The AmWritingFantasy Podcast: Episode 47 – Learn the Secrets to Showing Emotion in Characters (with author, editor and writing coach, C.S. Lakin)

Editor and writing coach C.S. Lakin joins the Am Writing Fantasy podcast.

She shares great insights as to how an author can master the emotional craft of fiction.

Readers want to feel with the character.

Readers read to not only be entertained, but also to have the characters and the story affect them. 

Episode 47 of the Am Writing Fantasy podcast is full of advice and useful writing tips.

Here's the links mentioned in the episode:

https://www.livewritethrive.com/ 

https://cslakin.teachable.com/p/emotional-mastery-for-fiction-writers/ 

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Read the full transcript below.

(Please note that it's automatically generated and while the AI is super cool, it isn't perfect. There may be misspellings or incorrect words on occasion).

Narrator (2s): You're listening to the amwritingfantasy podcast. In today's publishing landscape, you can reach fans all over the world. Query letters are a thing of the past. You don't even need in literary agent. There is nothing standing in the way of making a living from writing join to best selling authors who have self-published more than 20 books between them. Now onto the show with your hosts, Autumn Birt and Jesper Schmidt.

Jesper (30s): Hello. I am Jesper. And this is episode 47 of the amwritingfantasy podcast. And today I'm joined by Susanne Lakin, who knows some of the secrets about showing emotion in characters in order to evoke emotions in the reader. And I know that you are a novelist, a copy editor, writing coats, and you also teach workshops on the writing craft. So welcome to the amwritingfantasy podcast.

Susanne (57s): Thank you for having me.

Jesper (60s): I did a bit of stalking on the internet and I saw that, I saw that you live in California near San Francisco, but maybe you can tell us just a bit more about yourself.

Susanne (1m 13s): Uh, sure. Yeah. I live South of San Francisco in California. Um, and I'm born and raised in California, but, uh, I've been writing pretty much my whole life. I was raised by a mother who was a top television screenwriter and then, um, my brother also went into that profession. So I am was around a lot of filming and reading scripts and movies and all that kind of stuff. So my early introduction, aside from reading books on my own was to read a lot of screenplays.

So I have a different type of attitude or approach toward fiction writing sometimes than others because I think very cinematically and I think in terms of camera shots and, um, just a very cinematic, uh, visualization of my scenes and I tried to teach that method through a lot of my books and my blog posts. Um, I think the emotion topic is one that's really important. It's not discussed much. There isn't much out there. When I started researching online about that, I wanted to put something together because I feel of all the things that are tied in with reading and writing is the idea that we have an emotional response to what we read.

And so all my life I've been reading and writing and loving books and wanting to figure out how I can move readers with my writing. So as far as, you know, that's kind of my whole upbringing in terms of my approach to writing and reading. Um, I also, I'm married, I have a couple of grown kids. Uh, I have a couple of grandkids actually and I have a dog who is old and needs a lot of attention, big that lab and I have a few cats. Um, I love to backpack and snowboard. I'm real outdoorsy kind of person.

Um, I also am the, uh, yeah, I was going to say I'm also the fiction coordinator for the prestigious San Francisco writer's conference, which is a top writers conference in America. So I put that whole thing together every year and that's super fun.

Jesper (3m 17s): Oh yeah. Cool. Yeah, it was funny you were talking about am at the out outdoorsy type of person and whatnot because autumn, my cohost TAC that she does a lot of, uh, of traveling around as well and seeing nature and all that. So, uh, that's something I'm sometimes quite envious when I see her pictures. You post on Facebook because I live in Denmark and he is just flat. We don't have any mountains. Only nice, nice nature like that. So yeah, it, there's some very beautiful areas around the, in the U S

Susanne (3m 47s): yeah, I would think that Denmark would have some beautiful places too. I haven't been there, but I would love to go. Uh, I don't get out of my cage very often. So, um, you know, maybe one day I'll get over there when, you know, one thing about writing fantasy too, since you know, this is what your podcast is about, I really think it's important for writers to get out in nature and to just sort of explore the world with wonder because all the fantasy writing fantasy and creating fantasy worlds requires so much imagination and an immersion of our senses that I think sometimes if we just locked up in an office space or bedroom or wherever we work all the time, it's really hard for us to get in touch with that wonder and the imagination, you know, that comes from exploring the world outside.

So that's just a thought that kind of popped into my head. But I know that for me, a lot of the inspiration for my fantasy books came from my time in nature, especially in the woods, like being alone in the woods, backpacking, um, grew up on fairy tales, which many of them were set in your part of the world in Europe. Uh, you know, where most of the fairy tales are about little cottages in the woods and there's like magic woods. And so because I'm a fairy tale writer, I really need to get into nature and feel that experience at the smells, the sounds, all of that.

