Advanced Brilliant Writing: Make Your Plots Wider and Your Characters Deeper (Go! Write Something Brilliant) (11 page)

The reader is deeper into the character’s skin because they aren’t told what emotion to equate with the sense, but rather are left to experience the sense and apply their own experience and emotions to it. We, as the reader, have to dig around our hearts to decide what emotions that might be, and when we find it, we understand on that heart-level what the character is going through. You
know
I felt sorry for that woman when she began her pre-labor breathing.

This is where a lot of authors stop. They have connected with their readers hearts, made them feel what their characters feel, and that’s their goal.

But there is another layer, one that goes even deeper, one that makes us connect with the character, an almost spiritual, definitely life-changing connection.

And that layer is called
Soul-Deep
.
It’s the use of Action, Metaphor, and other Characters to convey emotions.
It’s the heart of showing.

Let’s look at Darla again: Darla had a book
. The How to Get over Your Fear of Flying
book. She takes it out. Clutches it herself, and then almost frantically shoves it back into the bag. Then, after wiping her hands on her pants, breathing out a few times, staring out the window, she grabs it again, and this time opens it, tearing off the highlighter top with her teeth and going to town, marking up the book, as if it holds the key to surviving the next two hours. The book is hope and promise and victory and I saw in my author’s mind’s eye a two-year-old clutching his blanket, trembling and alone in the middle of the night in his crib.

Don’t you feel sorry for her?

Gary Smalley calls the technique of communication creating a “word picture”—and suggests that married couples use it as they communicate soul-deep feelings. When people can connect to a word picture, they can connect to the emotions we are trying to covey. For authors, if they can connect to a word picture, then they can connect to that emotion and all the different hues of that emotion. Darla’s teddy bear book communicates fear, and desperation, and the need for salvation, as well as the promise that she could overcome her fear of flying. We, the reader, understand all those hues, and instead of being locked inside one emotion, we’re allowed to feel the entire array.

It’s this connection to your character that will glue your reader to the page. If I were to write this scene in Darla’s POV, using this metaphor, it might look like this:

She didn’t need the book. Didn’t need . . . okay, maybe she’d just take it out and hold it. She didn’t want it get lost, maybe left behind. She pressed it to her chest, stared out the window at the airplanes, like birds—safer than cars, the book said—moving around the shiny tarmac. Clear blue skies. A perfect day for flying.

She put the book back in the bag. Shoved it deep. Zipped up the bag. Really, it wasn’t like it was a security blanket, or that she was a toddler. Across from her, a woman with an iPod looked away—Darla knew she’d been staring.

She blew out a breath. Rubbed her greasy palms on her pants. Maybe she should call her father—again. A voice came over the loudspeaker. She tried to listen, but lost the first half of the announcement. What if it if was her flight, what if she was left—

She unzipped the pack and wrestled out the book. Opened it. There—“Preboarding, what to expect at the gate.”

Had she read that chapter? She pulled out the highlighter, held the cap in her mouth and began to underline. Probably she’d just keep the book out.

In that scene, I never mention that she’s afraid. But the reader sees it in her greasy palms, and breathing (there’s the touch the heart layer) but most of all, the reader gets into her skin through the symbolism and action of needing the book like a security blanket. See, we, the reader, don’t just feel her pain in our hearts, we’ve been there, wanting to defeat something, and not able to. We’ve now connected with her on a spiritual level, one of deep understanding, because we understand the metaphor.

And we understand the defeat when the fear wins.

Take a break and walk over to your bookshelf. Open a story that has touched you and take out your highlighter. (Four highlighters of different colors would be best!) Now, open the book and see if you can identify the four layers of the story, and when they’re used.

Go ahead and take some notes:

• Examples of Naming the Emotion:
  
• Examples of emotional layering Just Under the Skin:
  
• Writing that Touches the Heart:
  
• Setting, Action and Metaphor that reveals the layering that is
  Soul-Deep
  .
  

Building the Soul-Deep Layer into a scene

First, I want to start out with a challenge I deliver to all my Book Therapy clients: Write the scene without naming the Main Emotion of your character.

