Emotion Editing
As a writer, I know my characters intimately, sometimes before I even start writing, sometimes as they reveal themselves to me as a write. I know why novel protagonists Keith Emmons, Anne Coffey, “Pitch” Black, Angela Carnaby, RLN Allison, veterinarian “Charlie” Masters, and even 21-year-old former lifeguard “Maggie” McAuley are who they are and what influenced them to reveal themselves on my pages.
The same is true for my short story characters, like starship Commander Louis and augmented plumber-to-the-stars William Seward VII. I even have clear stakes, up to and including death. The thing I’ve come to realize is that my readers didn’t know why my characters were who they were on the page.
I’ve been in writing groups where fellow authors’ works featured massive info dumps, and I was very wary of doing the same. Sure, I knew that “Pitch” survived an advanced shuttle crash, or that Richard Allison had a reputation as an eccentric science fiction author, but what made them that way, and how could a reader empathize with them.
Oh, sure, readers loving science fiction might gravitate to an SF story, but how could they empathize with time-traveling archeologist Keith Emmons or even Surtr, the former fire giant, opening a bar in Seattle to pay the rent. If they didn’t understand the internality they could identify with.
While it’s possible to enjoy his writing, understanding why author Harlan Ellison was infamously litigious requires understand the factors in his childhood that shaped him.
According to Vincent Hanley’s blog, To Kill A Mockingbirds’ Atticus Finch is a rational man with moral integrity. A widower, he raises his children (Scout and Jem) with respect, instilling empathy. Those characteristics underlay his reason for defending Tom Robinson despite the odds against a positive verdict and for encouraging his children to “climb into another person’s skin and walk around in it…”
I don’t mean to imply that any of my stories have the depth of ‘To Kill a Mockingbird,’ but understanding the emotional context of any character’s motivation and interactions is important for the reader to understand. Why did Atticus Finch “have to” defend Tom Robinson? What did Scout and Jim learn and why did it affect them?
As Donald Maas explained in his book “The Emotional Craft of Fiction,” the most useful question for a writer isn’t “how can I get across what character are going through,” but “the better question is how can I get readers to go on emotional journeys of their own?… inducing for each reader a unique journey through the story.” He (and other writers) say that what readers remember of any story is “what they felt while reading it.”
In going back through the stories I’ve written–and which have been rejected by multiple sources–might mean I haven’t connected with an appropriate advocate yet, but in re-reading them it seems clear that my stories didn’t create a deep enough impact (emotional journey) on my readers.
I’ve tried to change that, digging deeper into my characters to have my readers feel more.
