“Just Right” Emotional Appeal 2.0: Goldilocks and the Three unBearables
By Kristin Hacken South | March 28, 2024 |
Last month I mused on possible definitions of melodrama and why it’s such a dirty word. I asked you to comment on it and y’all came through. Thank you! Some thoughts on your replies:
Melodrama is not a synonym for high emotion. If anything, melodrama is its counterfeit. Melodrama plunks out a single emotional note and insists we sing along. Emotionally resonant literature, by contrast, offers a symphony in which sensitive listeners can identify a range of melodies, harmonies, and motifs, and can choose which ones to follow and how to hum along.
Likewise, apathy is not a synonym for reticence. Some genres expect more muted or indirect access to emotion than others, but all fiction requires an appeal to feeling of one sort or another. A book that leaves its readers with an emotional flatline is like a car without a working engine: it fails to transport anyone.
Both extremes reflect a lack of balance. This imbalance can manifest as (1) character responses that don’t align with what causes them, (2) a surfeit or lack of misfortune that flattens the narrative arc, or (3) emotions that are not shared by the reader. If Goldilocks represents a “just right” medium, then these extremes are her three [un]Bear[able]s.
The first unBearable: too big or too small
The first unBearable is a character reaction that is too large or too small or otherwise inappropriate. Goldilocks has the antidote: write characters with responses that match their experiences.
Parents faced with disciplining their teenagers (or toddlers!) are often told that the punishment should fit the crime. A teenager grounded for a month for neglecting to rinse her plate will not respond with a desire to do the dishes. One who wrecks the family car and only loses a week of allowance will not be deterred from reckless driving. The lesson for parents as much as for authors of fiction is to avoid over- and under-reaction.
When characters experience a catastrophe or windfall or death or reunion, they should respond in the same way as a real person of their kind would do, with devastation, joy, hopelessness, a new spring in the step. Readers do not want to sit with a story that displays false or missing responses.
By contrast, emotional honesty engenders trust. When I first read the third book of the Hunger Games trilogy, I hated the ending. Katniss, our ever-successful protagonist, whom we’d followed for hundreds of pages over three books, did not end up as a peaceful, wise leader. Instead, all that she had experienced finally broke her.
Suzanne Collins chose honesty over false comfort: this is how people actually respond to trauma. This is how dictatorships maintain their hold. This is what happens to a culture that glorifies violence and disregards poverty. Even the best of us can fall apart, when we experience loss after loss. I did hate this ending, but now I respect its author for telling a hard truth, even if I wish the truth were different. Suzanne Collins gets it just right.
The second unBearable: too hard or too soft
The second unBearable is a story that pushes too many feelings at a reader too quickly, or that doesn’t evoke emotion at all. Goldilocks would create a storyline that arcs between highs and lows, with enough pauses that readers won’t get whiplash or become too saturated to care.
Moment after moment of big drama and emotion in a row can cheapen all of them. The old joke goes that if you play a country song backward, you get your truck back, your dog back, your job back, your house back, and/or your wife back. It should come as no surprise that non-fans often ridicule country music. After a while, all those undifferentiated tragedies blend into background noise.
Contrast that with the balance Shakespeare accomplishes by sprinkling scenes of humor into his tragedies. Drunken doormen in Macbeth, a pompous old windbag in Hamlet, and Mercutio’s deathbed pun all provoke laughter. The surprise of a humorous moment heightens the tragedy by highlighting the great distance from one to the other.
Another fix is to slow a scene down in order to let the emotional impact sink in. In one of my favorite reads, The Once and Future Witches, Alix E. Harrow describes a dramatic childbirth scene. In this excerpt, the mother-to-be has come close to death but her sisters step in to help:
Agnes feels that will thrumming beneath her breastbone, a rush of desire. She wants to live. She wants to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with her sisters and shout a new story into the dark. She wants to look into her daughter’s eyes and see Juniper’s wildness and Bella’s wisdom, the wheel of stars and the snap of flames…
Agnes is aware that she is crying and that the tears are hissing against her skin. She is aware that the pain is an animal that has slipped its leash, biting and thrashing deep inside her, and that it carries her daughter closer.
That what they are doing–binding three lives together, holding a woman to life even while her pulse stutters and jolts–is an impossible reckless thing that only her dumbshit sister would think of, and that they are doing it anyway. Because she doesn’t want to die and they refuse to let her.
Harrow deepens the impact by moving seamlessly between internal states and outward observations, and by combining them in surprising ways and with vivid language. She takes ten pages to closely observe each new layer of the event, folding memories and desires and in-the-moment observations between each layer. In my opinion, she gets it just right.