What? Yes—if you can convey the emotion without naming it, and draw your reader deep into the skin of your character through the use of a metaphor, then you have written a story that will linger with your reader. You’ve allowed them to experience the story with your character.

So, if I can’t name that emotion, how do I work it into a scene? You put emotion in a scene through the use of
Setting, Characterization
and
Action.

Setting:
Consider this little passage from my book
Finding Stefanie

Gideon turned off the highway and headed west. He glanced at the gas gauge, gripped the wheel of the old Impala wagon he’d boosted, and scanned the darkening land for shelter. He supposed they could sleep in the car, but the way the wind had kicked up, throwing frozen tumbleweeds across the road, he’d prefer shelter. And a fire. And something nourishing in their stomachs.

At least for Haley. . . He glanced in the rearview mirror at the way she curled into a tiny grubby ball inside a red Goodwill winter jacket two sizes too large for her. One of her pigtails had fallen out, lending her a forlorn, lopsided look. And her eyes screamed hunger. But she didn’t speak. Hadn’t spoken one word since they left the shelter.

The tires moaned against the highway pavement, like the sound of a siren in their wake.

How do you feel about their situation? Desperate? Fearful? The reader doesn’t know it yet, but Gideon has kidnapped his two sisters from a child shelter. I never say he is desperate or on the run, but I convey it in the description. Wind kicking up, throwing tumbleweeds, a grubby Goodwill jacket, pigtails falling out. Eyes screaming hunger.

And then I interject a little metaphor, using sound to convey his fear that someone might be following him.

Here’s another excerpt from later in the scene:

He passed miles of barbed wire fencing and dirt driveways that led to tiny box homes with feeble light showing from the windows. He guessed the black humps against the darkening horizon had to be cows or maybe bulls. Here and there the tattered outline of trees edged a hill, boulders lumping in washes.

He would have missed the house entirely if it hadn’t been for Macey, who spotted the
For Sale
sign tangled in the barbed wire fence. She saw it flash against the headlights and said simply, “Hey.”

Do you feel his sense of aloneness, that he’s driving deeper into his desperation? Feeble light, black humps, tattered, edged . . . all these words give a sense of uneasiness to the scene. And then, I insert the For Sale sign, tangled in the fence, showing the house unwanted, uncared for. The perfect place for Gideon and his sisters who feel the same way.

Why do we get scared when a character walks down a creepy basement? We don’t even need to know that she’s afraid (in fact, sometimes we’re more afraid than she is). It’s the setting that makes us afraid.

Book Therapist Trick:

1. Pick verbs that convey the emotion you’re trying to establish. Kicking, screaming, throwing—all can convey as sense of panic, or doom, or fear.
   
2. Use specific and revealing nouns when describing a scene. Specific nouns carry emotion. Tumbleweeds, a Goodwill jacket, barbed wire.
   
3. Find one metaphor that you can interject into the scene that captures both the feeling of the scene and the emotion you want to convey.
   

Here’s what I do—
I write the scene. Then I go through and change the verbs to match the mood. I delete any verbs that aren’t focused and any nouns that aren’t conveying the emotions in the scene. Then, I look around and find one metaphor from the scene that I can apply to evoke the emotion of the scene.

Let’s take Darla on the plane. How do we convey how she feels about entering the airplane? We might use the stuffy, conditioned air and turn it into a metaphor of noxious gas poisoning her as she walks on to the plane. Or, the seat belt pinning her to the seat. Maybe we could see a metaphor in the rows and rows of fellow victims, all surrendering their lives into the hands of an unseen protector, not unlike worshippers kneeling before an altar. Then the door closes, forever enclosing them inside, like a tomb.

I don’t know about you, but with those kinds of verbs, nouns and metaphors, I want to run down the aisle screaming, and make them open the door!

Use your setting and description to convey emotions through verbs, nouns and metaphors.

Characterization:
Use other characters to build emotion into a scene. Sometimes, we can project the emotion of a character onto another character, almost like a mirror. Other times, we can juxtapose it. This is called
Character Comparison.

