Emotion vs Feeling
By David Corbett | March 14, 2017 |
Photo by Steve Day
I’m going to tell you something: thoughts are never honest. Emotions are.
—Albert Camus
I’m wading into tricky waters today. If I’m successful, I will have begun a discussion on a topic that is very dear to one of our own, the esteemed and estimable Donald Maass.
If I’m not so successful, I will have stumbled, fumbled, and bumbled into an area that Don understands far better than I do and will have made a flaming bozo of myself.
Sound like fun?
Here goes.
I’m going to refer to two posts here at Writer Unboxed, one by Don titled “Third Level Emotions,” and another concerning his upcoming book, The Emotional Craft of Fiction.
I’m also going to refer to a talk he gave at ThrillerFest two years ago titled, “Why Your Thriller Isn’t Thrilling.”
In each of these, Don addressed a subject of great importance to him in his evaluation of what matters in fiction: the portrayal and evocation of emotion.
My perspective on this: I have been puzzled by what at times has seemed to be a blurring of the line between emotion and feeling.
As I wrote in The Art of Character:
The difference between emotion and feeling is more one of degree than kind. Feeling is emotion that has been habituated and refined; it is understood and can be used deliberately. I know how I feel about this person and treat her accordingly. Emotion is more raw, unconsidered. It comes to us unbidden, regardless of how familiar it might be. Rage is an emotion. Contempt is a feeling.
[For a more detailed, neurological discussion of this distinction, see “Emotion and Feeling” in Descartes’ Error by Antonio R. Damasio.]
Both emotion and feeling are essential in fiction. But given the distinction between them, rendering them on the page requires different techniques. And that’s where, perhaps, Don and I have differing perspectives.
I encountered this issue while reading Jungian analyst James Hillman, about whom I wrote earlier this year for WU.
Specifically, I read an essay of his on Jungian typology titled “The Feeling Function,” which opened my eyes to how important feeling is in everyday affairs. (Feeling is one of the four cognitive functions Jung used to describe the human personality, the other three being Thinking, Intuition, and Sensation.)
To place just the right people in just the right seats at a dinner party requires conscious command of feeling.
More dramatically, as Hillman noted, to emphasize good manners in an era of unprecedented anger and violence is to recognize the importance of the feeling function.
To emphasize good manners in an era of unprecedented anger and violence is to recognize the importance of the feeling function.
But what about emotion? As I noted in the excerpt quoted above, emotion comes unbidden—we are helpless before our emotions, but in command of our feelings (at least relatively).
Put differently: once we reflect upon and analyze an emotion, it begins its transformation into a feeling, at which point we can use it consciously to navigate our world and engage with the people in it.
When Don gave his wonderful analysis about how to search out and develop “third level emotions,” it seemed to me to be a methodology for turning emotion into feeling. In one particularly illuminative section, he wrote:
Research into emotional functioning has shown that feeling and cognition happen together. There is some disagreement about which happens first and how they mesh, but it’s clear that part and parcel of emotion is the assessment of it…. On the page, writing about feelings entails not only the feelings but assessing them, which is to say observing them and their effects, judging them and discerning their meaning.
My problem with this is that I think it fails to distinguish feeling from emotion. Feeling is precisely the cognitive assessment and evaluation of emotion. But that begs the question: How do we convey emotion (rather than feeling) on the page?
Here, it was Don’s ThrillerFest talk (“Why Your Thriller Isn’t Thrilling”) that proved illuminative.
Don made the point that if you want readers to feel terror, you must first give them hope—specifically, hope that whatever terrible thing appears to be looming might be avoided.
If you want readers to feel terror, you must first give them hope.
This means that to some extent surprise and/or reversal is critical to getting the reader to experience a genuine emotion. If we see it coming, or if the emotion is already implicit in the scene, its impact is diminished.
Something must bring the reader to a moment of shock, sharper awareness, or deeper empathy. (In his Take Five Q&A, Don put it this way: “To get readers fully engaged in emotional minutiae requires, again, catching readers by surprise.”)
It’s only after such a moment of shock, reversal, or simple surprise is conveyed that the process of assessment can begin. The scene where this normally takes place is called a sequel scene, and it follows a particularly dramatic or harrowing scene or sequence of scenes. At that point, both the characters and the reader will need time to “catch their breath.” In narrative terms, this means they need to:
- Process the emotional impact of what just happened
- Think through the logic of what just happened—i.e., determine why it happened and what it means (because, most likely, what was expected to happen didn’t).
- Make a plan for how to go forward.
I think Don’s methodology—picking a “third level emotion,” then analyzing it in terms of what it says about self-identity—is a really insightful way to go about processing the emotional impact as outlined in step #1 above.
In an article I wrote for Writer’s Digest, premised on Don’s observations, I paraphrased that methodology as follows:
- Dig Deeper: You need a starting point that is not self-apparent, because nothing shuts off the reader like belaboring the obvious. Instead, go to a third level of emotion in the scene.
- Objectify the emotion: Find a physical analogy for it. (It was as though her shame had created a sunburn on the inside of her skin.)
- Compare the emotion: Measure the emotion against other occasions when it has arisen. Is it worse this time, better? How? Why?
- Evaluate the emotion: Is it a good or bad? Proper or shameful? Valid or invalid? Right or wrong? What would a more refined, more honest, stronger, wiser person have experienced?
- Justify the emotion: Despite the evaluation just performed, explore why this emotion is the only proper, honest emotion for this character at this moment under these circumstances.
- Examine the impact on sense of self: What does this emotion say about who the character is, her status, the state of her life? Has she stepped up a notch or sunk to a new low? Has she grown or regressed? Does she recognize the emotion as universal, or does it render her painfully unique, alone, even isolated?
If there’s no emotion to begin with, there’s nothing to assess. If you fail to create the opportunity for an emotional experience on the reader’s part, whatever analysis that follows will bear a greater resemblance to navel-gazing blather than the refinement of emotion into feeling.
