My name is Barbara Venkataraman and yes, that's my real name. One time, I shortened it as a user name to BarbaraVen, which looked like Barbara Raven and I thought, Wow! What a great name for a mystery
writer, with its homage to Edgar Alan Poe. Such a missed opportunity. I tell you this, if I ever write my own version of "Fifty Shades of Grey", I'll use that
name. Look for it!
I'm a practicing family law attorney and mediator and I write cozy mysteries. A
cozy mystery is defined as a mystery without gratuitous violence or graphic
sex which features an amateur sleuth, usually a woman, and takes place in a small
town or confined setting. Think "Murder She Wrote". My cozy mysteries feature a
reluctant family law attorney named Jamie Quinn who lives in Hollywood FL. I've
written four mysteries so far and am currently working on the 5th
one, "Engaged in Danger". My topic today is:
GET A RESPONSE: WRITE AN EFFECTIVE EMOTIONAL
SCENE
Let's
start with a quote by the great English novelist E.M. Forester. He said : "The king died and then the queen died”
is a story. But “the king died and then the queen died of grief” is a plot. The
reason it's a plot, he said, is because there is cause
and effect. I would add that it's
a plot for another reason--because of emotion. When a writer creates a plot, what
he's doing is setting up a series of questions that propel the story forward, questions that the reader wants answered enough to keep reading. For that to
happen, the reader must be engaged in the story--and more than that, the reader
must be invested in the characters. Think about it this way, if a
stranger came up to you and said I'd love to tell you a story, can you spare 8
hours? You'd say, I don't know about that, this better be a damn good story. So
you make a deal. The writer says before we start, I need you to suspend your
disbelief and just play along, okay? Also, I'm planning to manipulate your
emotions. I figured you'd want to know that up front. You nod and say that's
fine. I'll keep up my end of the deal because I actually want to be manipulated--but only if it's done well. Otherwise, I'm going to hate you forever. And also I'll give you a bad rating on Amazon.
Speaking of having your emotions
manipulated, I'd like to share one of my pet peeves. Once I tell you about it, it
will always bother you too. Shall I go on? Okay, I hate it when movies have a
musical score that is heavy-handed. Like, here's some uplifting music, feel
happy now. Here's comes the sad music, take out your Kleenex. Now we have
romantic music, these characters are going to fall in love. If the acting and
dialogue aren't doing their job, then the music only makes it worse. Except for
it's a scary movie, then the ominous music lets me know something bad is about
to happen. I do appreciate the warning. Then I can start squeezing my husband's
arm with an iron claw! (Cue the Jaws music)
So, how do you write an effective
emotional scene without cheapening it or waving a banner that says--get ready,
emotional scene coming up? Before your readers can become involved with a character
emotionally, they need to know the character and understand him, identify
with him in some way.Like when you hear about a car accident, it's sad. But if it's
someone you care about, it's devastating.
A reader should feel like he is in
the scene, experiencing what the character is experiencing, all senses
should be engaged. The author's first decision is point of view--Who is telling
the story? First person point of view brings the reader right into the mind of
the narrator. It's hard not to feel close to someone when you are privy to
their every thought--but it's not the only way. Think about Harry Potter.
Throughout most of the seven books, it's Harry's point of view we experience, with
an occasional switch-off, like when Snape meets with Voldemort or meets with
Dumbledore and Harry isn't present. But it's not written in first-person point of view. It's
third-person limited, limited to Harry mostly. Let's examine the title of the first chapter: "The
Boy Who Lived". Already we're asking, what boy, what dangerous thing
happened to him? We're curious, but not invested. Our first glimpse of Harry is
as a baby who has survived his parents being killed by a dangerous person named
Voldemort. He's been left on the doorstep of unpleasant relatives by a trio of
magical people. Ten years go by and we meet Harry, who seems well-adjusted
despite having to live with people who treat him miserably, and we start living his
life with him, discovering that he's a wizard, why he's special, what really
happened to his parents. We root for him to get away from his relatives
and to learn some magic. Although we are not orphans, we understand his loneliness,
his desire for family. He's not a perfect kid, he has layers. People are
complicated and your characters should be too.
Authors rarely convey emotion by
having a character say "I'm sad, I'm happy." No, they have an entire
bag of tricks at their disposal. The setting is one example. A table is a
table, right? But seen through the eyes of a sad person, that table can be worn-out,
damaged, remembered as the scene of happier times that will never come again. Body
language and body movement is another way. Slumped shoulders, sparkling eyes, saying she
dragged herself to the party. Having a chatty person suddenly go silent can
denote great happiness, or shock, or grief. Have a normally stoic person leap
in the air can convey emotion without any dialogue. Understated dialogue-
Jordan Peele from the show Key & Peele. Did you hear how he proposed to his
girlfriend? He tweeted an emoji of an engagement ring to her.
Context is crucial--show who your character is so that we know when he or she is overreacting,
under-reacting.
My dad is
a tough critic and any time one of my sisters or I would make dinner, we'd
ask, "How was it dad?" He'd always say the same thing, "not
bad". One day, my sister cooked all his favorite things and made a
lovely dinner. After we finished, she asked him, "So, how was it dad? He saw all
of us watching him, waiting for his answer and he smiled this big smile and said "It
was really…. Not bad at all".
And then we all threw our napkins at him. In context, if you didn't know my
dad's habit, that story wouldn't make sense.
