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| Easily one of my favorite cinematic moments. Powerful, memorable, and few words to muck it up. |
Emotion, from the perspective of a
writer, is an interesting thing; at once inescapably critical to most kinds of
fiction and simultaneously impossible to actually describe.
The kind of fiction I’m talking
about, of course, is narrative fiction involving specific characters and
intended to make the reader feel certain ways and possibly think about certain
things. More vague, broad, or meta-based
fiction might not involve emotion, or might only hint at small amounts of
emotion; it might simply describe a fictional world, or the ever-famous
mid-millennium book which describes fictional flora and fauna. Yet nearly any book which tells a story about
characters must inevitably involve emotion at some level, most often at its
core. We can’t be fully invested in a
story if we don’t care about the characters in its telling, and we can’t really
care about them if we don’t understand what they’re going through. Without emotion, more specifically without
the reader’s emotions in empathy for the book’s characters, a fictional
narrative is stripped of any power it might have had.
Yet at the same time, emotion is
impossible to actually describe. I can
describe what a character looks like to the last exacting detail. I can describe their environment far and
near. I can detail every political,
economic, and cultural movement of their world.
I can even describe every last second of a character’s background if
necessary. None of that, however, has
any way of ever describing the emotions that a character, or any other
character in their world, goes through.
An emotion is not actually a thing
which can be described. When I feel
anguish I know exactly what it is and I can identify it, but I can never
describe it to someone else. I can, of
course, say “the anguish was crushing, I barely ate for days,” but that doesn’t
describe my anguish. It only describes
my reaction to my anguish. There is no
set of stimuli that I can point to and say “that is anguish,” there is no
physical representation of anguish with which other people can identify, and
therefore nothing for me to describe.
It’s the same principle as color, really; I have no way of knowing
whether or not the color purple I see is the same color that you see. Just like I can never describe purple without
saying “it had a dark purple hue that shimmered bright violet in the right
light,” or just “it was purple,” I can never describe an emotion.
So what is a writer to do? For starters, a character’s reactions are
literally everything. If emotion is the
core of a good piece of fictional narrative, yet we can’t describe the emotions
themselves, then each character’s reactions to their own emotions are the most
important tool in any writer’s skillset.
To overdo it makes the emotion unbelievable or perhaps gives the impression
of the wrong emotion. To underdo it
leaves only bland emptiness, and lack of emotion is what kills a story. Yet if I do things correctly, if my
characters react just right, then I don’t have to be able to describe an
emotion itself. If everything is right
then a reader will understand the anguish being felt by a character or, in a
perfect world, feel an echo of that anguish in response. When my words work correctly, I don’t have to
describe joy, hate, love, fear, anguish, curiosity, depression, or any other
emotion that a character goes through; their reactions should tell my reader
everything.
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