This is another point where I disagree with Don (I think). If I understand his remarks correctly, readers only feel something in the assessing and evaluating of the text. In his words:
[F]iction writers assume that readers will feel what their characters do. They don’t. Readers instead react: weighing, judging, comparing and creating, moment by moment, their own emotional journey.
Now, again, I may be misunderstanding what Don is trying to get across—but my struggling with it testifies to how important I believe it to be.
I can only speak for myself, but I find the formulation just quoted to be restrictive. One of the most emotional moments in my own reading experience came from a Tobias Wolff story titled “An Episode in the Life of Professor Brooke.”
It comes when the married Professor Brooke goes home with Ruth, a woman he’s met on an out-of-town trip. Once they’re alone, Ruth says, “I believe in being honest.” Brooke thinks she’s about to tell him about a boyfriend or a fiancé.
Instead she lifted both hands to her hair and lifted it off like a hat. There was no hair underneath it, just a light down like a baby’s.
I have never forgotten that moment, and though I recall experiencing a jumble of emotions at the time (and still do upon rereading it), it wasn’t because of weighing, judging, comparing, or creating. It was from the sudden shock of expecting one thing, then getting quite another—one so touching, revealing, and, yes, “honest,” that the character’s vulnerability is inescapable, and the scene’s indelible emotional impression is made.
However, true to Don’s analysis, the other unforgettable moment from that same story comes at the very end, and it adheres closely to his methodology for assessing emotion:
And Brooke’s wife, unpacking his clothes, smelled perfume on his necktie. Then she went through the laundry hamper and discovered the same heavy scent all over his shirts. There had to be an explanation, but no matter how long she sat on the edge of the bed with her head in her hands and rocked back and forth she could not imagine what it might be. And her husband was so much himself that night, so merry and warm, that she felt unworthy of him. The doubt passed from her mind to her body; it became one of those flutters that stops you cold from time to time for a few years, and then goes away.
What I remember feeling at the time I first read that paragraph was the shock of “stops you cold.” It’s nicely set up by “flutters,” which does not prepare you for what so quickly follows.
But though the paragraph does much of what Don’s methodology proposes—objectifies the emotion (rocking on the side of the bed, head in hands; the passing of her doubt from her mind to her body); compares the emotion to others (she found him so much like himself that night, i.e., no different than on other occasions); evaluates the emotion and examines its impact on identity (she felt unworthy of him); and comments on her life (it comes up every now and then for a few years, then goes away)—that was not what I remembered. I remembered that lancing shock of horrified recognition and fear.
I’m not sure what to make of all this. I realize Don has given much greater and deeper thought into these matters, has researched them thoroughly, and has written what I expect is a must-read book about the issue. I also, to repeat myself, may be misunderstanding what he is trying to say.
But the basic point I’m trying to make is this: Though I agree that there are places in a story or a book where the assessment of emotion allows the reader to think through their own reaction, without a moment on the page to trigger an emotion to assess there’s nothing to sort through. And creating an emotional moment requires a different technique–more dependent on sudden surprise, shock, or reversal–than creating the more reflective deliberation that creates feeling.
I am really looking forward to what Don thinks of what I’ve said, and the discussion that ensues with all your comments. In the meantime:
What particularly memorable moments of emotion or feeling do you recall from your reading?
What moments of emotion or feeling from your own work seemed particularly challenging–or effective?
In either instance–what made them so memorable: the sudden shock of the experience, or the character’s assessment and self-evaluation?
Note to Unboxers: I am beginning a 4-week online course, The Craft of Character, through Litreactor today. We still have a few slots open if you would like to join us. (And by “us” I meant group of dedicated students from around the world.) To learn more or to register, go here.
David Corbett (he/him) is the author of seven novels: The Devil’s Redhead, Done for a Dime (a New York Times Notable Book), Blood of Paradise (nominated for numerous awards, including the Edgar, Do They Know I’m Running?, The Mercy of the Night, The Long-Lost Love Letters of Doc Holliday, and The Truth Against the World. He has also published the story collection Thirteen Confessions and the novella The Devil Prayed and Darkness Fell.
David’s short fiction and poetry have appeared in a broad array of magazines and anthologies, with pieces twice selected for Best American Mystery Stories.
His non-fiction has appeared in numerous venues, including the New York Times, San Francisco Chronicle, Narrative, Zyzzyva, MovieMaker, The Writer, and Writer’s Digest.
He has taught both online and in classroom settings through the UCLA Extension’s Writers’ Program, Book Passage, LitReactor, 826 Valencia, The Grotto in San Francisco, and at numerous writing conferences across the US, Canada, and Mexico. In January 2013 Penguin published his textbook on the craft of characterization, The Art of Character (“A writer’s bible that will lead to your character’s soul.” —Elizabeth Brundage), and Writer’s Digest published his follow-up, The Compass of Character, in October 2019.
Thank you for your post David.
Jim Harrison’s 1979 Novella ‘Legends of the Fall’ had this great moment when the character Tristan goes and touches a sleeping bear.
I fell in love with Harrison with that trilogy. It’s filled with moments like that. My personal favorite of the three novellas is “The Man Who Gave Up His Name,” and I love the scene where the protagonist, Nordstrom, who has gone from a corporate hatchet man to a short order cook at a greasy spoon in the Florida Keys, is dancing alone to the jukebox until daybreak.
Thanks, James.
David, this was an amazing essay! And Jim Harrison’s Legends of the Fall is always on my desk as a touchstone. I was going to use Ian McEwan as an example of reader emotional and WTF response as in Chesil Beach and The Comfort of Strangers. I myself cannot discern the emotional vs the feeling aspects in those examples. In Legends, when Tristan goes to find the dead Samuel, and then suffers Two’s death…the reader is ripped apart along with him. In answering your question about my own work which deals with relationship abuse, most readers end up cursing and throwing the book across the room in what I expect may be frustration and anger. I have to study more this question of the difference between and chicken and egg thing of emotion and feeling. In the book A Little Life, where the character has been brutally defiled, and devastated, there is no surprise. Is the reader being emotionally manipulated? It is truly a most painful book that leads back to the question of affliction.
