(We are talking about the elements of verisimilitude, that is, how to make fiction feel similiar to reality. I’m extending the idea of verisimilitude from sensory details to some other things that make sensory details more effective.)
Emotion
The obvious thing that overrides logic is emotion!
However, merely stating that a character is feeling sad will not override the reader’s logic and create verisimilitude. It will not make the reader empathize with the character or make them feel like they have entered in to the world.
Why?
Merely stating the fact of an emotion is logical and rational, information to be taking in but not necessarily responded to. As far as I can tell, one cannot override logic with logic; trying only multiplies the amount of logic being used.
For better or worse, humanity isn’t very good at responding to logic! We mainly use it to rationalize our emotions. The only way that logic consistently beats emotion is when social reputation or relationships are at stake.
As writers, we can use that to our advantage. Emotions beat logic every time.
But those emotions have to be presented in a way that doesn’t allow logic to dismiss them–that is, in ways that override logic, by presenting them in emotional- and sensory-detail-based terms. I’ll show you some examples shortly, so that makes more sense.
But first I would like to note that you can make a reader react emotionally to a situation without giving these types of details. You can only do this if the reader has experience that type of situation before or has a lot of empathy. You can’t count on that to happen all the time, though.
A more consistent technique is providing readers with details that can be observed about how another character is experiencing emotion, the internal details about feeling emotion (or denying emotion), and sensory details that are so strongly colored by emotion that the emotion itself does not need to be described.
Here are the examples. I’m going to start with a non-detailed, logical, rational statement of emotion first:
- Logical description of emotion: Charlene suddenly felt overwhelmed by grief.
- External sense details/watching another person’s emotion: Charlene’s eyes closed and her mouth pinched shut. She bit her lips and lowered her head, pulling her shoulders in tight. After a moment she began to rock and shake, two tears rolling alongside her nose.
- Internal sensory details/feeling an emotion: The breath stopped inside Charlene’s lungs. Her throat tightened and her hands and feet prickled, then fell numb. The world turned dark as gray mist seemed to creep in around the edges of her vision. She closed her eyes. A scream tried to force its way through her pinched throat but was trapped instead, feeling like tiny claws cutting out her voice. Her face turned hot as she tried to keep the scream trapped inside. She bit her lips. No sound emerged. Two tears oozed alongside her nose. She was going to explode.
- Setting details colored by emotion/opinion: Charlene’s arms lay on the tablecloth like dead pieces of wood, completely detached from her body. All the sound in the room had gone flat, like someone had turned down the volume on a TV set. Her ears were ringing. In front of her, the small white dessert plate was missing. The sweet taste of peach pie lingered in her mouth, despite the awful clenching of her stomach and the acid in her throat. She gagged and held the smooth white napkin to her lips, pushing hard enough to feel her own teeth.
When you give sense details with an emotional spin on them, the emotion tends to be subtler but harder to dismiss. A great technique is to mix the subtler sensory details with a statement of more direct emotional detail:
- Internal emotion plus sensory details: Charlene’s arms lay on the tablecloth like dead pieces of wood, completely detached from her body. All the sound in the room had gone flat, liike someone had turned down the volume on a TV set. Her ears were ringing. In front of her, the small white dessert plate was missing. The sweet taste of peach pie lingered in her mouth, despite the awful clenching of her stomach and the acid in her throat. A scream tried to force its way through her pinched throat but was trapped instead, feeling like tiny claws cutting out her voice. She gagged and held the smooth white napkin to her lips, pushing hard enough to feel her own teeth. Tears welled up and she tried to will them away.
Think of the different techniques for writing emotion (including writing about it logically and rationally!) as being tools in your toolbox, to be used or not as the other constraints in the situation warrant.
For example, if you need a fast-paced scene, you may have to give up a few of your gorgeous, emotion-laden sensory details. If you have a slow spot in your pacing, you might want to indulge in some extra emotion-laden sensory details. If you want to distance your reader from the emotions the character observes, give fewer emotionally-charged sensory details; if you want to envelop the reader in emotion but surprise them about it, give a lot of emotionally-charged sensory details that leave out the character’s own sensations of that emotion. For example, show the sensory details of Character B flirting with Character A, but don’t let Character A recognize their own feelings of flirtatiousness.
What level of detail you use depends on the effect you want to pull off.
Another of the benefits of writing emotion via details is that you can capture the way emotions are rarely single, pure emotions, but are conflicting messes of emotion, or emotions that otherwise have some subtle flavor to them. If a character doesn’t know what they feel, then using a lot of sensory details instead of logic can help communicate that impression.
One final thing: being subtle about emotion is almost like a point of suspense. “What does the character really feel?” the reader asks. Eventually, in order for a story to feel satisfying (because answering all the questions the reader has is part of how you make an ending feel satisfying), you will have to clarify the emotions the character really does feel.
This is often used to great effect in romance novels, where a lot of sensory and emotional details are used to tell the reader that the characters love each other, but the “I love you” statements are saved for the climax of the book.
Holding back the realization of an emotion from a point of view character is a powerful tool to communicate grief as well; if you give the sensory details of a character perceiving the world but have them struggle not to cry or even to admit to themselves that they feel grief, it can utterly devastate the reader. Use that technique wisely, though, and don’t kill off characters just to dump emotion on the reader! Eventually, readers catch on and will start rolling their eyes that you’ve killed off their favorite characters–again–and move on to other authors.*
*Well, except for stories that are about death, dystopia, and evil, where the deaths are expected; even so, the readers will probably step out of the story to wager which character will be killed off next.
(Next time: Opinion details!)