Expressing
character emotion is a balance between universality and uniqueness. Emotions
must be familiar enough to produce empathy in the reader, yet the expression of
the emotion must be unusual so that the reader is intrigued. Some of the most
powerful expressions of emotion are the ones that inform about character.
In
Julie Berry’s All the Truth That’s In Me, sixteen-year-old Judith has been
ostracized from her conservative, religious, colonial community. She’s no
longer eligible to marry Lucas, the boy she’s loved her entire life. Judith
cannot speak, and she has limited ability to read and write. The novel is
written in second person as Judith addresses Lucas in her mind.
“There’s
nothing so bright as the stream by day, nothing so black on a moonless night.
I
bent and drank straight from it. It was all I had to fill my belly. And maybe,
I thought, you’d be thirsty, too, after a scratchy day of haying, and before
retiring to bed you’d dip down into the same stream and drink the water I had
kissed. You’ve cooled off here most summer nights since you were a boy.”
This
expression of longing, love and the desire to communicate are unique to Judith
because she is resigned to her solitude. She wishes that Lucas would “drink the
water [she] had kissed.” Judith’s wish for this small thing and huge
impossibility causes the reader to yearn with her.
In
a recent workshop, Donald Maass said, “When characters feel what we expect them
to feel, the reader doesn’t feel it.” Maass suggests choosing any scene and writing
the emotion the character is experiencing. Then he suggests listing the second
emotion the character feels, and the third and the fourth. Maass asks writers
to rewrite the scene based on the fourth emotion. The other three magically
find their way into the passage as well. The scene is deeper, more profound and
more likely to touch the reader.
Obviously
I cannot know other writers’ thought processes or if they examined several
emotions before settling on the one they used in the following passages. I
chose the quotes because they resonated with me. Perhaps the reason I found
them moving was they didn’t express the most obvious emotion.
Brown Girl Dreaming is a memoir by Jacqueline Woodson. Woodson’s parents had a
troubled marriage and eventually separated. In this scene, Woodson doesn’t show
the parents fighting, she doesn’t tell the reader that her mother was homesick,
and she doesn’t even show her mother’s dislike of Ohio. She presents the bond
between her mother and her paternal grandmother who were both from the South.
“Both
know the southern way of talking
without
words, remember when
the
heat of summer
could
melt the mouth,
so
southerners stayed quiet
looked
out over the land,
nodded
at what seemed like nothing
but
that silent nod said everything
anyone
needed to hear.
Here
in Ohio, my mother and Grace
aren’t
afraid
of
too much air between words, are happy
just
for another familiar body in the room.”
Woodson
captures a fundamental difference between her mother’s Southern upbringing and
her new life in Ohio. Any reader who has been homesick, lonely, or felt out of
place relates to this passage and admires the fresh expression of these
emotions.
I’ll Give You the Sun by Jandy Nelson is a young adult novel about twins, Noah and
Jude. Early in the book, Noah, then thirteen, describes his relationship with Jude.
He doesn’t tell the reader that he loves his sister, or brag about the
extraordinarily close relationship they have. Noah almost inadvertently admits
that he is dependent on Jude.
“She
scoots over so we’re shoulder to shoulder. This is us. Our pose. The smush.
It’s even how we are in the ultrasound photo they took of us inside Mom and how
I had us in the picture Fry ripped up yesterday. Unlike most everyone else on
earth, from the very first cells of us, we were together; we came here
together. This is why no one hardly notices that Jude does most of the talking
for both of us, why we can only play piano with all four of our hands on the
keyboard and not at all alone, why we can never do Rochambeau because not once
in thirteen years have we chosen differently. It’s always: two rocks, two
papers, two scissors. When I don’t draw us like this, I draw us as
half-people.”
Any
reader who has loved another person can identify with the close relationship
between these siblings. The unique voice appears in the way Noah concedes that
he doesn’t feel whole without Jude.
I’ll
end this long series with another quote from Donald Maass. “More than plot, we
crave meaning and emotion. We want to experience something, not just be
entertained.”
Expressing character emotion posts:
Unique characters (here)
