on how to proceed.
TIP #1: Give It Time
Tim O’Brien’s Vietnam War masterpiece The Things They Carried came out in 1990, a full 15 years after the end of that war. J. D. Salinger waited five years to write about his harrowing experiences as a soldier in WWII, and he still avoided the war itself—his 1950 short story “For Esmé—with Love and Squalor,” is comprised of two scenes: one shortly before the narrator heads to fight in D-Day, and one a year later when the war has just ended.
If the pain is too fresh, we—and I very much include myself here—are likely to end up doing what I call “pushing emotions,” where we just can’t manage to do the old show-don’t-tell thing. We find ourselves trying to convince the reader that someone who died was amazing and that our loss was very, very painful. We describe ourselves as crying and crying.
This writing can feel like therapy for the author—unloading on whoever will listen—instead of an enriching literary experience for the reader. Ultimately, the whole point of “show don’t tell” advice is that you must trust the reader. Show them the situation in a fairly straightforward way and let them take it from there.
TIP #2: Use Figurative Language (Carefully!)
Figurative language—metaphors and similes, mainly—are wonderful tools for writers when used well, but they can easily misfire. These challenges are particularly clear when you try using these phrases to describe an emotion itself. It’s often either not apt or borderline cliché—his heart swelled like an … um … a tire?
Figurative language applied to emotion is particularly hazardous because it takes an abstract thing (an emotion) and amplifies the abstraction by using figurative language, which is itself abstract.
It’s crucial to avoid cliché—maybe just steer clear of the word heart, itself, which has a lot of cliché baggage gathered around it.
In her devastating short story “Brokeback Mountain,” Annie Proulx describes Ennis’s heartbreak more viscerally. After their summer working together (and falling in love), Jack and Ennis part ways with a gruff handshake. As Ennis drives away, Proulx writes: “Within a mile Ennis felt like someone was pulling his guts out hand over hand a yard at a time.”
Gross, yes. But also appropriate to this taciturn cowboy, and surprising, and it sounds genuinely agonizing.
TIP #3: Let Objects and Motifs Activate Painful Themes
It’s one thing to get your reader to cry at the end of an epic novel, but Amy Hempel’s “In the Cemetery Where Al Jolson is Buried,” gets me every time in just a few thousand words. The story famously concludes with a passage about the first chimp to learn sign language. This anecdote was alluded to on page one, but the narrator told her friend she wouldn’t share it because it was too heartbreaking.
Now, at the end of the story, after her friend has died, the narrator shares it with the reader. We’re told that the chimp was a mother who communicated with her newborn via sign language. The story’s final sentence goes: “And when the baby died, the mother stood over the body, her wrinkled hands moving with animal grace, forming again and again the words, Baby, come hug, Baby, come hug, fluent now in the language of grief.”
The crucial thing is that this anecdote was alluded to on the first page, and then we were made to care about the characters, and their relationship, then the narrator abandoned her friend at her friend’s greatest moment of need—on her deathbed, by which point we’ve almost forgotten about the chimp. The situation is, itself, inherently agonizing. So, when the chimp story returns at the very end, and we’re already primed with big feelings, seeing this chimp’s grief lights up all the emotions that have built up within us.
TIP #4: Describe Feelings That Are Surprising or Askew
Current thinking in psychology indicates that there are about 10 basic human emotions—sadness, happiness, fear, anger, surprise, disgust, pride, shame, embarrassment, and excitement—and everything else is a blend of these basic ingredients. At our most acutely painful moments in life, we are not experiencing just one feeling, but are flooded with lots of surprising emotions, and a writer’s job is to be attentive to that.
A lot of time, the major emotion a character is experiencing is somewhat obvious given the context. In these situations, often the best approach is to focus on the surprising emotion or a complex feeling.
In Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Notes on Grief, she writes:
Why are my sides so sore and achy? It’s from crying, I’m told. I did not know that we cry with our muscles. The pain is not surprising, but its physicality is, my tongue unbearably bitter, as though I ate a loathed meal and forgot to clean my teeth.
She focuses on a physical feeling, and it’s a surprising one. Also, the use of “I’m told,” after her admission that she’s been crying, puts a disorienting spin on the whole passage.