In Revision & Self-Editing, I described the “reaction” scene or beat as Emotion, Analysis, This gives us the authorial luxury of slowing down to focus in … when the moment calls for it. But we can also render the above as a simple beat and achieve a similar effect in keeping with the action that stimulates it. And there must be an action that stimulates it lest the character become like the person at the cocktail party who, when asked, “How you doin’?” begins a long and turgid account of his recent colon surgery.
Swain has a great treatment of the latter subject in Techniques of the Selling Writer (1965), in the chapter “Plain Facts About Feelings.” He calls it the “problem of proportion.” This, it seems to me, is where many a writer stumbles.
David, you mentioned that moment from the Wolff story. I have never forgotten a similar moment from Hemingway’s “Soldier’s Home.” Krebs looked at the bacon fat hardening on his plate. That’s it. But how powerful and perfect it was at that precise moment in the story..
Thanks, Jim. Timing is everything, especially in moments like this. Where exactly in the story to place it, how long to allow for that slowing down of focus, if at all. Sometimes, as in the Hemingway example, one line nails it.
I’m wondering if anyone will contribute a recalled section that isn’t one of those jolting images or moments, but rather presents an analysis of an emotion, a rendering of it into feeling. We shall see, I guess.
I like your terminology — reaction scene or beat — though I also like the element of planning that goes into the “sequel” (though the term seems to suggest merely a look back, not forward). I find it useful to think of the analysis of emotion and logical as being in the service of a new plan and thus action. So tempting to drift into aimless rumination without that constant focus on moving forward.
Thanks as always for chiming in. I’m now a bit obsessed on finding “Plain Facts on Feelings.”
Hi again David
I’m just a student of fiction, but I think this passage from ‘American Pastoral’ presents an analysis of an emotion quite nicely.
“The god (himself all of sixteen) had carried me up into athletes’ heaven. The adored had acknowledged the adoring. Of course, with athletes as with movie idols, each worshiper imagines that he or she has a secret, personal link, but this was one forged openly by the most unostentatious of stars and before a hushed congregation of competitive kids-an amazing experience, and I was thrilled. I blushed, I was thrilled, I probably thought of nothing else for the rest of the week. The mock jock self-pity, the manly generosity, the princely graciousness, the athlete’s self-pleasure so abundant that a portion can be freely given to the crowd-this munificence not only overwhelmed me and wafted through me because it had come wrapped in my nickname but became fixed in my mind as an embodiment of something grander even than his talent for sports: the talent for “being himself,” the capacity to be this strange engulfing force and yet to have a voice and a smile unsullied by even a flicker of superiority-“
I think that’s a beautiful rendering of an emotional moment of awe into a tacit analysis of self, for though all the talk is about the adored, the adoring one is implicitly comparing himself to his idol.
Great example. Thanks.
Hey Jim. To briefly jump in on this point, I think you know that I have a problem with Swain’s concept of the aftermath or “sequel” scene, what you call the Emotion-Analysis beat.
My muscles tense (emotion!) especially when I read the words “the authorial luxury of slowing down”, which on the more I think about it the more it causes me to feel (feeling!) that we’re granting ourselves permission is wallow in churning exposition.
The fact is that in the seconds following an emotional jolt on the page, the reader quickly does their own processing, weighing the implications and sifting the meaning of what’s happened. We don’t need to rehash all that. Such passages are often dead on the page, stuff to skim.
But I don’t think you’re in favor of that. The pause can be short, just the right line, as in your bacon fat line from Hemingway, a brief cutaway brimming with symbolic significance. But for every Hemingway gem there are a thousand manuscripts with cutaway-pause lines like, “Outside, the wind rustled the leaves in the trees.” I skim those too.
Now, my “third-level emotions” method may seem to belie what I’m saying. The method is to create a paragraph in which a character is processing–exactly what I just railed against–but the emotion being processed is a surprise (dug up from a deep, third-level place) and so analysis is demanded on the part of the reader. The jolt is not in what happens but in what the reader is caused to understand.
When the heck are we three going to discuss all this over a beer? I’m feeling the need!
You are buying the beer, Don.
I certainly do not equate “slowing down” with “wallowing in churning exposition.” Far from it. Some of the most memorable moments for me are those emotional beats where the author did slow down, not interfering with the readers’ experience, but to enhance and often reinterpret it.
I can cite examples from Michael Connelly to Theodore Dreiser. But I don’t have to, because by the second beer we’d be largely in agreement!
You really need to look into this drinking problem you have. Beer! Beer! It’s all you think about (he said with feeling, or emotion, or …)
Not true. I think about coffee far more.
My favorite fridge magnet reads: Move over caffeine. This is a job for alcohol.
Seriously: I think the brilliance of the third level emotion technique is its staring point: a deeper, less obvious emotion within the scene. But I also think the comparing and the analysis of what it says about self is where it really hits home. The character realizes the emotion says something about who he is.
Something like that, yes, thanks!
“Something like that”?
Here’s a direct quote from your earlier post:
“Finally, what does having this third-level feeling tell this character about self? What does it say about his or her condition? Has this character sunk or risen? Has this character grown or regressed? What’s the truth in it? How is this feeling beautifully universal or painfully unique? Is feeling this feeling to dwell in heaven or burn in hell?”
What am I missing?
Nothing. Thanks, pal. Loving this discussion today. You’re making me sharpen the dull cutting tool of my brain.
Wow, this is really good stuff! Thank you, David. I really love when WU does in-depth craft issues like this. So helpful.
You are most welcome. If only I had a hard-and-fast rule or bit of guidance for you. I’m still figuring this stuff out myself, and Don has been an immeasurable help.