The third unBearable: too hot or too cold
The first two forms of imbalance create the third, a reader response that the writer did not intend. A “too hot” reader reacts with a strong but unintended emotion; a “too cold” reader couldn’t care less. To avoid this third unBearable, a reader response that does not match the writer’s intentions, prop open a window instead of flinging the barn doors wide. Invite readers to have a response commensurate with—though possibly not the same as—the character’s experience.
I saw a television commercial recently in which a woman stands in a stiff me-against-the-world posture and announces the injustice in her cell phone plan. As she metaphorically shakes her fist at the heavens, her face is taut with distress. The lighting in the room turns dark and her voice rings with agony. Her friends assure her that if she switches to the right phone carrier, all will be well. I laugh when I see this ad, as I am meant to do. Her overblown reaction does not fit the circumstance.
Laughter is a mismatched backfiring if a story is meant to be taken seriously. Humorists understand and make deliberate use of this disconnect. Comedy teaches us that sad or dramatic situations do not automatically compel a reader to feel what a character is feeling. It’s one reason slapstick works.
We need a clue to how we are supposed to feel, but only a clue.
I once found myself crying as a friend related the miracle of her great-aunt receiving a wig, as if manna from heaven, after she prayed for it with abundant faith. Yes, Reader, I cried over a wig. The narrator made me care about the character in her story enough to want what she wanted, to understand her stakes in getting it, and to see the sheer impossibility of it happening. And then it did. Cue the relief, the celebration, the joy. Over a wig.
But was my reaction really about a wig? What if this aunt had cancer and was about to see a long-lost family member? What if she had weeks or months to live, but didn’t want her bald head to proclaim this fact as a first impression after years apart? To her, the wig might represent dignity, the complexity of past relationships, and clinging to life.
Donald Maass, the great observer and coach of emotionally resonant fiction, encourages this sort of bait-and-switch with an appeal to what he calls third level emotions. (Run, do not walk, to read his essay about it.) As I have applied it—not necessarily exactly as he meant it—this means identifying the primary, expected emotion (“I’m sad that I’m dying of cancer”), then going deeper to find a second feeling (“I’m excited and nervous to reconnect with someone I haven’t seen in years”). Go one more level back (“I sure would like to talk with him for a while before I reveal that I’m dying”) and write from here. The wig is now a physical manifestation of complex feelings. Her small victory reflects much deeper stakes.
Evoking but not forcing the feels is, to me, the most difficult of these three emotion-balancing techniques. It requires sensitive observation of real emotions as they occur in the wild and the skill to dehydrate them and tuck them inside the traveling pouch of a book. But if we succeed—when we succeed—it feels just right.
Accurately gauging and writing emotion is hard. How do you make it work in your writing? Whose writing do you admire in this regard?
Kristin Hacken South is happiest on the days that she works on her fiction, which to date has included a few short stories, two middle grade detective stories, and two adult novels. She lives in Atlanta, with three independent book stores within walking distance of her house. Her idea of a good time is still a day in the desert with a trowel in one hand and a notebook in the other.
[coffee]
“Evoking but not forcing the feels…” Yes. I’m going to re-read that essay, and to re-read yours. Thanks!
It sounds good, right? If only figuring out how to do it were easier…
Sometime when my own emotions are high…I’m having a bad day…time to write. Time to pour out whatever it is I am feeling. Yes, I have to go back. Yes, sometimes what I have written is so PURE emotion, that it will not work anywhere. But sometimes..my humanity belongs on the page. Thanks for your post.
That’s another aspect of writing to consider, for sure. As you mentioned, I also often find that when I’m writing from a strong emotional place, the words are too on-the-nose for other readers to see. But that’s not always the point of writing, is it? Writing therapy is real!
Hey Kristin — The wisdom of the first three paragraphs alone was enough for an entire day of musing and connection to my own work. You go on to really aid my exploration with your own. I appreciate your mention of Collins, and the emotional payoff of the overarching story of a series.
You also allude to a willingness to step back and consider a story like that over time, and even to allow for the author’s intention in your consideration. In today’s reading environment, I rarely hear of that sort of patient appraisal. But, for me, those are the most meaningful and impactful stories. I’m less inclined to find stories that provide a faster dose of “feel good” emotion to be memorable (even if it doesn’t feel like melodrama at the time). When story elements don’t play out as I immediately hope they will, I try to keep myself in check, appeal to my own patience. I just may be in for a memorable experience–one that will provide deeper understanding and even meaning to my life.
Thanks, as always, for the inspiration to deeper thinking.
To be clear, my detached writerly self can admire Collins’s wisdom while still hating the story’s ending. :(
It raises another question about the purpose and role of fiction. Are we obligated to focus on the worst possible outcomes, just because they’re one truth? I’d like to think we could also write with the intention of providing hope. Sometimes I’d rather be soothed than reminded of how bad the world can get. A desire to show readers a higher ideal isn’t the same as denying reality.
