Gut feelings

[readingredhead]

The first time I remember focusing very specifically on descriptions of emotions and emotional states was for a short story called "Dead White Women" that I wrote for Vikram's fiction class freshman year (dear god that feels like SO long ago! when did I get old?!). I got a lot of feedback on the first draft that I was "telling" what characters (specifically the main character) felt rather than showing it. I made a point to pay more attention to what my emotions physically felt like after that -- the way my skull seems to tighten when I'm stressed, the queasiness of anxious fear, the limb-tingling of a sudden surprise revealed.

The Printer's Tale starts off with a lot of emotionally-trying moments for Noelle, and they really just keep coming. (Which, to be fair, is sort of what fiction IS. We don't want to read about people who are perfectly happy with their lives, and conflict demands some kind of internal uneasiness.) But I'm starting to feel like my descriptions of her emotions are incredibly repetitive. I have this tendency to describe every emotion as originating in the stomach or the gut -- a cursory search of the first three chapters reveals such phrases as "she felt her stomach plummet" and "a crawling uneasiness in the pit of her stomach" -- and especially taken out of context, these phrases seem so utterly ridiculous.

I feel like when describing emotions there are so many stock phrases to fall back on, which are not-quite-right to describe the emotion I'm going for but are closer than anything I could think up on my own, and so I sort of just go with them. But I'm wondering a couple of things now.

1) When you read descriptions of emotion that use these kind of shorthand phrases -- plummeting stomachs, nausea, stomach muscles tightening, etc. -- are they actually "showing" you something, or have they slipped back into the realm of "telling" shorthand?

2) How do you genuinely express the physical components of emotion in writing, and how do you keep those phrases from becoming stale? I might have one or two original-ish phrases but I feel like the early parts of this story involve a lot of the same character feeling different degrees of the same emotion, so it's a little difficult to keep it fresh...

So, readers and writers amongst you: I am open to all thoughts you may have on this topic!

Comments

[rondaview.livejournal.com]

1) At first they show me something, but if I start becoming aware of the repetition of words, the phrases lose their power over me. Like, even stock phrases about different parts of the body would (I think) be enough to blend discretely into the background, while repetitions of words (or very similar variations on a theme, like phrases relating to the word "gut") draw attention to the author's complacency, and therefore to the storytelling artifice, where the author wouldn't necessarily want it.

2) I think a large part of it is really just plumbing the depths of your creativity (tm), and not just, as you say, resorting to stock phrases because they're easy and close at hand. Also, you could express emotion in other ways? Perhaps they don't react physically. Maybe there's a delayed reaction, where they stand totally impassive and then when the bad guy departs goes off and vomits in a bush. so that the very lack of reaction translates something to the reader. Or maybe the POV itself is briefly jarred -- like a narrative omission of some sort.

[readingredhead.livejournal.com]

Oh look at you being all literary with narrative admission and jarred POV :) I think this is possibly how I write extreme shock, just naturally and without thinking about it as such -- suddenly giving NO emotional cues in the text as a way of showing character detachment.

This is just frustrating because there is no easy formula to follow in order to know when you need to give emotional cues and when you don't. I'm a fan of letting dialogue and interaction show tension between characters, or get across an emotional state, but this is hard to do in early chapters when you're still establishing characters so your readers aren't going to be familiar with these people, and won't necessarily know how to "read" their interactions without some cues being provided.

asfdljkadfs writing is hard.