This piece poses no problem whatsoever for me. Heck, my ideas are being *discussed*. I’m flattered! I’m also delighted there’s any kind of discussion at all on this topic.
I’m groping to find an argument to start—wouldn’t a literary feud be fun?—or even a bone to pick but I’m not finding much, only semantics and some conceptual differences that don’t amount to a whole lot, but are kind of interesting to kick around.
To me, the difference your draw between “emotion” and “feeling” is a tad academic yet interesting in that it works to distinguish between an emotional response and its subsequent processing. For you, and perhaps Hillman, emotion (if I have this right) is an immediate surge of irrational response to something, while feeling is a later considered understanding of the original response. Yes? We are helpless in the face of emotions, but in control of our feelings.
Well, okay. The thesaurus lists emotion and feeling as synonyms, and I do in my writing use the terms in the more casual and interchangeable sense. But to say that you’re using clinical precision whereas I’m using sloppy English, I think glosses what might be an interesting variation in our approaches. Maybe?
I wonder if when you draw the distinction between emotion and feeling, you are aiming at what’s on the page, meaning whether characters are in the grip of emotion or acting upon feelings. (True?) Regardless, I’m aiming at not what characters are going through but what readers are experiencing. My goal is nothing more than to stir readers up. Emotions, feelings…I don’t care what terms we use, I care only that readers hearts are moved for it is in that state of engagement that readers are open and receptive to the author’s purpose.
Or maybe that’s not right, and we’re both talking about the effect of fiction on us readers? Looking closer, I think that’s true. Your example of Tobias Wolff’s story explains your own reaction to the story’s surprises, how what we read isn’t quite what’s expected. But there are differences. The hat moment provides shock, whereas the laundry moment leads (later in life) to feelings in the professor’s wife that are unexpected and a passage which is more akin to the processing of emotion on the page that I call (and you very accurately report) as “third level emotions”.
Hmm.
My book The Emotional Craft of Fiction is about the totality of ways in which a story creates emotional effect (and, if you must, feelings) from showing-versus-telling, to the story’s emotional environment, to the emotional opportunities in major plot markers, to the effect of the meaning that characters draw from any event, to the interactions of plot and inner journey, to characters’ changes, to turns to virtue, to (even) the mood of the author in writing which in turn will determine how we feel in reading. At the end I urge a magnanimous spirit in composing a story, because an open-hearted author creates an open-hearted reader.
Maybe it boils down to this: you like surprise, shock and reversal of our expectations for the jolt they produce in us. The technique of “third level emotions” on the other hand causes evaluation. For you the jolt comes first, evaluation is secondary. For me, I don’t care about chickens or eggs or anything except that authors need to stir up readers more—much more—by any means available.
So, I dunno. Do we have an argument? Sadly, I’m not sure we do. You bring a nice precision to the response we have to different types of story moment. I’m pushing an arsenal of weapons from slingshots to H-bombs to let loose in an all-out and indiscriminate assault on the reader’s resistant heart—and to fire up timid authors.
I suspect we’re talking around the same topic, getting at it in different ways, in our own terms, preferring our own conceptualization of it yet overlapping so much that whatever differences there may have less practical significance for authors than recreation for you and me.
I think we both want stories to clobber readers. Maybe it doesn’t matter so much how authors get there, or how they understand it, but that they simply do it. What do you think?
Thanks for chiming in, Don.
First, to clear the proverbial air, nowhere did I state (nor would I) that I was speaking with “clinical precision” whereas you were using “sloppy English.” On the contrary, I think I made it pretty clear I’m trying to muddle through what very well may be a misunderstanding of your intended meaning.
Nor do I believe the distinction between emotion and feeling is merely semantic or a “tad academic.” I wouldn’t waste my or your or anyone else’s time on it if I believed that were the case.
Rather, I agree that your position and mine differ in this regard, as you put it:
“[Y]ou are aiming at what’s on the page…. I’m aiming at not what characters are going through but what readers are experiencing.”
I realize this might seem like utter writer arrogance, but I do like to think sometimes, when all alone with the stars and my cuddle bear, that what readers are experiencing is at least tangentially related to what I’ve managed to put on the page.
And so, yes, I’m approaching this from the viewpoint of technique, particularly because I was fascinated by your breakdown of the analysis of emotion in your post about “third level emotion.” You provided a technique. I found it intriguing. I’ve even found examples of it now that you’ve pointed it out—not just the one I identified above but others, particular one in The Sense of an Ending by Julian Barnes that I found particularly moving, when the narrator looks back at a moment years before when he was particularly cruel to two friends, his most idolized male friend, and the narrator’s ex, whom he learns had become a couple:
“Why had I reacted by going nuclear? Hurt pride, pre-exam stress, isolation? Excuses, all of them. And no, it wasn’t shame I now felt, or guilt, but something rarer in my life and stronger than both: remorse. A feeling which is more complicated, curdled and primeval. Whose chief characteristic is that nothing can be done about it: too much time has passed, too much damage has been done, for amends to be made.”
I was quite moved by this, but not as much as an echoing passage at the end, where the narrator looks back. “You get towards the end of life—not, not life itself, something else: the end of any likelihood of change in that life.” And, sensing he cannot quite answer the terrifying question, “What else have I done wrong?” he realizes: “There is accumulation. There is responsibility. And beyond these, there is unrest. There is great unrest.”
That ending haunts like the tolling of a death knell. And what I find, in thinking back over those moments in reading that have stayed with me, as well as some of those mentioned by others commenting here, is that the sudden unexpected image or phrase or action or response is often what’s remembered, which suggests it is what has the greatest impact. And I think those moments conjure something more akin to emotion than feeling, but it’s not like an ocean divides the two. The one evolves into the other—where is the line where emotion develops legs and walks upon the land as feeling? Ask Darwin.
