love

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Emotion in Fiction

Well the study junkie’s been at it again. As usual I ‘ve had my head up my (*cough*) in my books, immersed in one topic or another for the past several months, undoubtedly at the expense of my writing. Well, in the short term anyway. In the long term, I hope it all adds up to something even better.

One of my recent distractions, and it’s been a MAJOR distraction, has been screenwriting and film making. But I’ll get to that in another post.

by ambernwest @ WANACOMMONS

by ambernwest @ WANACOMMONS

Most recently, I’ve thrown myself into a new topic, one which I realize is a shortcoming in my own writing – and that is emotion. I entered two of my unpubbed manuscripts into the writing contest of my local RWA chapter, The Judy, and last month discovered that I placed second for one of them. Yay! A prize! This is a rare and beautiful thing in a life so lacking in validation.

What I valued even more than the prize, however, was the detailed scoring and comments of the six judges who read my two entries. The perspectives of experienced writers, many of them published, with fresh eyes on my work, and the generosity to tell me what they think – that is priceless.

So, ironically, it was the comments on the manuscript that did not win that I focussed on first, because this is the manuscript that I earnestly pitched at the National RWA conference in Anaheim this past July. And to my surprise and delight, the one agent and four editors all asked to see it. So of course I hurried home and took a good hard look at it.

One of the things I decided to do was apply Margie Lawson’s Deep Edits technique to at least part of the manuscript to discover if there was something I had overlooked. It’s not that this story hasn’t been revised and edited a thousand times already. It’s pretty tight.

And that brings me back to emotion. What I discovered, over and above the valuable suggestions made by the contest judges, was that, according to Margie’s system what my manuscript lacked was, of all things, emotion. Well, in fact it’s not absent. It’s just not explicit enough for the particular market to which this book aspires.

My reading history is broad and deep and varied, and one of the things I sometimes have trouble doing is adjusting my writing to suit a particular market. So I might be writing a commercial women’s fiction story but use language or voice that’s more suitable to literary fiction. And I’m beginning to see that this just won’t work. I think. Or at least I have to find the balance that’s just right for my story and my “hypothetical” readers – whoever they may be.

So while I believe there’s tons of emotion in my novel, I don’t necessarily make it as obvious or visceral as I probably should to give my target readers the kind of reading experience they are looking for, and are used to. The emotion is situation and character based, and it’s often between the  lines. I know readers are clever, but I’m learning that there’s a pretty powerful effect that certain kinds of language has on the reader’s emotional engagement.  So my current learning curve is all about finding artful ways of engaging my readers in the emotional experiences of my characters.

And the material I have from Margie Lawson is invaluable in helping me to do that. Revisions are underway.

But of course when you cast the net of consciousness you catch all kinds of things. One of these, that kind of fell into my hands last week, was a book entitled The Passional Muse: Exploring Emotion in Stories by psychologist and author Keith Oatley, Professor Emeritus at the University of Toronto. Someone with the same professional background and perspective as Margie Lawson.

While I agree somewhat with the Quill and Quire review of this book, and did have the same difficulty the review discusses engaging in Oatley’s short story, One Another, embedded in the academic text, I still found much of his discussion of the role of emotion in fiction in our developmental experience as fully formed human beings quite fascinating and enlightening.

In any case, it points to the fact that wherever my work fits on the commercial-literary continuum, emotion is such a central part of fiction and the reading experience that I’d better get some clarity about how this ought to be conveyed in my own writing.

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Professional Women, Love and Carl Jung

Recently I realized there’s a definite pattern to the books that I’ve been writing. In some ways I suppose it’s obvious, but since it’s quite unintentional, it kind of caught me by surprise.

The female protagonists, and often the males as well, in at least two of my novels, and probably another three that I’ve outlined, are adults in their mid-thirties to early fourties, and who have, for one reason or another, chosen to put their energies into their career at the expense of finding love. Sometimes their single-minded focus on their careers is related to their backstory– something that happened to them in their family of origin or in their youth. Sometimes their avoidance or downplaying of love in their lives is due to their commitment to their career, but often to their backstory as well. Sometimes committment is the issue.

These things tend to get muddled together, and often there are issues characters don’t want to admit to or confront. Personally, I think this makes for interesting values-in-conflict story-telling, just like Randy Ingermanson recently wrote.

When it comes to career, we’re talking about identity. For modern working women, this is a complicated issue. I discuss this a bit in the Essay elsewhere on my website entitled: What is it about romance? I also think that this pattern is not uncommon, and that not all women talk openly about this issue with their friends. Men possibly not at all. For a serious, career-driven woman to admit that she is looking for love seems like a cop-out. It’s something that should “just happen” but never take one’s attention away from the all-important career. It feels like they are pandering to outmoded “fairy tales” from the past. Perhaps today, with internet dating sites, the whole “mate searching” problem has become more open and explicit than it was in my day. Even if women are open about wanting to find love as well as have their career, I think it remains a challenge for modern women to be comfortable with the idea that they place importance on finding true love without feeling like their identity as a professional woman is somehow compromised, or that they will be perceived as not “serious.”

Identity in conflict with a character’s essence is how Michael Hauge talks about the character arc in a plot. It reminds me of Maureen Murdock’s writing in The Heroine’s Journey. It differs significantly from The Hero’s Journey in that for men, there is only the quest. For women, there is both the quest and the hearth–the desire and need to nurture and have a family. Perhaps these two goals have always been in conflict for women through the ages, but the Feminist movement brought it into the light. I happen to think that in these Post-feminist times (and I mean that like Post-Modernism, the Feminism hasn’t gone away, we’re just living in the historical wake of a huge societal change) the challenge is all the greater because each successive generation of women openly discuss the rights we’ve come to expect less and less. So much is taken for granted, that I think individual women often struggle alone to come to terms with these conflicting values without the rhetoric to guide them.

In Murdoch’s view, the Heroine’s Journey is not linear, but rather circular, or perhaps spiral. A woman may begin the journey by rejecting the “mother” and embracing the strong “masculine” role for herself, but she cannot attain her ultimate essence until she takes a little detour down to the underworld of the primal Earth mother, embraces her essential feminine, and returns, having discovered the source of her own power. Only then can she come to terms with her own mother, internalize the strong male and emerge empowered as her true feminine self, as both a “warrior” and a “mother” figure (whether or not she in fact is or becomes a mother). (My sincere apologies to Maureen Murdoch if I’ve completely mangled her ideas in my attempt to distill and condense them here.) This “coming to terms with the essential power of the feminine” brings to mind the re-told stories of Clarissa Pinkola Estes in her Women Who Run with the Wolves. There’s a Jungian link between these two writers, so the connection is no accident. In any event, the journey is a bit more complicated for women. Murdoch suggests that any given woman may be stuck at, or experiencing, a particular place along this path, which raises certain issues and puts particular challenges before our heroine.

This is how I envision my heroines. Depending upon their individual story, I try to keep in mind what challenge they most need in order to take the next step toward their own happy ending, and find a way for that to happen in my stories. You may or may not recognize Murdoch’s Jungian stages in my stories, but they definitely help me trace each of my heroine’s journeys.