In my
first mystery. "Death by Didgeridoo", the protagonist, Jamie Quinn, is depressed after her mother dies and she
is trying to gather her thoughts. "But it's no use. They are shadow
puppets, gray wisps flitting through my brain and they refuse to be
caught." I ever used the words sad or depressed, but I think that comes across.
Let's
do an exercise:
There's a torrential rain coming after a long drought. You
are a farmer & your life savings are invested in your crops. You've been
praying for a rain like this to come.
Give me
one dramatic but surprising action the farmer takes upon hearing the news.
Give me one
sentence expressing his emotion without naming the emotion & include a
color.
Now,
let's change it up, the rain is still coming but it's going to drown the crops.
Give me
one dramatic but surprising action the farmer takes upon hearing the news.
Give me a
five or six word sentence expressing his emotion without naming the emotion &
include a color.
Here is a blog post I wrote that sums up emotional resonance in a novel.
THEN WHY ARE YOU HERE?
Picture yourself in the stands at a baseball game, not just any baseball game,
but the last game of the 2014 World Series--winner takes all. You've invested a
lot to be here, having spent a small fortune on a ticket (that was very hard to
come by) and an entire day of your life driving, parking, and fighting the
crowds, all so that you could watch this game. The man sitting next to
you, clearly a Giants fan, is decked out in so much orange and black that he
could be an advertisement for Halloween. In between cheering for his team, your
seatmate observes how quiet you are and asks: "Hey, man, who are you
rooting for?"
"Nobody in particular," you answer.
The man is flabbergasted. "Then, why are you here?"
Why, indeed? When you
have no stake in the outcome, no skin in the game, why would you stick around?
That is the reader's dilemma. Authors are asking a lot of them: to invest money
in a book and to spend precious time reading it, but what's in it for them?
What do they get out of the experience? For a reader to enjoy a book, to be
satisfied with his expenditure of time and money, he doesn't necessarily have
to like the characters or have anything in common with them, but he must be
invested in them. In other words, he needs to be rooting for somebody,
to care about at least one character's plight, to wonder how that character
will resolve the issues in his life and whether he will learn anything along
the way.
A good example of the reader's dilemma is The Kite Runner, a 2003 novel
set in Afghanistan where the protagonist, Amir, sacrifices (spoiler alert!) his
friend Hassan by not rescuing him from his attackers. Amir not only justifies
his behavior, but takes out his guilt by treating Hassan horribly, causing him
to be ostracized, and possibly ruining his life. This protagonist is not
likeable or admirable and we are universally appalled by his actions, so, why
do we keep reading to the end? Why was this book a runaway bestseller? With an
initial printing of 50,000 copies, this book went on to sell seven million
copies and was also made into a movie. Everyone loves Harry Potter, the boy
wizard, but nobody liked the jealous, weak and morally-bankrupt Amir. Even when
Amir tried to redeem himself years later by helping Hassan's son, the reader
felt no respect for him. Too little, too late, we thought. But we read on--and
not just to find out how Hassan's life turned out. We kept reading because we
were both fascinated and horrified, convinced that we would have done
the right thing if faced with the same choices. In other words, that we were
not Amir! But then, we wondered whether we would have been too scared to try to
rescue our friend from his vicious attackers, whether we would have been
willing to admit that we stood there and did nothing. The novel struck a chord
because it made us explore our own characters; it made us think about how we
would act in such an impossible situation. How would we deal with jealousy?
With guilt? Would we be willing to risk our lives to redeem ourselves or to
right a terrible wrong?
As readers, we were invested, big time! But then, just when we thought the
stakes couldn't possibly get any higher and that Amir's regret and guilt
couldn't get any worse, we learned that Hassan wasn't only a servant boy, he
was also Amir's illegitimate brother! Gut-wrenching stuff, for sure. And that's
the answer to our question--we stick around because of EMOTION. A novel without
emotion is like a paper doll. It can be a beautiful paper doll, but it will
never be three-dimensional no matter how hard it tries. Clever dialogue, sharp
prose, interesting characters, lovely scenery, may be enough to hold our
interest, but we will always leave feeling dissatisfied.
My Jamie Quinn Mystery Series opens with my protagonist Jamie Quinn mourning
the death of her mother. Nothing can pull her out of her depression until her
aunt calls in a panic because her disabled son Adam, Jamie's cousin, has been
accused of murdering his music teacher. The love Jamie has for her aunt and
cousin, the guilt she feels for not being there for Adam in the past, for not
being there for her aunt in the present, all motivate her to come back to life.
In this first book, Death by Didgeridoo, there's enough guilt to go
around, as well as some jealousy, revenge and regret, but there's also
playfulness in the dialogue and some fun scenes between characters. Emotion
gives a story genuineness, but not necessarily realism. Until I wrote my book,
I’d never heard of anyone else being killed by a didgeridoo, so that's kind of
far out there, but the interplay between Jamie and the other characters, as
well as the doubt and insecurity Jamie expresses are sentiments the reader can
relate to.
To sum up, I will quote you an Amazon book review I once read: "I wasted
eight hours of my life reading this book and I'm writing a review to save you
from the same fate!" What a kind soul, to want to save strangers from
wasting their time! As an author offering advice to new authors, I hope
to do the same because, if you're not going to write with emotional resonance,
then, why are you here?
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