I’m not dense enough to think that moments of powerful emotion exist in isolation, even in poetry. They are part of the fabric of everything else being presented. And there is also the necessity for moments when that jolt (or pinprick) of emotion is analyzed, assessed, weighed, incorporated into a sense of self. That creates part of the fabric of the story as it moves ahead. (And I think the two examples from the Julian Barnes novel show that: the first example helps provide the groundwork that makes the final image so devastating.)
But they are quite different moments, one passive, the other active, and require a different technique, as I think the examples indicate. I’m not arguing for one over the other. I’m just identifying what I believe are two distinct types of experience that characters can have. The technique you identify as “third level emotion” I consider to be the process of rendering emotion into feeling. I think that technique is invaluable. But I also believe it is not what readers tend to remember when they look back at moments that they found particularly moving.
And that, to quote Porky Pig, is all, folks.
Wait, is air proverbial? I hope not, I’m somewhat dependent upon it.
I really like this: “Where is the line where emotion develops legs and walks upon the land as feeling?” The haunting Julian Barnes passage you cite is definitely one of feeling, meaning an analysis and (dire) reflection, as opposed to an emotional jolt. I get the distinction and see why you’re drawing it, which I think is to advocate for jolts (surprises with emotional effect) and to say that those are necessary precursors to passages of feeling. We can’t feel unless we’ve first had emotions to feel about.
Do I have the gist of it?
In my book, I do state that what readers experience has little to do with what characters feel. Readers are on their own emotional journey. Above, you write something seemingly different but that I believe is in spirit the same:
“I do like to think sometimes, when all alone with the stars and my cuddle bear, that what readers are experiencing is at least tangentially related to what I’ve managed to put on the page.”
I would go farther. What readers experience in reading is *entirely* due to what you have put on the page, but it’s just not characters’ reported emotions that are doing that. It’s a great deal more than that, a whole emotional and felt (to use your distinction) environment that you create.
I think what you’re saying in your post today is that while a technique like “third-level emotions” does provide a certain feeling experience for readers, it’s just not the only one. Emotional jolts are another, albeit an emotional (as opposed to a feeling ) experience, and may be more effective.
I wouldn’t argue with that, I’d only add that jolts, like the third-level emotions method, are both only part of a big picture, a whole range of effects that altogether provoke readers to go on their own inner, experiential journey as they read.
The whole range is what I gather up under the umbrella term of “emotional craft”. Third-level emotions are only one way to go about achieving emotional effect on readers, not the only way. Jim Harrison, Julian Barnes, John Cheever (see below) and David Corbett have plenty more to show us.
I seem to be unable to make one point clear: I AM NOT ADVOCATING ANYTHING. (When all else fails, hit the Caps Lock key.)
I am simply pointing out a distinction between two types of experience, both of which, as you say, are “part of a big picture, a whole range of effects.”
By pointing out that readers tend to remember the jolts more than the analysis, I am in no way saying one is superior to the other. I’m simply making an observation, not taking a stand.
I will note that one of the most memorable scenes I’ve ever read is in fact more of an analysis, though ti does rely on a shocking reveal. It comes at the end of John Fowles’ The Collector. Freddy Clegg is analyzing what went wrong with his abduction of Miranda, and reflects on the mistake he made in “aiming too high.” This is part of his plan on who to abduct next. It was so chilling and horrifying (and I was reading this in the calm and quiet of the Adirondack Mountains) that I literally threw the book down on the ground.
This post was simply my attempt to take what I’ve learned from you and put it into my own understanding of a distinction between emotion and feeling–one I believed you would find interesting given your research into the neuroscience of reading. The Damasio chapter I mention in my post is an explication of this distinction in neurological terms. Perhaps that approach would seem less semantic or academic to you. But my intention was simply to identify two different techniques, demonstrate the difference in conveying each on the page, and make a few observations on which ones resonate in what manner and why that might be true.
But we largely agree on the key point: these are two techniques among many at a writer’s disposal to help provide the reader with a moving, memorable experience.
Oh, The Collector is so disturbing! I feel that about everything by Fowles. He disturbs me about the very fact of storytelling itself. The multiple endings of The French Lieutenant’s Woman, the creepy ambiguity of The Magus. Cripe, to clobber us on even an existential level…man. I would have loved to have invited him to our beer gathering, preferably near Lyme Regis.
I remember reading The Magus and feeling mesmerized. And very confused. Hearing it compared to The Tempest didn’t help–I understand The Tempest.
Fowles is a member of what seems to be an extinct tribe: the “mainstream literary” writer. Other members include Somerset Maugham and J.P. Donleavy. That kind of book or writer seems to have vanished–or am I just revealing my ignorance?
I’m a great fan of reversals to heighten emotion in the reader. I’ve mentioned before one of my favorite examples: the moment in the LOTR films when Pippin knocks a suit of armor down a well. After the clanging stops, they all listen intently. Only silence, so–whew!–they relax. Then, slowly, the drums start. That moment of relaxation makes our terror much greater.
I love other techniques too. Reading _H is for Hawk_ by Helen Macdonald moved me in so many ways. Sometimes it was the incredible aptness of an image. In describing her difficulty remembering the days immediately following her father’s death, she says, “The memories are like heavy blocks of glass. I can put them down in different places but they don’t make a story.”
Here my reaction comes from my own experience of grief and the great relief of having it expressed so perfectly (as writer Elizabeth Goudge once said).
Another technique is the clicking into place of several pieces which then resonate against each other. An example is her description of her father’s quirky quest to photograph all the bridges across the Thames. By the end of that section, what bloomed in me was a mix of pleasure, sadness, and satisfaction.
Perhaps these examples also contain your element of surprise, or at least being unexpected. I agree that expectations diminish the actual experience.
I’ve usually distinguished between emotion and feeling a little differently. Considering the contrast between the verbs to emote and to feel, I think of emotion as having something outward or shared about it and feeling as something more inward or personal. Semantics! What fun! I’ll think more about your definitions and look up Damasio.
