Shades of Joy, Shades of Pain
When Iwas going through my divorce, I was hopelessly broke and horribly stressed. I was waiting tables and bartending, a single mom, when out of nowhere, while stopped at a red light, a guy recklessly speeding on a rainy night hit me from behind and pushed my car down an embankment. I blacked out when my head hit the rearview mirror, which fell off the windshield. I had a concussion, and I was so confused, I thought a Mack truck had hit me--that's how loud the "boom!" was. It left me out of work for over a year and with migraines that plagued me for a decade. I still have a bad back--L2 and L4 are nicely herniated, and occasionally, I sneeze, I lift a laundry basket wrong, whatever . . . and bye-bye back. Anyway, in the midst of this, my doctor recommended joining a support group for divorced moms that he knew of--thought I might get some needed support for dealing with my injury while out of work and divorced. I went for a little while, but I always found it odd. At the beginning, they passed around a face. Around the face were about 10 different "emotions" --happy, sad, angry, worried . . . whatever. And the woman leading the group said it was to help people identify their emotions. WHAT?!?! I was a walking, breathing, bleeding emotion 24/7. How could some of these women not know how they really FELT inside? Eventually, I left the group.
So it was that yesterday, I recalled that, and I was very grateful--as a WRITER and as a person--that I can always identify what's going on with me. Hence, I can always write about it. Because if there's one thing I believe about writing, it's wringing from it all you can--all the action, the tension, and emotion you can. And that is about SHADES of emotion, and finding ways to show them.
What do I mean? Well, there's the general "sad." But what does that tell me? Not a whole helluva lot. Because, really, you could lump intense grief into sadness, couldn't you? Grieving people are . . . well, sad. But yesterday, I noticed that I ACHE. I miss Oldest when I hear certain songs, and it feels like a thud in my heart. Like a stone has settled there. I am not GRIEVING per se. I am not SAD in the true sense of the word, because I am happy she has this opportunity. But I ache, and after a few days, I realize the ache is sort of permanently settled there. At least for now as I get used to her being gone.
When Demon Baby was born, he was intubated and in the NICU and a machine helped him breathe. I used to sit in a rocking chair by his side for 8 or 12 hours at a stretch, not eating, not doing anything but WILLING this child to breathe on his own and get better. Was I sad? I wouldn't even CALL it that. I was DESPERATE, I was prayerful, I was in a special kind of mother-agony.
On the flip side, there is joy, elation . . . easily lumped with "happy." But to me, happy is a general state of being. As in, "I consider myself a happy person." And I do. Even with my ache, my happy-meter is pretty high most of the time. BUT, yesterday, Demon Baby came into my room and after a long and rather silly series of Naked Escapades on his part (we are in the third week of nakedness--I do get him dressed to leave the house but on the way home from ANY errand, etc., he's already back there in the seat saying, "I just can't WAIT to get naked."), he and Baby Girl and I were tickling and wrestling, all over my king-sized bed and he fell into SQUEALS of laughter and I was reminded for the thousandth time that there is joy in a child's squeal. It's not "happy." It's something elevated above that. Some other quality of happiness that wells inside of a mother.
Now, I don't know if in the middle of an action book anyone has time to describe all the shades of emotion, but I do know that so much of writing is nuance. It's why, as we grow as writers, we move away from the words of our middle-school and high school years. We lose "happy," "nice," "beautiful." We learn to shade our writing--and our characters' emotions--along a whole spectrum.
Thoughts?
15 comments:
Tough assignment, teacher.
I know--just like in my own life, I think--that my characters' emotions are so complex that they don't always know what they are. They know they're feeling fear and anger and other things, but it's such a complicated mix they're sometimes overwhelmed. That's partly because of the horrible situations they find themselves in, but I also think--at least for me--that strong emotions are like that.
