Feelings Without Names
By Donald Maass | August 5, 2015 |
The fleeting beauty of life. The irony of it all. A nameless dread. The exquisite ache of inexpressible love.
Is there a greater art than evoking a feeling that has no name? When readers feel those it’s magic. It’s pure human connection, silent but nevertheless potent heart to heart sharing. It’s like when couples who’ve known each other forever exchange a look. Who needs words? The look says it all.
Nameless emotional experiences can be dark, too. When we leave the light on, shudder or feel sick inside at the horror of human cruelty, we are feeling something less specific and yet larger than any feeling we can label. The same goes for sensing the presence and reality of God. For those who have felt that even sublime words like humility, joy, wonder and awe are inadequate.
Ironically, in fiction there is only one way to get across a feeling with no name: words. How is that supposed to work? How can you evoke something nameless without naming it? Obviously we are here discussing evoking emotion. We are talking not about telling, but about showing in its highest form.
The least effective way to evoke unstated emotion is with pregnant pauses, “significant” looks, or gestures like shrugs or the dismissive wave of a hand. Overused devices have little effect. Snorts, grunts, and exasperated huffs—Women! Men!—are similarly pale.
[pullquote]Wonder doesn’t arise when readers don’t have to wonder. When the obvious is implied the feeling that readers experience does, unfortunately, have a name: indifference.[/pullquote]
By the same token, why bother to evoke in readers feelings that can be readily identified and which have accurate names? There’s no magic in that. Wonder doesn’t arise when readers don’t have to wonder. When the obvious is implied the feeling that readers experience does, unfortunately, have a name: indifference.
The art we’re seeking is the evocation of tacit feelings that leave the reader helpless to explain and speechlessly certain that they have felt exactly this themselves. Unique feelings are situation-specific. They flare as brightly as fireworks and perish just as quickly, leaving nothing to hold except the memory of having experienced something fragile and elusive, an excitement or trepidation that is at once real yet impossible to convey or recreate.
How can this be done?
The mysterious Italian novelist Elena Ferrante, whose books were recently described by The New York Times as feminist potboilers, is good at capturing feelings that cannot be named. She is best known for her most recent works, her “Neapolitan Novels”, a series about two bright girls who grow up in Naples but whose adult paths diverge even as they remain friends. The third in the sequence, Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay (2014), picks up the friends later in life. The one who left Naples, Elena, has established herself as a novelist. Her friend Lina remains in their home city, divorced and working in a factory. The novel’s opening finds Elena again in Naples visiting Lina. While on a walk they come across the dead body of another childhood friend who collapsed in a flowerbed next to a church. Following this unsettling episode, Elena contemplates the city, which has changed—and not:
Every year, in other words, it seemed to me worse. In that season of rains, the city had cracked yet again, an entire building had buckled onto one side, like a person who, sitting in an old chair, leans on the worm-eater arm and it gives way. Dead, wounded. And shouts, blows, cherry bombs. The city seemed to harbor in its guts a fury that couldn’t get out and therefore eroded it from the inside, or erupted in pustules on the surface, swollen with venom against everyone, children, adults, old people, visitors from other cities, Americans from NATO, tourists of every nationality, the Neapolitans themselves. How could one endure in that place of disorder and danger, on the outskirts, in the center, on the hills, at the foot of Vesuvius?
Elena’s extended lament about Naples finally turns to her friend Lina, who warns Elena not to write about her, which as we easily see is exactly what Elena is doing. The passage is much longer than I’ve shown here, and is ripe with—well, what exactly? I would call it fear of aging, a sense that life has moved along without repairing its crumbling infrastructure, an ache for a friend who has drifted down a different path, the knowledge that the journey isn’t done and yet death could be as close as the nearest flowerbed.
Is Elena talking about Naples or about herself? The answer is pretty obvious, no? Elena has told us nothing about how she feels about her life at this moment and yet she has expressed everything we need to know. We feel her feelings without hearing them named.
