The HEA Cafe

ESSENTIALS, emotion and hooks, are the topics for Wednesday. EMOTION is absolutely necessary in your submission.

·       Emotion

According to Dwight Swain, readers read for emotion.  We want to have boring and mundane lives but to read exciting, emotion-packed fiction.  If you are skimming, not delving deeply enough into the portrayal of the emotions of your characters and doing that in every scene, you will not be acquired.  If you are writing the easy scenes with your fun and undemanding secondary characters and skipping the hard, emotional, heart-wrenching scenes that nearly destroy your hero and heroine or lift them to heaven, you will not be acquired.

According to Susan Naomi Horton in her classic article “Making Them Tick: Motivation and Emotional Intensity” reprinted by many RWA chapter newsletters in the mid-90s, emotional intensity is necessary to sell and it is created by:

• thematic continuity
• strong motivation
• meaningful conflict (More about these later.)

There are five ways to portray emotion in prose, and here they are from the least effective to the most effective:

• just saying what emotion a character is feeling, (Mary was sad.)
• revealing it through dialogue,  (Hey, Mary, you look sad.)
• revealing it through interior monologue (or the character’s thoughts underlined), (I’m so sad, Mary thought. Does Bill really love me?) Note present tense.
•  through the characters actions, (Mary sat down and cried.)
• and finally the most effective, through the character’s physical reactions to some stimulus. (When Mary saw her boyfriend kiss Thelma, she realized that she’d stopped breathing. She gasped and turned away. Please don’t let them see me.) Oh sorry, I got carried away—just the first 2 sentences!

 Whole books have been written on this topic so this is all that I have to say about it—DO IT.

For more indepth instruction, I recommend highly two online workshops by Margie Lawson, PhD—Empowering Character Emotion and EDITS revision system.   

 Here is the rest of page 1 and page 2 of Dorritt.  (Add the first excerpt from Lesson 1)

Read and pick out all the words, phrases, sentences—and figure out all the ways I have portrayed emotion in this passage. No one is dying here, but there is a lot going on in that lavish parlor.  Of course, since it’s the beginning, I am just setting up the characters and their emotions.  I’m launching them and as the chapter progresses Dorritt will finally hit the high emotional point near the end of the first chapter, the chapter’s climax.

“Dorritt’s tambour embroidery frame and stand sat in front of her at hand level. Placing tiny artful stitches helped her conceal how her heart skipped and jumped. How would it all play out today? Dorritt looked up at Jewell. “Don’t you think love is necessary to marry well?” 

Jewell made a sound of dismissal. “These odd humors, your peculiar comments all come from books. You read too much, Dorritt.  Father always says so and mother agrees.”  Jewell’s high-waisted white dress swayed with her wandering.

“Then it must be so.” The heat of the afternoon was squeezing Dorritt like a sodden tourniquet. She put down her needle and pinched the bridge of her nose.  Over the past months, she had stood back and read the signs of her stepfather’s devious manipulation of facts and circumstances. Did Jewell have any idea what might end? Begin today?

With a handkerchief, Mother blotted her perspiring face. “Please, Jewell, you must sit down and relax, compose yourself.”
“Why hasn’t André come yet?”  Jewell attacked the lush Boston fern which sat on the stand by the French doors. She pulled off a frond and began stripping it.  “He told me he would be asking my father’s permission today.”

There is many a slip between the cup and lip. “Perhaps he has been delayed.” Dorritt set another tiny stitch with the rigid concentration.Would her stepfather manage to work his conjuring once more, bend reality to his selfish and greedy will? And more important, could Dorritt use it in her favor? Her hands stuttered and she had to pull the needle back out.

The sound of an approaching horse drew Jewell to the French doors that led to the garden.  “I can’t see the rider.  He has already dismounted under the porte-cochere.  That doesn’t look like André’s horse,” she added fretfully and tossed the mangled fern frond back into the pot.
 

On to our second point for Wednesday.

·       Hooks—

Readers keep reading for only one reason.  They keep turning pages to find the answer to some question or to find out what the character is hinting at, what is going to happen next. They won’t read on because you write beautiful prose.  And the most discriminating reader of all is the editor you’re hoping will acquire you. Every chapter has a hook at the beginning and a hook at the end.  And so does every scene.  Many people take a lot of time working on their first sentences in an attempt to hook the reader immediately.  Sometimes we can come up with a winning first sentence and sometimes we can’t.  But you will do just as well if you can plant a hook in the first paragraph or two.  An editor will at least read the first couple of paragraphs, so just get a good one in there and then keep it going. Plant little hints that someone has a hidden agenda, something big’s coming, that secrets will be revealed–some time in the upcoming page.  That’s a way to keep the reader (editor) stuck to your pages.

Exercise for emotions and hooks

Go through my first two pages of Dorritt and highlight all the emotions portrayed and all the hooks I’ve planted.  Then look at your first two paragraphs, highlight them for both hooks and emotion, improve them and then post them for comments here. Again, tomorrow I will skim and post one which is well done.  If you would like comments about your posting, be sure to ask for them in your posting.  But only post these on Wednesday. Tomorrow we will be going through two techniques of a professional proposal.

Remember make them laugh, make them cry, make them wonder.