Thanks, Barbara. I think your rendering of the two nouns into verbs is brilliant. There is something about emotion that seems to be “breaking out,” even though its place of previous confinement is still within. Feeling, by being more analytical, has that element of “staying within” that thought possesses.
I love the blocks of glass image. Thanks for sharing that. I don’t even know the context that well but it’s staying with me.
David, as I read your question about a moment of emotion, one came up, and the emotion was definitely mine. It was the first time I read Maeve Binchy’s “Firefly Summer.” There is a moment at the end of the first half of the book (spoiler alert) when the main character, Kate Ryan, has a catastrophic accident. I remember sitting bolt upright on my sofa when I read that and crying out loud, “No, not Kate!”
I’ve never done that before or since with a book, though I’ve been very invested in many a character. And what Maeve Binchy does in the second half of the book is explore the ramifications of Kate’s accident, not only to her, but also to her family and the entire community.
What’s interesting as I think about this, is that every time I re-read it (and I re-read books a lot), even knowing what will happen, I still wish that it wouldn’t. That world is so vivid, that I imagine what might happen if Kate didn’t walk over to the building site, and how that would change everything.
I’ve read Don’s new book, and re-read parts of it, as well as put it to work in my own work. To be honest, I don’t analyze it much in terms of feeling or emotion. I just dive in.
Thanks for starting a wonderful conversation. I’ll enjoy reading this through the day.
Thanks, Carol (or, as I also know you as: “Doc”):
I realize it may seem as though I’m analyzing the same thing from two different perspective and trying to announce the discovery of a new continent, but what I’m getting at is two distinct moments in a story that reflect different responses on the part of the character, one passive, one active. They need to be dealt with accordingly, and as James Scott Bell noted at the top of this thread, the analysis of emotion comes in a specific type of scene, which I call a “sequel” and he calls a “reaction” scene or beat. In one you get smacked, in the other you walk off the pain. Maybe you also try to figure out what happened, how bad is it, how somebody stronger might respond, why that does or doesn’t help with the pain, and what does it say about you that you’re experiencing all this.
May I ask a question about the “third-level emotions”? I’m not clear on how that develops and how to move ahead. Let’s say I have a scene where a character is feeling intense loneliness. What else does the character feel simultaneously? Isolation. What else? Dependency. So, the third level emotion is dependency and that should be the emotional focus? And you are saying that the writer should objectify, compare, evaluate, and justify on dependency?
With the understanding that I am reflecting on something Don wrote, and thus he might be the better person to answer your question, it’s my understanding that yes, you would dig down to the dependency and analyze that.
For Don’s exact words, you can go to his original post, which I provided the link to above in my piece. Or just go here: https://staging-writerunboxed.kinsta.cloud/2015/06/02/third-level-emotions/
Paula, I’ll answer since the method of probing “third-level emotions” is one I posted here on WU and later elaborate in my book The Emotional Craft of Fiction. To answer, yes, you have the essential technique down.
The idea is to catch readers by surprise by having a character process a feeling that is not at first obvious, but is nevertheless valid. This causes mental evaluation on the reader’s part, which is good and what David is distinguishing as “feeling”, a processing.
In your case, if you write about dependency what happens is that your readers, paradoxically but wonderfully, wind up feeling something of their own…which will probably be loneliness.
I appreciate the distinction you’re making between emotions and feelings. I have often struggled with the task of getting emotion on the page because it seems that every book or story that has really done me in emotionally says very little about emotion on the page itself. It’s more those little shocks, those reversals, those sideways movements and crooked dialogue. It’s Dickinson’s slant rhymes put into prose. And the books that do spend a lot of time on characters’ emotions I often find tedious and condescending, as though the author didn’t think I was smart enough to figure it out. Perhaps it is just that some authors tackle emotions with subtlety and some are too heavy-handed.
I will never forget the way I felt when I read Cheever’s “The Swimmer” for the first time in high school and came to the last paragraph (which I will not spoil for those who have not read it). And then the going back over all of my assumptions about the narrative. Cheever ends the story before there can be any emotional response in his main character, leaving the reader to do all the processing on his own. It’s not on the page except in clues you didn’t pick up on the first time around.
From that day, I have loved short stories that employ a shock or a reversal at the end. I love novelists who attempt to do that with the ends of their chapters (and I try to do it myself when possible).
I think this ability to know where to make the cut, like a good film editor, is vital. In my freelance editing, I run into a lot of writers who lose the impact they could have simply because they went on a sentence or two too long, and they are usually explaining a character’s feelings about something that just happened or something that was just said. I find myself often suggesting lopping off words at the ends of chapters because they’ve dulled the impact of what just happened by explaining how the character reacted when, if they’ve done a good job with the character’s voice thus far, it’s really unnecessary.
In my own writing, I sometimes attempt to put more emotion on the page than I naturally would. When I revise, I inevitably remove those parts. They always feel like telling when what I really want is not to tell the reader how a character felt, or tell them what they should be feeling, but to EVOKE emotion in them, which is not done, in my experience, by being too plain about emotions. That’s what I think Don tries to get us to get at with the third-level emotions. Something unexpected but, in retrospect, natural.
So I guess my greatest task it to find ways to put feelings into words that don’t quite advertise themselves as such. I think it’s those passages that I inevitably end up underlining in books: moments when the author captured a feeling I didn’t even know I had until I read that sentence.
Hi, Erin. I second everything you said. Annie Dillard referred to that propensity to restate something that was already said perfectly well “the old one-two.” And there is indeed an element of telling rather than showing to such excesses, the need to explain what is already perfectly clear.
I think sometimes writers do this to convince the reader (or themselves) that they really, truly understood what they just said, as though the powerful image or phrase might lose impact due to some ambiguity, whereas the exact opposite is true: The ambiguity invites the reader in to experience the moment on his own terms.
I think the power of understatement in writers like Hemingway, Carver, Cheever, Didion and others reveals exactly a respect for the reader that you mention in your comment.