What we see from this is that “nameless” feelings do actually have names, it’s just that these feelings are 1) conflicting, layered or complex, and 2) they are filtered not through the self-reflection of a point-of-view character but through that character’s observation and apprehension of things external to self.
In other words, to take us inward to something inchoate it is best to detail something outward that stands in for that inner state. Nameless feelings swirl when characters project themselves onto things other than themselves.
So, let’s turn this insight into a tool.
- Find a point in your story at which your protagonist is stuck, stymied, undecided, overwhelmed, or in some other way suffused with inner need without having a means to move ahead.
- Now find something in the vicinity for your protagonist to obsess about. This obsession may be positive or negative or hopefully both. Detail your protagonist’s gripes and delights in whatever it is. Observe what is good and bad, beautiful and ugly, meaningful and empty. Be specific. Keep the focus off your protagonist and on this whatever-it-is.
- Finally, be sure that in this moment nothing changes. Leave discord unresolved, messes untidy, beauty overlooked, grumbles unheard, truths ignored, and your protagonist helpless to do anything but notice what others do not. Whatever is, simply is.
When your protagonist has strong feelings about something, your readers must examine their own feelings. Do they feel likewise or differently? Do they approve or disapprove? The conflict they feel emanating from your protagonist they will seek to resolve in their own minds. That engagement is what you want. There’s a good chance that it will be emotional. Your readers will have feelings but those feelings will be difficult to pin down.
That in essence is the delivery of feelings without names. We’ve all felt the fleeting beauty of life and will again when your protagonist captures it by talking about something other than the fleeting beauty of life. Put differently again, you’re not evoking something that doesn’t exist but something too complex, contradictory and irresolvable for readers to easily tag.
All feelings have names. The art is in making them too elusive to quickly describe.
[A note to the WU community: I’ll be on hiatus for the next two months for family reasons, see you again in November.]
How are you using unspoken feelings in your current project? Which novels have made you feel things that can’t be easily expressed?
[coffee]
Donald Maass (he/him) founded the Donald Maass Literary Agency. in New York in 1980. He is the author of The Career Novelist (1996), Writing the Breakout Novel (2001), Writing the Breakout Novel Workbook (2004), The Fire in Fiction (2009), The Breakout Novelist (2011), Writing 21st Century Fiction (2012) and The Emotional Craft of Fiction (2019). He has presented hundreds of workshops around the world and is a past president of the American Association of Literary Agents (formerly AAR).
Hey there WU Community,
I am in transit today and may not be able to keep up, but please do discuss! It was great to be part of Writer Unboxed Live last weekend. Thanks to Therese and Writers Digest for making that possible.
Happy writing,
Don
Once again, I feel like you are reading over my shoulder as I write. I am currently working on a novella in the same universe as my alternate-universe urban fantasy. The novella is set between the first and second books of the trilogy. Raven has won his pardon and returned to society, but is just now realizing how much he lost in the years he lived as a dark mage. Since he was an amateur pianist, I use his frustrations as he attempts to re-learn the piano as a stand-in for his grief for the lost years. (Especially appropriate as he is about to get involved in a case involving an opera singer)
From the opening:
Raven’s fingers on the keys found all the right notes, but still the music was wrong. Mechanical. Because he was still thinking of each note, instead of the flow of the piece.
Damn. He took his hands from the keys, forced a deep breath. Bach’s thirteenth invention was a tricky little beast—the man had written it to put his children through their paces, after all, but he had written it for his children. Raven could play the piece, flawlessly and with feeling, and without conscious thought, when he was in General Academy.
The steady click-click of the metronome he had turned to in his desperation mocked him.
Relax, and it will go better. What did it matter, if it took him a while to get his playing back to where it once had been? He had no aspirations of playing professionally, nor even of performing. He played to amuse himself; what matter if the notes didn’t quite add up to the music?
Because he used to be good, damn it. And all the lost years ate at him.