Mark:
Hmm . . . great food for thought. Yes . . . sometimes it's a muddle. I am angry and sad (for example, God forbid you had a family member who was a victim of a crime . . . you would feel both)--and I think that's perfectly within the realm of "shades"--because to me a shade is not black or white. It's some mix. That's why when I think of this ache I feel . . . or when I think about my dad being blind, it's just this heaviness. It's not sadness per se as a flat-out emotion, it's more complicated.
I think, when I wrote The Roofer, that Ava embodied that kind of complicated state. She LOATHED what her brother had become, LOVED him with all her being for what he had done for her, FEARED him . . . it was a muddled mess that was for her this defining "one-ness" she had with him that was uncomfortable to read for a lot of people.
I wouldn't bypass the notion that people have problems with strong, unpleasant emotions and may lock them away as well. There are people, for sure, who deal with, say, a parent or child or friend or whatever, with a terminal illness, by going into emotional denial and just shying away from the subject. That creates its own challenges (in life and in writing), but to my mind it can be interesting in writing because the emotions find an outlet in behavior even while the character might be saying, "No, I'm dealing with it, no problem."
I worked with a guy who was an emotional mess and he claimed it all had to do with how much he disliked the job. I asked him, point-blank, "Do you think this has anything to do with the fact your brother died of a heroin overdose two months ago?"
He said, "No, I'm dealing with that fine."
Uh, no, he wasn't. He may very well have had problems with the job, but he was having a breakdown and I was pretty sure his behavior was the result of his brother's death and the problems with the job were just symptoms.
I think the trick is to tap into the reader's emotions. A wooden chair can be emotionally charged, if it's, say, the chair where the person you loved most in the whole world used to sit...
Relationships and emotions are way too complex to truly capture with written words, so I think what we have to do is show vibrant and fleeting details and hope they resonate in some meaningful way.
That's where we learn from the poets.
In real life, and in writing, the key is to realize that conflicting nuances of emotion do not negate one another. Getting that across to myself, and sometimes to others, has been a tough road...but I think it helps me make the same things true for characters.
Using Mark's example - his co-worker who was so depressed - didn't have to tell him anything. His actions, or lack thereof, showed Mark and probably everyone around them what was going on.
Show don't tell works in life too - even when we don't want it to!
Mark:
And therein lies a fascinating "character." All that Freduian stuff like projection, that we don't really deal with. The passive-aggressives in the world.
E
Hi Jude:
I agree. The best we can hope for is to achieve some "relationship" with the reader's emotion. That said, I think when people talk about wooden characters, they are often really talking about emotions painted too broadly to register as more than a blip on a reader's radar.
E
Hi Amy:
Excellent point!
E
Enjoy those squeels now. As you well know, in the blink of an eye he'll be off to college too.
Wow, okay, my blog post today was called, A Lot Happy, A Little Sad. LOL. I swear I wasn't copying!
I've been numb to loneliness, lately. You kinda go to this numb place, a "waiting room," as I mentioned. But then I saw my best friend and my niece this morning, which was AWESOME, but I cried three times on the way home, and it made my happy music sound sad. But DH gets home in 34 days, which sorta makes it worse, too, because the numbness stops working as the ache starts to feel hope, LOL.
So yeah, that ache sort of grows a little numb, but you have other kids and your husband. So maybe you won't go numb at all, which could be good and bad, LOL. Who knows?
You sure are a survivor!
Erica, so beautiful! Shades are exactly what writers draw. I love it all, and mostly I love that my characters show me with their emotions who they truly are.
And I just had a two-day sleepover with my family. Children's laughter does come with magic.
Great post and comments. I definitely tend to go inside the character and equate her feelings to something I've experienced so I can feel the physical effects on me and therefore on the character. When I was younger, before having experienced a lifetime of emotions, I am sure I couldn't have written in the same way.
Hi Spy:
I must be psychic.
LOL!
E
Hi LaDonna:
Glad you got to enjoy your grandmunchkins.
E
Suzanne:
That is DEFINITELY how I write--I have posted before I think I am a Method writer (like Method acting)--trying to FEEL it.
E
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