Dynamic Descriptions: Emotion
Today’s post is short and sweet, but full of meat. Hmm….nevermind.
“Emotions make you do some crazy things!”
It was true in the 90s when H-Town belted it out, and it’s true today!
Emotions will have you slashing tires, busting windows out of cars, and devouring Ben + Jerry’s by the pint!
While we hate to experience and even run away from some of them in real life, we loooooove to encounter emotional people in our fiction!
That’s why it’s so important to show what’s happening to your characters and how they’re feeling—use sensory, emotive details to paint a picture—rather than just telling the reader via play by play.
In fact, the emotions on the page should be 10x what we’d experience in real life in order to really pull the reader in!
How do you do it?
A few months back, I discussed how to give the reader a “visual” experience with your words vs just typing a laundry list of descriptions. You can read more about writing dynamic descriptions here.
To write emotions, the same principles apply, but the S.T.A. framework will help you do it more easily:
The stimulus—not to be confused with the stimmy— is the thing that’s going to make your character feel their emotion.
Follow the stimulus with your character’s thoughts. How do they feel about what just happened?
And finally, make your character take action and write what they do in response to the stimulus.
To use this method in your work, consider the point of the scene. Where is it going and how will it advance the story forward? If perhaps, the point of the scene is for a heated argument to take place, your characters must act in a way that brings this about.
You must choose:
The stimulus that will cause your character to get angry.
The thoughts they’ll have about that stimulus, and how does it make them feel
The physical action/reaction will they take
Need an example to help you visualize? Here’s one I came up with on the fly:
Stimulus: John steals the last cookie from the jar, when he sees his sister,Trina, reaching for it...
And action!
I knew it was coming. He’d been doing it since we were 6, and finally tall enough to reach the cookie jar on the counter.
I should be used it by now, but each time it happened, my spirit faded just a little bit more. John would call me dramatic, but I didn’t care. So what if they were some tasteless, off-brand imitations. The cookies weren’t just cookies.
They were Mrs. Porter giving me a B on Black History essay when she knew I’d submitted A+ work. They were me being chosen as the tree in the school play, even though I was the only one who delivered my lines perfectly for the lead. They were all the achievements I’d worked so hard to gain, only to have some idiot snatch them from my hands.
“Give it back,” I said, fingers shaking as they hovered above the empty jar.
Ok, so I didn’t fully incorporate the stimulus into the scene, but can you see how it led to Trina’s thought process? Can you see how her thoughts led her to take action? This scene shows us that Trina is upset by what happened, without literally saying “she was upset”, but it also pulls us into her character and gives us more background about how she views the world.
Your turn! Try the S.T.A. method in your writing the next time to find yourself struggling to bring your character’s emotion to life!
PRO TIP:
Remember to consider your character’s personality when choosing how they’re respond to the stimulus! If your protagonist is an introvert, their reactions will be very different from someone with an extroverted personality.
Do you get tripped up when writing descriptions for your story? Maybe it’s time for a little help! Through a 1:1 Clarity + Strategy Intensive, I’ll show you how to overcome the parts of the process that keep you on the ropes! Book your 90min session today!