Creating Emotion: Let Your People be People
As writers, we’re constantly trying to draw
our readers into our story. We know that we must create a character for the
reader to care about to feel emotion on their behalf. But how do we get our
readers to laugh, fear, and cry with our characters? Here are two ways:
1.
The characters need to look
like real people.
2.
The characters need to act
like real people.
Looking like real people
In researching for my own historical fiction
novel, I have found myself increasingly stirred and compassionate toward people
whom I’ve never met. The only thing that I know about them is a single quote
they have said or a photograph of their face. But that’s just it.
Those two things give me a window into their lives. I’ve seen
them as people. I’ve seen them as human beings who suffer. And it creates
emotion in me.
In watching the docudrama In Our Hands (on the six-day war for Jerusalem), I found myself
moved during the battle scenes, particularly watching the medics interact with
the wounded soldiers. As authors, myself included, it’s easy to get carried
away with the gore of a story or battle scene. But the reader will only be
shocked, not saddened, by all the blood if they don’t care about the dying character.
In In
Our Hands I cared about the dying and wounded soldiers because they were
men with faces. The actors were actors, yes. But the people they represented
were real. The actual sons were interviewed to tell their fathers’ stories.
Soldiers who had fought recounted watching their friends die. They had souls.
They weren’t words on a page—they were real people.
That is the first step in creating emotion: the characters need to look like real people.
I’m not saying to have your medic dash onto
the scene and give me a rundown on the hair and eye-color of the wounded
soldier. But you as a writer must see the character as a real person, and this
happens through the second step.
Acting like real people
It’s so easy to make our characters act like
flat puppets. But what if your character isn’t always brave? What if he’s
scared out of his mind because he keeps seeing all his friends falling around
him and he knows he must be next? What if he doesn’t run through the burning
building to save his friend? Some people aren’t brave, but some people can’t
handle the enormous strain of emergency situations.
“But that’s not how I want my character to be,”
you say. Okay then. That’s fine. We all want our characters to be that brave
soldier who nearly—or does—die for his best friend, because those are the stories that we all want
to read and be a part of: ultimate sacrifice. Those are the stories God created us to want and
need because that’s His story.
But your character still needs to act like a
person. He shouldn’t run through sniper fire and explosions unfazed. “I want
him to be courageous,” you say. Someone once put it this way: “Courage isn’t being unafraid. It’s going on, even when
you’re terrified.”
That’s the beauty of those kinds of
self-sacrificing stories. It isn’t that the people in them were unafraid.
Unafraid people aren’t captivating. Fascinating people are the weak,
vulnerable, ordinary, everyday people—that may be petrified at times—and yet
they stifle their fear enough, or push through it anyway, because they love
others more than themselves. Or, as a Vietnam veteran told me, there is the
greater fear of letting their buddy down. Jesus Himself prayed that if it was
possible, “let this cup pass from Me.” He didn’t want to suffer but went to the
cross anyway because He loved us more than His Own life.
Don’t be afraid to let your characters
react. It’s okay to let your soldier feel the pain
of his shattered collarbone. He doesn’t always have to have that abnormally
high pain tolerance. It’s okay to let the medic be terrified because he’s never
seen this much blood loss. It’s okay for him to see the panic in the eyes of
the soldier he’s working on and to have flashbacks to when his mistake caused his friend to die. It’s okay for him to make another mistake because he’s so
distracted by his fear. He’s human, right?
Showing emotion is not the same thing as
creating emotion. But if you let your characters live and act like real people, you will
create emotion as you let Colin run through the fire, get shot, and press on to
save Jared, despite his terror.
…
Fascinating
people are the weak, vulnerable, ordinary, everyday people—that may be
petrified at times—and yet they stifle their fear enough, or push through it
anyway, because they love others more than themselves.
What creates emotion in you? Why?
…
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