It’s the same as the magic. You know what you’re doing. Just let your fingers find the notes, and let the music take you.
He switched off the metronome, put his hands to the keys and tried again. Eyes half-closed, he breathed with the piece, and at last found the music in the notes. Finally, the tune took over, came alive, moved like the breath of the world. His soul swelled in his chest.
The message crystal flashed.
Red.
He missed a note and the flow of the music collapsed. Damn.
(There are some missing italics because I couldn’t figure out how to make the comment field do italics.)
“All feelings have names. The art is in making them too elusive to quickly describe.”
Great post Don. Thank you.
Don, is this what’s known as “indirection of image”? I’ve been reading about this approach: taking emotions and projecting them onto something concrete. I tried it one day to see how it would work in a scene in my novel. It came out way too melodramatic. I tossed it out. I felt like it was not a method I could just insert into a scene at will. So, I went back and started again, this time working from the character motivation first. It was better, truer to the scene, but still felt heavy and a little “out there.”
Don,
First of all, hope you have a great trip to your destination (as those who follow you on Twitter would know of). I hear it’s a beautiful and crazy place. (Having just returned from India, which is also beautiful and crazy, I can kind of understand what your travels and travails may be like. Of course that is home for me and this might not be for you). Wishing you safe travels and great 2 months of discovery and fun.
Thank you for the insightful post. There is a scene that I have been thinking about in my WIP where my protagonist is going through a life-changing moment. I don’t want to overdramatize the moment yet it is one of the central transformative moments for my protagonist and I want to give the scene it’s due. And your approach of “dispassionately” transferring his emotions to his surroundings to bring forth the emotional turmoil that he is going through is such a great idea. It also will bring out the strength and resilience that have been central to my protagonist. Am going to try to bring this concept into the scene as soon as I am done with this post. I think it will work wonderfully (fingers crossed of course). Thanks for the timely and insightful post.
Happy journey! We will miss your posts in the next two months. Talk to you when you get back.
Love your posts, Don, this is no exception. Thanks for the ideas you expressed. Hope your hiatus is a good one for you and your family.
Thanks for your teaching advice, Don. As I often do, I copied the bullet-pointed “to do” section into my Scrivener side note, and now I’m going back to evoke nameless emotions in my next chapter. :)
Very cool. Could I use those tools to create these uneasy feelings of emotional uncertainty as the close to my novel? I can see that I could close the novel with a happy ending, an evil ending or with an uncertain ending (based on the protagonists decision) and leave the protagonist with uncertain emotions about his choice.
Don, I just finished Louise Erdrich’s “The Round House” and I realized that a scene that touched me in the ways you suggest encapsulates the approach: late in the work, the protagonist, a 13-year-old boy, see his parents with new eyes after a series of traumatic events. He’s shocked to see that they are old. But the more layered, subtle sense is that of the losses he himself has suffered, his forced maturation, and his own uncertainties to come.
I didn’t reflect on it in the careful (and very helpful) way that you explore, but I was affected by it in that stirring sense of wonder, uncertainty and emotional engagement. Thank you for articulating the pull of such art.
I got you a cup of coffee for the road—drink deep, journey well, return with wisdom. (Though you’re doing pretty well with what you have already.)
Excellent post. Thanks for making me think.
“The conflict they feel emanating from your protagonist they will seek to resolve in their own minds. That engagement is what you want.” Amen, and have a good journey.
As always Don,
your work ‘spading’ into how story is conveyed blasts light and air into this author’s process.
Question, stemming from the length of the example from Elena Ferrante and presuming that passage is in keeping with her narrator’s voice–long, lyrical: Some narrators address the world in clipped fashion, close to the bone, and a long passage would be out of voice. If limited to one or two sentences, creating namless emotion becomes more challenging. Can this device work with brevity as well as it does at length and must we to aspire to brilliance to pull it off?
