by Linda Rodriguez
Aristotle,
the great philosopher of art, said that the emotions are: anger,
friendship, fear, shame, kindness, pity, indignation, envy or
jealousy, and love. In
the 20th
century, Paul Ekman, a psychological researcher, identified six basic
emotions: fear,
anger , happiness, sadness, disgust, and surprise. Researchers atGlasgow University have recently challenged these lists, claiming
that there are only four basic emotions—happiness, sadness, fear,
and anger—based on analysis of facial expressions across cultures,
genders, and ages. Every emotion is some mixture of these, as with
the primary colors on a color wheel with so many others in between in
varying admixture.
Writers,
of course, prefer to work with many more than those four basic
emotions. The important thing for writers about emotions is that
they come from the limbic part of the brain, not the conscious,
logical part, and they can often sideswipe us, taking us unaware and
prompting us to do things we would not normally do. Also, emotions
motivate most of what we do in life. Behind almost anything important
that we do lies at least one emotional motivation and often a complex
of emotions. And, in turn, everything we do, everything that happens
to us, triggers an emotional reaction that then may motivate another
action on our part, so that our lives become a chain of emotional
motivations and consequences.
Often
writers think that the secret of an exciting book is the dramatic
plot events that happen in the course of the story. Dramatic events
are important to an exciting story, of course, but they're only part
of that story, the extremely visible part. The greater but often less
visible part of the story, like the unseen vast bulk of an iceberg
that is what really kills the ships, is the emotions causing and
resulting from those actions and events. Dramatic actions and events
are not enough on their own to hold a reader's interest.
In
Lord
of the Rings,
Sam's dogged devotion to Frodo and fear of what's happening to his
friend and Frodo's fear of what the Ring of Power is doing to him and
his battle with the lust for power, greed, and selfishness that the
ring engenders in everyone keep us following their journey through
dreary landscape with the same passionate interest that we give to
the flashy, magical duel between the sorcerers, Gandalf and Saruman,
and the pageantry and dramatic battles of the horse warriors of
Rohim. And even those horse warriors draw us in with the emotions of
Éowyn,
the dutiful niece and sister who longs for the life of a warrior
rather than that of a wife and mother and who tragically and
hopelessly falls in love with Aragorn, who has long ago bonded with
the elf princess, Arwen. If you examine the books you've loved, you
will find that emotions drive all those dramatic actions and events.
As
writers, if we're fully aware of this underlying iceberg of emotion,
we can use it to control the pace of our story, to vary and build up
the dramatic tension. We can also use character emotions to draw the
reader into our books. In
The
Art of Fiction,
John
Gardner discusses
the importance of creating for the reader what he calls "a vivid
and continuous
dream."
The
goal of every writer is to entice the reader into a dream world and
to keep her there for the duration of the story. The bridge for the
reader into your story dream world is emotion, that non-logical
aspect of humanity that pervades everything we do. If you can make a
character's emotion real on the page, the reader will connect to it
and follow that character's journey, partaking of it as if it were
her own. Brain research shows that, when we read fiction, we
experience everything we read within our own brains as if we were
actually doing and living through those events and learn from that
vicarious experience as we would if it had been real. It is emotional
connection and identification which allows us to do this.
Linda Rodriguez's Plotting the
Character-Driven Novel, based on her popular workshop, and The
World Is One Place: Native American Poets Visit the Middle East,
an anthology she co-edited, are her newest books. Every Family
Doubt, her fourth mystery novel featuring Cherokee campus police
chief, Skeet Bannion, will appear in autumn, 2017. Her three earlier
Skeet novels—Every Hidden Fear, Every Broken Trust,
and Every Last Secret—and
her books of poetry—Skin Hunger
and Heart's Migration—have
received critical recognition and awards, such as St. Martin's
Press/Malice Domestic Best First Novel, International
Latino Book Award, Latina Book Club Best Book of 2014, Midwest Voices
& Visions, Elvira Cordero Cisneros Award, Thorpe Menn Award, and
Ragdale and Macondo fellowships. Her short story, “The Good
Neighbor,” published in the anthology, Kansas City Noir, has
been optioned for film.
Rodriguez is past chair of the AWP
Indigenous Writer’s Caucus, past president of Border Crimes chapter
of Sisters in Crime, founding board member of Latino Writers
Collective and The Writers Place, and a member of International
Thriller Writers, Wordcraft Circle of Native American Writers and
Storytellers, and Kansas City Cherokee Community. Visit her at
http://lindarodriguezwrites.blogspot.com