However, I’d point out that Don has expressed more than once that he thinks we’ve gone overboard, with a devotion to understatement so profound that it’s mostly “under” with little “statement.” I don’t want to put words in his mouth, but that’s the general gist I’ve taken away from some of his recent posts. He’s in no way into gushy prose, but as I understand him he believes that what is lacking in much of contemporary fiction is emotion and feeling. He’s trying to swing the pendulum back a bit, but not at the expense of elegance or precision.
Yes, I think you’re right.
Thanks, David, my thinking is slightly different than you expressed it: It’s not that there is a dearth of emotion and feeling in contemporary fiction.
In fact, in many novels there is scads of it. Characters’ emotions and feelings, I mean, in the mistaken belief that if you pile on the interior life of characters then we readers will naturally be swept up and experience tons and tons of emotions and feeling, exactly as those characters do.
That’s not so. Characters feelings per se cause us to feel little. When we as readers go on an experiential journey–emotion, feeling–it is primarily for other reasons. That is a lot of what I’ve been writing about, both in my book and here on WU.
I so agree. A reader’s emotional investment in a character and the character’s story happens only when the reader’s own empathy is ignited for the character and the character’s story.
One of my favorite bits of writing advice comes from Billie Holiday: Don’t Explain.
I believe this discussion is complicated by semantics and the variable elements below:
Time…immediate vs delayed
Reference…character experience vs author’s written words
writer intent- reader response
The emotion-feelings impressions are clearly outlined in the post and comments. Given the wiggle-room of semantics, I do not appreciate any substantive disagreement.
I do wonder at what point post the triggering story event the character’s emotion analysis and assessment assumes the more dispassionate phenomenon of judgement.
I’m not sure these distinctions matter (“matter” another term for semantics rugby) but I find the post and discussion stimulating and anticipate it may influence my writing. Thanks David, Donald, and all the contributors.
PS – hope i get at least 5 credits for this class…a lot of work!
Hey Tom:
Your five credits are in the mail.
I think the timing as to when to analyze and assess after a triggering emotional event depends on where you are in the story, which I realize is about as vague an answer as I could possibly come up with. The fact it often lies in a sequel or reaction scene or beat suggests that one shouldn’t wait too long, because that emotion will wane or even be forgotten once the story moves on.
Agreed – in fact I think the human animal responds at faster than Cray super-computer speeds to emotional triggers. I think responses that are not immediate or near immediate may slip into the realm of judgement (i.e. one’s “processing’ of the emotions/feelings can change them into something more rational than emotion.)
Agree with Barry regards likely over-analysis but hoping there is value in the exercise. I think so.
Thanks for the credits…I’m hoping to obtain at least a gentleman’s “C” for the course.
Interesting topic! And an intellectual conversation about something it would seem can only be experienced by the heart. For me, the places in my fiction that resonate the most emotionally with my readers are the places where I felt it the most as the writer. If I try to overthink it, the emotion seems manufactured on the page. So my philosophy is to get out of the head, and write from the heart. Then clean it up in the editing process.
That said, I agree that surprise is quite effective in generating emotion in the reader. In the book “In Sunlight or in Shadow,” a marvelous collection of short stories based on the paintings of Edward Hopper, Craig Ferguson wrote a terrific piece called “Taking Care of Business.” Spoiler alert here! One of the characters is dying, and he and an old friend go fishing. Their boat is almost capsized by a whale. As the whale swims away, the two men break into laughter, whooping it up, high-fiving (as I recall) then look at each other for a split second. And quick as a flash, the friend pushes the dying man overboard. Stunning and heartbreaking, all at once.
Thanks, Diane.
Now that I think about it, it was that beat before the man pushes his friend overboard that packed such an emotional punch. If it had been written with the two men laughing, then the one pushing the other, it would have seemed inhumane. It was that beat, that moment of looking at each other and all it implied, that made it so heartbreaking.
There are few moment as poignant as the fading away of laughter–and this one feels especially so.
David–
You say at one point that you “may be misunderstanding what Don [Maass] is trying to get across–but my struggling with it testifies to how important I believe it to be.” Isn’t it also possible that your struggle testifies less to the point’s importance than to the respect you have for Maass as a fellow authority on narrative?
Certainly, readers of Writer Unboxed confer on both you and Don, as well as on James Scott Bell the respect you have all earned as experts. But in reading your post, and the comments, I sensed myself experiencing a growing feeling of unease (not to be confused with an emotion of rebellion). I didn’t question your sincerity or anyone else’s, but could not deny a resistance to so much analysis. I finally was sure the fail-safe point had been left behind.
If I step back to do just that–analyze my reaction–I think William Carlos Williams’ summary judgment on meaning in poetry serves well: “No ideas but in things.” That’s why, for me, the most telling features of your post today and the comments are the concrete examples taken from works of fiction. They show how complexity and meaning spread in an instant in the mind from a handful of words placed in context: about a woman who has no hair, or a wife’s less dramatic but equally powerful response to discovering, through the most primitive of the senses (smell) her husband’s infidelity, or Krebs looking at bacon fat congeal, or the clatter of armor down a well.
True, you aren’t writing fiction here, you’re writing or writing about theory. I don’t dismiss or reject theory, but I think it works best when wedded to lots of fully developed, specific examples given adequate context.
You ask for examples, so here’s mine. In Saul Bellow’s novel Herzog, the narrator, an intellectual, is filled with rage at being betrayed by his second wife. She’s gained a restraining order against him, and taken their daughter to her lover’s house. By this point, the reader shares Herzog’s sense of injustice and outrage. Herzog goes to the house with a gun, vaguely half-thinking to kill his wife and her lover, and run off with the child. But by chance he witnesses the lover, once a friend, on his knees in the bathroom, tenderly bathing Herzog’s little girl in the tub. The unruly stew of emotions or feelings or whatever you want to call them is in the moment made so complete as to compel the reader–with Herzog–to let go of all easy responses.
