Blogger: Etta Wilson
Location: Books & Such Nashville Office
Weather: Still rainy
If you’ve been reading the Books & Such blog posts this week, you’ve noticed that we’re exploring the senses of perception and their use in our writing. We’ve had some conversation about how we can use color (the sense of sight), about odor (the sense of smell), and about food (the sense of taste). Recalling human physiology, that leaves the senses of hearing and feeling. At this point, I’m foregoing hearing, because I think “feeling” may be one that has more traps for us as writers. In fact, we probably use “feeling” in the internal sense rather than the kinetic sensory sense.
For years, we’ve heard the maxim, “Show, don’t tell” and it’s a good one. It’s just hard to keep in mind and do when writing. Not only do we have to imagine an action or words of dialog that convey what the character feels, we have to be sure that what we imagine is known well enough across the reading culture to avoid misunderstanding. This may be done by giving the response several different times in terms of the other senses.
Ursula LeGuin (National Book Award and Newbery Honor winner) is so good at this. In her 2004 YA novel Gifts, one of the main characters is a boy who denied his eyesight, learned to be blind because he feared his anger toward his father. It’s a complicated psychological story, but LeGuin tells it by actions and words and a minimum of character introspection. Near the end, as the character grows in understanding, he says on page 201: “Grieving, like being blind, is a strange business; you have to learn how to do it.” LeGuin equated the feeling of great loss to the sensory loss of sight.
Two things about using feeling in a story came clear to me from this: You use the other senses to describe the character’s feeling, and you can write more directly about feeling at a later point in the story after the reader is engaged with the character.
There is certainly a lot more to be said about feeling in fiction writing, and I’d love to hear it (she said with feeling).
Hmmm…show, don’t tell.
This is one of those pieces of writing advice that is so difficult to grasp.
I think agents, editors and other writers could write about how to “show” feeling (or other senses) until their fingers fall off. I really think, however, the best way to grasp the concept of how to show — not tell — feelings (or other senses) effectively is through osmosis. New writers should read books by a variety of authors and absorb what the pros are doing to make them so successful.
Tulafel, you’ve hit it on the head–the best way to learn to write effectively is be a voracious reader of a variety of authors. I’ve been reminded of this in the last few days as we have been unloading and loading some bookshelves.
Etta
I love to incorporate touch in my stories, it probably comes from my stint as an Occupational Therapy Assistant when I was younger. I think that training put me more in touch (pardon the pun) with the mechanism of feeling. I love your posts, they are very encouraging.God Bless,
Suzy
When I am teaching writing, i like to have my students write a paragraph that shows emotion in what the character does or says, physiological response, internal thoughts, anything they like–EXCEPT the name of the emotion or any related words. Then the group tries to guess the emotion. It usually goes over quite well.
Great exercise, LeAnne. I’d like to sit in on one of these classes.
Etta