But I suppose this discussion proves your point: I wouldn’t remember and discuss that book if it hadn’t shaken me so thoroughly!
Absolutely a wonderful prompt to further discussion. I think the intention of providing hope is among the most worthy there can be for pursuing this crazy-making gig. And, to be clear, I did not love the ending of Mockingjay, either. But I found myself appreciating it as a memorable experience while reading your wonderful piece today. Thanks again!
We humans can react so differently to the same situation. (I know this because I will blow up about something that my husband barely even notices.) Meryl Streep in that The Dingo ate my Baby movie portrayed a true life woman who didn’t cry enough for the public to believe she was innocent of her child’s death. It’s not a simple matter to write the Just Right emotion because there is no Just Right in general. There’s a Just Right Mostly for that character, but then, people are unpredictable. I tend to be emotional and anxious, but turns out in emergency situations I’m calm and decisive. Who knew? Characters need to surprise us and themselves too, to be true to life.
So who decides if the emotions portrayed are too big or too small for the event? I think readers decide. Readers are always judging. They judge the characters and they judge the author at the same time. Some authors get the readers to judge themselves, too. Gillian Flynn in Gone Girl especially, is great at that.
Thanks for your thoughtful post that has me thinking today.
I actually find this fact of varying tastes quite comforting! There is such a spectrum of what people want in a book that surely, I tell myself, there must be readers out there who’d like the kind of things I write. Hope springs eternal, eh?
Such an important topic, thank you!! I would add that one of the hardest things for us, as writers, can be a willingness to trust the reader to “get it” and “feel it” without needing to proclaim “Big Emotion Right Here!!!”
Of course, it’s often ourselves that we don’t trust, rather than the reader :-) It’s a risk to truly embrace, and act on, the adage that less is usually more. One thing that helps me is to remember that my aim, as a writer, is not just to show a character “feeling something.” It’s to make the reader feel something.
Thanks again for your essay, so well articulated!
You’ve identified exactly the hard part that I’m trying to learn how to address! It’s so much easier to identify the problem than to fix it. It’s why I appreciate the very concrete, specific exercises that Donald Maass provides in his books and talks.
True confessions time: I read your latest and was shocked by the ending. So you definitely made at least one reader feel something!
Oh my gosh! I hope you were “shocked” in a good way—that is, I hope the ending hit that Both/And place where we feel “I didn’t see that coming” and “Well, of course! It had to be exactly that.” For me, those are the stories that linger … xoxo
I’m so glad you’re writing regular posts for Writer Unboxed, Kristin! Your “lessons shared” always resonate, and I’ve come away with some terrific ideas to apply to my novels. Thank you!
I’m glad, too, that you brought up Donald Maass’ third-level emotions. I was actually thinking about that as I was reading your post–specifically the challenge of making character emotions and reactions BELIEVABLE when they aren’t the emotions that readers expect (or are much deeper/less superficial than what they expect–e.g., anger and betrayal instead of sorrow at a loved one’s death). I’d love to read some hands-on tips with examples about how to do that effectively in a scene. Perhaps a topic for a future post? (Anyone?)
I’d like to read that post too! Sadly, I think it’s like every other part of writing: the right way to create believable emotions will vary from book to book and writer to writer.
Some universals probably do apply, though: use specific detail. Build up to it. Keep it in character. And maybe trust in the alchemy of impersonal craft and personal vulnerability. (Says the woman who is terrified she’ll never actually figure it out…)
https://staging-writerunboxed.kinsta.cloud/2015/06/02/third-level-emotions/
This one’s a keeper, Kristin. Great food for deep thoughts.
Thank you, Beth!
“sensitive observation of real emotions as they occur in the wild” – love this phrase. And capturing the emotions that make you cry over a wig. As a musician, I also appreciate the symphony metaphor, so I’ll pursue that one: orchestra conductors spend a lot of time studying various aspects of technique, learning how to manipulate their batons. But ultimately, it’s about knowing what you really want the music to sound like. If you don’t know that, all the stick technique in the world won’t produce a moving performance. But if you do feel inside what you believe the music is meant to evoke, you’ll figure out how to move your body in a way that invites the musicians to produce the phrases, swells, and colors that will bring those emotions to your audience. As writers, are we “conducting” our readers? – figuring out how to lean into those notes that set their hearts vibrating?
I will stop before this metaphor gets completely out of control – but thank you, Kristin, for a lovely and thought-provoking piece!
I love your metaphor! Thank you for extending it. You make a good point that an artist needs to apply both technique and deep understanding of what they are trying to accomplish with it.
I love both Julia’s comment and Kristin’s piece as well! thank you.