Is this a matter of powerful, sudden emotions, or of more reflective feelings? I would say both, and at the same time.
Thanks, Barry.
Let me be the first to agree with you that reading fiction is far more interesting–and, probably, instructive–than reading ABOUT fiction.
It’s always tempting to provide great examples, then point to them and say, “Do that!” But I’m not sure every student would benefit as fully as we might like. Every now and then we all need to be reminded what to look for so we truly understand not just that something has moved us but why–since, after all, the issue for a writer isn’t merely enjoyment but craft.
That said, I was trying to point out something I thought might be interesting and useful from a technique perspective. If I’ve failed, or belabored the obvious, or become tendentious, the fault lies entirely with me.
Love the Bellow and Williams examples. Though I believe if Yeats’ poetry was whittled down to just those sections where thoughts were confined to objects, his collected poems would constitute a much thinner, and not necessarily better, compilation.
And yet many of the examples cited in this comment thread have been perfect representations of what Eliot meant by the “objective correlative” — congealed bacon fat, for example, and giant blocks of glass.
Thank you, David. I absolutely agree with you when you say that writers need to read as writers, not just as consumers of story, and that the guiding hand of good analysis serves this teaching purpose. But for me, analysis works best when applied in some depth to specific, extended examples. I also agree with you about Williams’ Big Idea being applicable to some, but certainly not to all poetry. And like you, I admire Eliot’s idea of the objective correlative, which is pretty much another way of describing how to evoke emotion in the reader through carefully chosen sensory detail.
In this discussion, what I think may be to some degree missing is a “reminder to self” that, like kinds of poetry and fiction, readers come in all sizes. I prefer to think that any thoughtful reader would respond to Bellow’s scene as I do, but the simple truth is, many would not. That fact of life is what makes writing fiction so challenging.
Thanks again.
Wow, WU was host to Top Chef today, with Corbett, Maass and Bell slapping (and by that, I mean high-fiving) spatulas. “More cumin!” “No, just a sprig of parsley and it’s perfect.” “It’s what’s taken from the table that makes meal most filling.”
This is some deep-state analysis, to use a current phrase. Thank you all for making the effort to parse some subtle stuff. Move over alcohol, this is a job for fiction.
When I thought of some writing that moved me, I think of the last 5 pages or so of Norman Maclean’s “A River Runs Through It,” which swell and ebb and then finally wash over you with deep impact. That wave is all set up by the moving tides that precede those last passages, the sharp family conflicts, the love and the losses. This is the very end, but it is just the crescendo of the pages before:
“It is those we live with and love and should know who elude us.” Now nearly all those I loved and did not understand when I was young are dead, but I still reach out to them.
Of course, now I am too old to be much of a fisherman, and now of course I usually fish the big waters alone, although some friends think I shouldn’t. Like many fly fishermen in western Montana where the summer days are almost Arctic in length, I often do not start fishing until the cool of the evening. Then in the Arctic half-light of the canyon, all existence fades to a being with my soul and memories and the sounds of the Big Blackfoot River and a four-count rhythm and the hope that a fish will rise.
Eventually, all things merge into one, and a river runs through it. The river was cut by the world’s great flood and runs over rocks from the basement of time. On some of the rocks are timeless raindrops. Under the rocks are the words, and some of the words are theirs.
I am haunted by waters.
The Prince of Tides. Don’t ever read that book in public. I couldn’t get through the opening without bursting into tears.
And I once had to remove myself from a Starbucks in a fit of hysterical laughter after rereading the opening of Breakfast of Champions there.
When the story can nail you to the wall like that in the first few pages…
And deliver to the very end.
Bernadette: When I was reading “Nothing to be Frightened of,” Julian Barnes’ contemplation on death and his panic thereof, I kept reading sections out loud to my wife, because it was absolutely the funniest book on death one could ever imagine. One of the funniest books, period, but the subject made it especially surprising and a joy to read.
David,
Thanks to my mom, I teethed on
Evelyn Waugh’s The Loved One.
I haven’t read Nothing to be Frightened of, but thank you, now I have it on my *must read* list.
Prepare to contemplate death. And laugh out loud.
Yes, I laughed through _Nothing to Be Frightened of_ as well. And was deeply moved by _The Sense of an Ending_. I read them together, in that order. I wrote about both on my blog (bmorrison.com/blog) and persuaded my book club to read the latter. Rarely do we all agree about a book, but we did about this one, delighting in the way the pieces fit together, examining its potent themes (history, time, memory), and sharing our intense reactions. Highly recommended. And a good textbook for some of the techniques David Corbett, Don Maass, et al. have been discussing.
Tom: What a wonderful excerpt. Thanks.
David,
Great post about creating emotional response in the reader by separating feeling and emotion. I had never thought of them as separate. But by creating the distinction as one being internal one external or the temporal difference – immediately vs. upon reflection we can try to create in our readers the response that we desire. Though I do agree with some of the comments that in the end the readers response is to some extent governed by their own experiences.
Case and point: I recently read When Breath Becomes Air by Paul Kalanithi. It is a memoir of a dying man -(Spoiler Alert!) the last chapter is written by his wife after he passed. It is one of the most poignant books I’ve read in recent times not only because of the fact that he didn’t live long enough to finish his book, but more so by the fact that I lost my dad after a long battle with illness and everytime we had a high moment, it was followed by really bad and hard days. And that is sort of how Kalanithi’s story was. It felt so real and took me back 20+ years to that time in my life. And he wrote it as he felt it- no censoring (at least it didn’t feel so) and no dramatization. There is this scene in the book where he is on ventilator and IV while cradling his oblivious baby daughter in his arms.
So my point is that the reversals, the honesty of the writing (it was more from the place of feeling I think than emotion, if we were to go by your definition) and my own life experiences have made this book so memorable for me.
Thank you for the very personal comment, Priya. It testifies to the very unique and personal responses each reader brings to a book. As writers we can only write honestly about we know and feel. From there, the book becomes the reader’s.