Let’s say your character is a waiter in a restaurant, and thus far his day has offered no challenges. Good storytellers will almost always add an intermediate step.įear mounts, as pointed out in the Plutchik discussion, and it’s a technique commonly employed in horror, suspense, and thriller tales. It’s one thing to hear the sounds a house makes as it settles or when the ice maker deposits a fresh batch of cubes it’s an entirely different thing to see a zombie tearing down your door. ( See for yourself, right here.)Īll too often, when I read the work of my students, too little time is taken to parse out the precise levels of fear their character(s) face. Use a thesaurus to review the synonyms for it. Just consider how many flavors it comes in–everything from cautionary concern to full-on, pants-crapping panic. Of all the many emotions we’re likely to write about, fear is one of the most common. Those will likely show up in my fiction.)īut, back to handling character emotions. I did, however, conceive a number of brilliant methods for pulling it off. Fortunately, I never had sufficient motivation to do it. (And yes, I’ve been sorely tempted to snuff out someone’s lights, typically someone in middle management. A person is unlikely to wake up one morning and decide to murder a co-worker unless something happened previously to trigger the thought. The same could be said of a character’s emotional state. We’ve all heard that a hallmark of great fiction is the way a character evolves as their story unfolds. The areas between the petals represent compound emotions. Draw the petals together in a point, and the scale of emotion grows in intensity as the size of the cone increases. I’ve seen Plutchik’s Wheel of Emotions rendered a couple ways, including this format suggesting a flattened cone. As I read the article, I thought about how a character might progress through an emotional range before reaching a point which could justify some dramatic action. Click Here! It provides a good discussion of Plutchik’s Wheel, a tool used to show the various levels of an emotion, from mild annoyance to mindless rage, for example. Before I launch into the next emotion on the agenda, I want to pass along a link to a website which provides an interesting look at emotions.
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