Early in Wild, Cheryl Strayed, who often writes of her powerful emotions, recalls being at the Mayo Clinic with her exhausted mother. Cheryl’s stepfather offers to get a wheelchair, but young Cheryl—still in denial about her mother’s cancer—blurts that her mother doesn’t need one. Although it’s not stated, the implied feeling is, if anything, indignation.
And then her mother says she’ll have one, “Just for a minute,” and Cheryl watches as her mother almost collapses into it, “her eyes meeting mine before Eddie wheeled her toward the elevator.” There’s a lot of anger in that opening passage, but again it’s never identified as anger.
Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking is almost entirely about the surprising qualities of grief. “We might expect that we will be prostrate, inconsolable, crazy with loss. We do not expect to be literally crazy, cool customers who believe that their husband is about to return and need his shoes.”
Tip #5: Let Everyone Be Complicated
Villains and saints are rare in this world and, for better or worse, they tend to be less interesting in stories. I’ve encountered this with clients’ books before.
The author’s father was cruel brutal and horrendous in every possible way. This sounds terrible, but also it makes him incapable of surprising the reader. Or, conversely, their father was always kind and loving and thoughtful—same problem, just inverted, but it’s worse because now there’s no friction either, no conflict.
Often, clients of mine want to write a kind of “eulogy” style piece or even a book. A person loses someone they loved dearly, and they want to write about the person who died, but for the piece to be interesting, especially if it’s long, it must explore a difficult and complex relationship. It’s a shame, but the people who make great companions in life do not necessarily make great characters in a story.
Great characters in literature are rife with contradictions. Even Cheryl Strayed’s mother in Wild, who is presented as a very lovable person, is also incredibly quixotic and unique—she moves the kids into a house in the wilderness, “built out of trees and scrap wood. It didn’t have electricity or running water or a phone or an indoor toilet or even a single room with a door.” When Cheryl heads off to college, her mother joins her, and they’re both slated to graduate from the University of Minnesota at the same time. Without these peculiarities, it’d be hard to get the reader to grasp how much Strayed lost when her mother died not long after they graduated from college.
Tip #6: Keep the Actual Crying to a Minimum
It’s safe to assume Joan Didion wept a lot after her husband died, but she rarely describes herself as crying. The man who helps around her house cries as he cleans up Didion’s husband’s blood from where the EMTs worked on him—that’s the first crying that happens in the book. Of that blood, Didion says she “couldn’t face it” although she did clean up the syringes and other debris on the floor of their living room where he died.
Watching a character cry does not tend to evoke much feeling within the reader.
At the end of his devastating essay about the loss of his wife, Francisco Goldman describes the moment he was finally allowed to see her body in the hospital:
I pressed my lips to Aura’s ear and thanked her for the happiest years of my life. I told her that I would never stop loving her. Then the assistant surgeon brusquely ordered me out.
Ten or fifteen minutes later, stepping back through the white curtain, I instantly sensed a vacuumed-out stillness around Aura’s bed, and the assistant surgeon told me that Aura had died minutes before. I went to her. Her lightless eyes. I kissed her cheeks, which were already like cool clay.
My sobs must have been heard throughout the hospital.
One sentence of actual crying—and it’s enough.
Bringing It All Together
A lot of these examples seem to occupy overlapping terrain—and the takeaways seem to be around the importance of surprise. As soon as the language or situation becomes familiar, the emotion slackens.
In The Guardians—a mesmerizing book about the suicide death of her dear friend Harris—Sarah Manguso uses all of these tools. The short book is constantly surprising; every page is surprising in some significant way, from the scenes to the images to digressions. Again, Manguso doesn’t describe herself as crying until you’re almost a quarter of the way through the book, and even then, she’s crying over the drowning death of a writer she had admired, which she connects to her own depression: “I remember wondering when I’d arisen and walked to the threshold. With the writer’s drowning I’d advanced one lurid death closer to my own.”
There’s so much value in writing about painful emotions, even if it is uniquely challenging. In Lauren Slater’s essay “One Nation, Under the Weather,” a defense of the illness memoir genre, she writes of how her books exist to keep people company in times of distress. “I can,” she writes, “if you are hurting, keep you company.”
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