This is from a scene later in
Finding Stefanie
, when she happens upon Macey, Gideon’s sister. Stefanie is feeling out of place in her own life.

His sister leaned against the truck, arms folded, face dirty. She had black hair—so black that Stefanie knew it had to come from a bottle—and a number of piercings up her ears and one over her eye. Whatever makeup she’d once worn, it had trailed down her face, or maybe that was simply soot. She wore a black shirt under her jacket and a pair of black jeans that looked like she’d painted them on.

Stefanie had had a pair of jeans that fit like that once. Caused her more trouble than she wanted to remember.

Stefanie takes a look at Macey, and a part of her really understands her. Macey
mirrors
her messy, even angry, emotions. Not only that, but Stefanie feels compassion for her, which will play into why, later, she offers Gideon and his sisters a home.

Let’s go back to Darla and show her emotions through a
juxtaposed Character Comparison.

Across from her, a woman’s sandaled foot tapped to unheard music, her eyes closed, her hand draped over her carry-on bag. In her other hand she held an empty coffee cup from Starbucks, as if she’d started her morning early. Sure, fatigue pressed into the wrinkles of her dress pants, flattened her blonde hair. However, she hadn’t a hint of sweat, nor even a crease on her forehead as the gate attendant announced their flight. Indeed, in moments she’d bounded into line, handing over her ticket, wearing an expression that suggested she’d finish her nap in-flight. A regular Amelia Earhart.

Darla sees a calm, if not tired, passenger. Hopefully you can hear some envy from Darla, some wistfulness that she might be that calm, even accustomed to flying.

Character Comparison is just a matter of letting your character see someone who embodies the same or opposite emotion as your character, and letting them describe them in their voice, adding inflection, opinion, and using strong verbs and nouns to convey that emotion.

Book Therapist Trick: Look around the scene
. Who do you have in the scene who might have been there, done that, in terms of your character’s emotions. What do they look like now? Or is there someone your character would like to emulate? Or even, is there someone your character would never want to be?

Now, describe them, again using those emotion-packed verbs and specific nouns, and throw in a metaphor.

Action
is one of the strongest ways to creating that emotional soul-deep connection.

I love the movie
P.S. I Love You
. There is a wonderful scene right after her husband’s funeral where the heroine is alone at home with her grief. We know she’s sad, but when she climbs in bed and calls his cell phone and listens to his voice mail message over and over and over, it’s heart-wrenching. She says nothing, but it’s powerful.

This is a scene from
Taming Rafe
, book two in the Noble Legacy. It takes place right after he’s discovered that Kitty—a girl he’s come to love—is engaged to someone else.

Rafe slammed his way upstairs, banged open his bedroom door. The entire house shook. Crossing the room, he ripped his Bobby Russell and Lane Frost posters off the wall and grabbed the box of videotapes he’d dug out for Kitty. He took his trophies, his ribbons, his two championship buckles, and the scrapbook he’d kept for himself over the years and shoved them into his PBR duffel bag. Then he threw them all over his shoulder and stormed back downstairs.

He took the back roads to the burial mound, driving as fast as he could without dropping one of the axles. He stopped at the bottom of the hill, lugged out the bag, and muscled himself up the hill.

He threw sticks and twigs together, and taking a lighter he’d found in Piper’s glove compartment, he knelt and lit a blaze.

The flame crackled as it devoured the sticks, then the kindling, and finally the larger pieces of wood he added for fuel. The flame showed no distinction between the fragile and the hearty, biting into the wood with tongues of orange, red, and yellow.

Rafe opened the duffel. Instead of dumping the entire thing on the flames, he pulled the items out one by one. His posters. They burned in a second, curling into tight balls. The ribbons, which sent out an acrid odor. The scrapbook. The fire started on the edges, burning away the accomplishments, the defeats. Then the tapes. The smell of plastic burning made his eyes water and sent black smoke into the now bruised sky. The trophies would take hours to fully burn, but their plastic mounts deformed and caved in on themselves immediately. Finally, the buckles. He dropped both of them into the flames.