I hope your months away are fulling and if involving travel, full of wonder and insight.
Don,
I hope you have a safe journey, and I will miss your posts the next two months while you are away.
Reading today’s post got me thinking about my own process of connecting to what characters are feeling and how that has evolved over the last few years. I used to visualize the scene and list the emotions they would feel. The problem, though, was when it came time to write the scene I often found other things lurking in there, and I was unprepared. I use a different strategy now, one which works much better for me: instead of trying to force emotions into the scene, I try to grab as many particulars of what it is like to LIVE that scene and BE that character. There’s no need for spelling out the emotions that go on there, because usually I find they are intractable — as you put it so well here. True, sometimes it’s okay to mention surface emotions to convey thoughts or feelings, but these are just what you see above the water. Their role is not to create feeling in the reader, it is, like the words that bring the specifics of the scene to life, to connect to something deeper.
One other thing I find is that approaching my fiction like this I never have a plan to manipulate the reader into feeling one emotion or another. Instead, I’m all about going into that scene and bringing to life the reality of what it means to live it. Often, when I conceptualize a scene, be it through first time writing or through a rewrite during revision, I find the specifics of the scene I enter will conform to a life situation I can relate to in some form or another. I’ve already stepped back from more than a dozen scene in my WIP where I look at the emotions that come through from reading and experiencing that scene and realize I’ve transmuted something from my own life walk. The fiction, the words, the plot devices, the character arcs, the story itself, these are all just outward trapping to bring to life that invisible — yet hugely important — part of the story that is the story’s soul.
On that note, your post has come at a great time for me! My editor instructed me to do some rewrites on last week’s chapter and I’ve been ruminating the last week on how to approach it. I just love your exercise. I’m going to use it as my yardstick later on, as this scene is a critical moment of change where the point of view character is about to undergo a procedure that will make him lose his humanity — to become a monster, a god, to die, he doesn’t know. He’s terrified, excited, driven to avenge his sister’s death, determined to prove his worth. I really want to go back and bring that to life, to visit those unseen emotions. Thank you for the prompt!
Nice, Don, thank you!
Here’s a similar exercise to build your chops in this regard: Object – a barn. Describe it on a day when you’ve just fallen in love. Describe it on a day when a loved one has died.
Hi Don – This is wonderful. I’ve noticed this technique before from fantasy writers, but the one that springs to mind is Robin Hobb – particularly in the more recent works. I’d noted the metaphor of the characters’ feelings to the descriptions, but I wasn’t tuned in the to the emotional evocation, so this is one of those lessons that threads the needle for me. And I know the exact scene I want to try it on in the rewrite. Perhaps others, but I’m going to go and play with that one as soon as I hit send on this comment. Each of these posts on emotional connection makes me all the more anxious for the next craft book (no pressure).
It was great seeing you last weekend. A to-go coffee is on its way. Wishing you safe travels and much joy in the experiences that await!
Brent Weeks (one of Don’s authors) is another fantasy writer who comes to mind for me. Well, I’ve especially noticed how his themes are made tangible in the magic and worldbuilding, but I’d be willing to bet the same is true for the characters’ emotions, if I just read again and pay attention.
What I have always felt works in key emotional moments of a book, both as a reader of others and as a writer inside your own manuscript, is they allow a genuine connection. Those moments, when handled deftly, allow a reader to step into the story … to see ancient Naples, or an old barn, for themselves via the character. And by extension, the reader can then contemplate the same feelings within themselves as the character does in the scene.
Early on, back when I still felt like an imposter, I remember listening in on a group of writers. They were talking about setting, and one talented young woman offered that she saw her descriptions as part of a subtle dance with the reader, with her words fleshing out just enough detail so that the reader could finish the image in his or her head.
I think that description applies to emotion as well. What works best is painting the emotional scene, not with a heavy hand but a light stroke. If the lead isn’t forced, the reader will find the emotion in themselves. The words and images to accomplish that may not happen on the first, second, or even tenth draft. But eventually, with care, one can find the right balance.
