Surprising Emotions: How Will Your Character React?

By David McFarland

 Surprising Emotions

When I was thirteen, I met my grandfather for the first time, and he told me about his life in the Mafia.  “I ran whorehouses and gambling joints in the Midwest, for more than thirty years,” he said, “mainly from Detroit down into Chicago.”  It’s the kind of admission that I would expect a person to shrink from making, rather vile and repugnant.  But you should have seen him.  His back straightened, his chin rose, and his gaze drifted wistfully to the horizon.  He was so proud to have been a mob boss.  

I learned a lot about my grandfather that day, but he spoke little, so the most important things that I learned came from visual cues.  

For writers, learning how to describe the physical manifestations of emotions is vital.  But just as important is knowing when to focus on showing an emotion and what emotion to focus on.  

As a judge for a large writing contest, I frequently read manuscripts where new authors spend a great deal of time giving me the physical cues of emotions that we rather all expect.  Thus, the descriptions can feel boring and over-wrought, even if they’re honest.

You have to decide when to focus.

You see, if your character is facing a charging rhino, your reader will expect that he’s scared.  In fact, if you depict the charge well, the reader will actually feel some fear.  His adrenaline will surge, his heart will beat faster, his muscles will tighten, blood will rush to his brain, his mouth will dry.  The physical manifestations won’t be as strong as when you actually live through the incident, but the echoes will be there.

So I may not need to focus on my protagonists emotions too much in that circumstance.  But when a character has a surprising reaction to an incident, then it becomes imperative to document what’s happening. 

Surprising reactions can be one of three kinds.

Under-reaction.  Let’s go back to our charging rhino.  What if, instead of having my character turn tail and run, as all of his companions do, he only becomes slightly discomposed?  It may be a signal he has faced death before and knows exactly what to do, or that he’s just the kind of person who loves to face a challenge.  So as an author, I might want to spend a bit of extra time and effort showing his reaction.

Over-reaction can also be fun.  Let’s imagine that our character is a seasoned big-game hunter at the turn of the twentieth century.  He’s Teddy Roosevelt, a war hero, with an elephant gun.  A rhino charges.  The other hunters in the party expect him to stand boldly in the rhino’s path, take careful aim, and bring the behemoth down.  Instead, Teddy takes one look, his eyes roll back in his head, and he faints.  That kind of over-reaction—the fluttering eyes, the stricken expression, even his slow fall to the ground—might be worth a good page or two.

Wrong Reactions.  Let’s face it, sometimes characters don’t react to a situation the way that we think that they should.  For example, evidence indicates that one tribe of ancient Neanderthals both ate woolly rhinos—and worshipped them.  To kill one, the hunter had to face it as it charged, then hurl a spear at point-blank range as he dodged aside. 

So how would such a Neanderthal react to such a charge?  Imagine that his children are hiding in a cave.  His pregnant wife is hungry, and god has come to give himself.  An eager hunter might react to the charge with tears of joy.  He might race toward his prey singing songs of thankfulness.  And once again, I want that account to be drawn to graceful perfection.

In short, when you’re writing character emotions, don’t report every sundry emotion—surprise us, both with the type of emotion you’re portraying and with your loquaciousness at portraying it!

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