{"id":3437,"date":"2014-11-23T06:48:40","date_gmt":"2014-11-23T11:48:40","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/?p=3437"},"modified":"2014-11-23T06:48:40","modified_gmt":"2014-11-23T11:48:40","slug":"concrete-images-emotional-impact","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/?p=3437","title":{"rendered":"Concrete Images: Emotional Impact"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"wasp\"<\/a>

(photo: Serena Epstein, Creative Commons)<\/p><\/div>\n

Author John Thornton Williams, writing a recent Glimmer Train<\/a><\/em> essay about his strategy for connecting readers with characters, touches on \u201cone of the most important accomplishments of fiction\u201d and one of the trickiest. Certainly writers receive plenty of advice not to come right out and say, \u201cMary was angry that Bethany was flirting with Ben\u201d or \u201cDan felt sad when his dog died.\u201d First of all, those feelings are pure obvious, given the situation, and second, naming a feeling doesn\u2019t make the reader feel it.<\/p>\n

An alternative, which Williams terms \u201ca lengthy expository digression into the psyche of a character, perhaps accompanied by physical cues,\u201d like \u201chis stomach was in a knot, his throat was on fire,\u201d he says, \u201cgenerally proves detrimental to how I experience the story at hand.\u201d It distracts him from the narrative, rather than immersing him in it. Or, as Donald Maass says, in Writing 21st Century Fiction<\/a><\/em>, \u201cwhen you supply everything readers are supposed to feel, they may wind up feeling little at all.\u201d<\/p>\n

Williams makes a third choice, especially for a story\u2019s crisis moments, when emotions run highest and, often, at cross-purposes. He calls this approach \u201cindirection of image.\u201d To accomplish this, he takes into account how his characters would see a situation, based on their emotional state. \u201cSomething as simple as a car parked on the street surely looks different to a lottery winner than to someone who just got evicted,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n

His example recalls a favorite exercise from John Gardner\u2019s The Art of Fiction<\/a><\/em>: \u201cDescribe a building as seen by a man whose son has just been killed in a war. Do not mention the son, war, death, or the old man doing the seeing; then describe the same building, in the same weather and at the same time of day, as seen by a happy lover. Do not mention love or the loved one.\u201d<\/em> This exercise is many times harder than it might appear, and it\u2019s perfect practice for the \u201cindirection of image\u201d approach Williams recommends.<\/p>\n

Indirection of image, he says, \u201cis a way to take abstract emotions and project them onto something concrete.\u201d This actually expresses our lived experience. How many times has a car or a piece of furniture or a particular shirt become more significant in our minds because of its symbolic association with a whole range of emotions, beyond what we can tease out and easily express? Our childhood home. The ghastly color of its bathroom tile. The relentless ticking of the mantelpiece clock. A dead wasp.<\/p>\n

By giving readers space to project their own emotions into the situation, by leaving a little ambiguity, readers can experience the emotion on a level that connects with their own experience, Williams says. They can, in other words, get inside the character. Here\u2019s a link to one of his stories<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Author John Thornton Williams, writing a recent Glimmer Train essay about his strategy for connecting readers with characters, touches on \u201cone of the most important accomplishments of fiction\u201d and one of the trickiest. Certainly writers receive plenty of advice not … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[74,40,174,29],"tags":[30,414],"class_list":["post-3437","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-emotions","category-fiction","category-first-draft-blog","category-writing","tag-novel","tag-writing"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2NkiT-Tr","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3437","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3437"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3437\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3439,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3437\/revisions\/3439"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3437"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3437"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3437"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}