Thanks Don. I was fumbling with this sort of thing in my WW II story of my Uncle Herb’s heroism in the South Pacific and his subsequent PTSD. Now I see why I wrote Herb focussing on the beauty of a jungle island with white sand beaches while flying his torpedo bomber to an engagement with the Japanese fleet. And in his postwar years of drunkenness, what caused him to climb over the railing of a bridge to look down on ships beneath. The first is about his desperate desire to survive the battle and see such a beach up close. The second is about his wish to relive his past glories and feel good about them, not suicide. I was on the right track, but not quite hitting it. Thanks for helping me dial those scenes in!
Don’t take this the wrong way, but I have a love/hate relationship with your posts. They are always excellent, thought-provoking, and spot-on. In that way, they inspire and I love them. The hate comes in when I go back to my WIP and see its flaws thanks to your new filter…LOL. But I’m learning, so thank you for being such a generous teacher!
Enjoy your travels.
Thanks, Don, for clarifying a powerful way to convey emotion and also for underlying its complexity.
At the moment, I’m revising a few more novels, so your post will certainly be on my mind as I re-visit what I’ve done. Happy and safe travels.
This lesson came at the right time, as I am working on improving the emotional “showing” of my characters. My current YA series is set on Lake Michigan. Naturally, the lake is constantly in the background, and it makes a good source for moments of pondering. Anyone who has lived on a large body of water can relate. The lake can represent both the good and the bad, the eternal and the temporary. This series will soon spin off into Detroit, where I hope to tap into the emotions that city can mirror. We shall see. Another fantastic lesson, Mr. Maass.
Really great advice, Don! As an earlier poster commented, I quickly copy / pasted the bulleted notes and plan to use in my work.
And great panel at the Writers Digest Conference last week. I had (sadly) never heard of Writers Unboxed before then, so I didn’t know what to expect, but I was very impressive by all the panelists and the work they are doing for / with writers here. I’ve only had the chance to peruse the site briefly since then, but this article was amazing and I can’t wait to come back often.
I was stuck on a scene and you just unstuck me. I know what to do with it now. Thank you.
Hi Don and once again, thank you for this penetrating post. It’s exciting when a teacher of the craft is able to so clearly name something that is hard to name. I am grateful
Wishing you the best on your journey. Be safe and blessings on you and your family.
Very timely tip for me as well. Am revising a straightforward life story into a medical memoir for a client who has difficulty expressing his emotions. Now I see perfectly how this technique will allow me to deepen scenes of high emotion. I always click when a post is from you Mr. Maass. Enjoy a coffee on me and happy hiatus!
Thank you for this information. Hopefully it will help us from writing a little too much like H.P. Lovecraft.
Isn’t August a major birthday time for your family?
(Correction) I should have typed a comma after “Hopefully” in the second sentence I wrote above.
It is exactly this talent that makes me fall in love with an author or a book and read it again. Thanks, Don.
Aloha Don,
You nailed it–Projection. According to Jung, the only way we can deal with difficult aspects of ourselves is to project that onto things in our waking life: people, animals, objects. These issues live deep in our personal unconscious and when it’s time for a character or person to make big changes, these elements come up. But we hate change. We hate the disruption it brings, thus the turmoil. “I’m unhappy, and want more from life. But to get more from life, I have to change my life. But there are things about my life that I like. But I really want to change….” In order to be happy, you first have to stop being unhappy. It’s tough to live through in your personal life, and then turn around and show it in your art is tougher. But so worth the effort.
Great seeing you at Writer Unboxed Live.
Great Post!
This reminds me of the evolution of portraiture in fine arts. Making a painting of a posed individual is much like describing a moment of a nameless feeling. The still image captures a face and body in a moment. They may be relaxed and demure or tense and stymied, but the viewer only sees the oil and the canvas. They must interpret the moment for themselves. The stillness of the medium is what drives home the intensity of the moment. Is the subject looking at the viewer, breaking the fourth wall? Are they looking away at a sight unseen? Is that a smile forming or fading? The momentum and reversal of a still can change how we see both the subject and the artist.
In writing these opportunities are drawn out even further. The structure of the word, the sentence, the page can gallop the reader forward and move them past this great moment of contemplation, or the cellists bow can pull back again to let the note hang, pulling the reader deeper in.
Wonderful discussion. Thank you.
I’m a bit of a Spinozan when it comes to emotions, and this article was a great way in to thinking how to give flesh and bone to Spinoza’s ideas on emotions (or affects). Basically, emotions are the potential for a body to affect or be affected. Which is to say, they are on a spectrum with action, where action itself is the apotheosis of a potential, while emotion emerges like a little death when a potential can’t find its expression through action (Freud’s ideas of trieb or desire fit nicely in with this – and from this follows theories of obsession, catharsis, mania – all the best features of our favourite characters in lit!). This works great for writing fiction, since it means you cannot write emotions except in relationship to actions and their bodies. Emotions are no longer states – John is sad, Dorothy is angry, etc. – but find their multiple and myriad expression through the relationship between specific bodies (“John pulled a thread on Dorothy’s sweater loosening a smile” is fundamentally different from “John drew a thread from Dorothy’s sweater loosening a sigh”) . This means there really can’t be words for emotions, since they are so specific to the set of relations that shift with their bodies. Emotions become like diaphanous threads tying characters together, hard to spot, easy to rend, but fundamental to how characters relate. This is just another way of saying exactly what you mentioned above, but I love that you give real and practical applications for figuring out how to write emotions in this way. The challenge, as always, is putting all of this into practice. But that is what makes writing such a joy.
Oops. Should read Spinozist in the first line. Isn’t there an edit button somewhere on here?… Here’s an emotion without a name – man writes an egghead entry on a website trying to show off his erudition, but then realizes too late he’s placed an error in the first bloody line. It’s not a critical error, but he can be a bit obsessive about such things. He’s written the corrective comment five times in the last hour, each time erasing it before posting. He takes a sip of his Chai Latte, fingers his keyboard and stares at his guinea pig in its cage. He’s forgotten to feed the poor critter, and now it’s giving him the evil eye.
“You’re too fat, anyway,” the man tells the pig.
His furry friend chooses not to comment.
“I’ll give you double the lettuce next go round.”
The pig rubs its head, snorts its nose clean and goes back to staring at its owner.
The man writes up correction number six. He doesn’t post it. He stares at his screen watching the words slowly dissociate into meaningless syllables, letters, shapes. He should go to bed. He really should feed his pig.
Instead, he takes a sip of his now lukewarm Chai Latte and scratches the soft spot behind his ear.
I’d like to second Bernadette’s comment (from above): I was stuck, and you unstuck me!
I’d spent the past four days trying to revise an important scene in a key chapter, only nothing was working, nothing gelled, not a spark of inspiration… until your post. It made me think of my character and what’s going through her head and heart. She feels stuck, afraid to move forward but can’t go back to how things were before. So… how exactly would those feelings express themselves? And not just in anyone, but in this particular character.
And then it all gelled. Scene is completely redone. I can hardly wait to show it to my crit partners.
Thank you! -Donna Gough
Don — I’ll just add my thanks and appreciation to you (and WU!) for such a helpful post.
When (and if…) you have an opportunity during your time away to peruse these comments, I have one question:
Could this technique work at or near the beginning of a first chapter? I.e., could a main character’s impressions of a place become an introduction to that character? Or would the reader need to be somewhat familiar with the character before a myriad of feelings without names could “resonate” with that reader?
I’m so impressed with the prospect of using the “technique” that I want to try using it at the first appearance of the MC to develop the reader’s empathy for her.
Thanks — John Gordon
Donald Maass please adopt me.