Jesper (5m 7s): Yeah. Yeah. There's also something about just the fact that when you're out outside, you know, moving, moving around and of course some, some good scenery will help but, but just the, just uh, the fact that you're walking about and get some wind in your face and whatnot, that that actually helps them on creativity as well. In my, in my view, yes. Yeah, it does. Yeah. But, uh, so now I know that you run the live write thrive.com website where you also actually have a course on showing character emotions.

And that was really a topic that caught my eye and because basically we haven't really covered, you know, character emotions and how to show it and how to get evoke emotions in, in the readers well here on the podcast before. So I am really so glad that you agreed to come on for a conversation about this particular topic

Susanne (5m 58s): here. Yeah, I'm happy to talk about it. As I mentioned, um, a lot of times when I read a book, I have about 10 nonfiction books, writing craft books in my writer's Roger toolbox series on novel writing. Mostly I think all of them are about in all of novel writing except crank it out, which is just about writing in general. But usually I get the idea for a book or a course because I can't find enough information out there, you know, on the internet or out in the ether to, um, really be instructive and deep for writers emotion is as a really good example because if you search online for information on how to evoke emotions and characters had to show emotion how to get readers to feel emotion, there's almost nothing out there.

So it got me thinking about how I react to reading what, what moves me when I read a book and I spent, you know, quite a few weeks just exploring my own feelings in, in, um, thinking about the books that moved me, the scenes that move me, going back to chapters that I know would make me cry and try to analyze why I felt the way I felt or how the writer was able to accomplish that. It was like magic to me.

And I talk about that a lot of my course, which is called emotional mastery for fiction writers because the whole idea is we want to capture that technique, that skill. And Hemingway said it best when he said that when you read something that moves you emotionally steady how it was done, study how that writer did it, then you copy it and you do it yourself so that you can create the same effect in your readers. Now that sounds a lot easier said than done and it is. But in the same sense, it's really not that hard because if you can tap into what moves you emotionally, generally we all are affected in pretty much the same ways.

In other words, if something moves me in a big way, something I read, no doubt it's gonna move a lot of other people, it's not going to move everybody. Some people just aren't moved at all. They can read something that just everyone's sobbing away in a, in a room or we were even at a movie for instance, you know, you could go to a movie and there was like a really emotionally moving scene and everybody's, you know, teared up and there's always going to be a few people that go, eh, whatever. And there's just not moved at all. So you're not gonna please everybody. But the idea is that there are universal feelings, right?

There are universal emotions that we all share. There's universal responses that we share. Um, you know, growing up in the film industry, you know, there was always this unwritten rule, or maybe it was written, I don't know. I think people break it now, but in the good old days when there were morals and ethics to things, um, the role was you never hurt or killed a child or an animal in a movie or a TV show because people got really mad, right? You don't kill a child. You don't, you know, hurt a child. I mean, you might, you might imply that a child's being hurt and then the good guys go stop the guys from doing that.

But, um, you never, you know, show a child die or an animal die. Uh, and that rule is broken sometimes, but you get why, I mean, it's because it's so upsetting to people. And we all in general society in general, we react emotionally to certain things that we, um, you know, that we share those feelings. So that's part of the approach to become an emotional master in your fiction writing is if you mind your own feelings, you mind them, go deep into your own feelings and you analyze what moves you and how it moves you, then you can copy what the writer did.

A, in a basic sense, you know, not word for word, but see what the writer did and how it moved you and then you try to do that yourself. So in my core site, use about 40 different passages from different genres of different novels. And I go through these passages, we read them and analyze them, break them down. And one of the main teaching techniques that I always emphasize, regardless of what I'm teaching, is for writers to grab bestseller books and there's genre and tear them apart.

You know, get the highlighter pen out. If you don't want to use an ebook and highlight on your Kindle or whatever, I just say go to a used bookstore, find a whole bunch of old cheap paperbacks and get some highlighter pens out and Mark things up, Mark up the lines that move you, that move you emotionally like Mark up the lines that show emotion in the characters. So there's two types of elements we're talking about here. We're talking about showing, emotion and characters and then you know, evoking emotion and readers. So those are two completely different things.

And most of the time, the emotion that the character is showing is not the emotion. You want the reader to feel right. You might have a character that is showing, you know, despair because she's, you know, been thrown by the wayside. A child that's been left abandoned or something and that child is feeling despair. But you want your reader to be angry, or you might want your reader to be outraged or, uh, scared for that child. You know? And a lot of times emotions are very complex, so you don't want to just sit down and name an emotion go, Oh, I want my character to feel scared.

And so I'm going to say she's scared. Emotions are so complex that this is why it's so important to do what Hemingway said, which was to look at how the writer wrote a passage and then look at how you're feeling. A lot of times you can't name what you're feeling, you know? So our feelings are very difficult to pinpoint and to understand. And they're usually very layered. We might be angry on the surface, but underneath we're hurt or scared. Anger usually masks other emotions. So there's a lot to learn about the emotional landscape of ourselves and of our characters.

And, um, one other thing that I talk about at length extensively, um, in the course is that emotions can be shown lots of different ways and characters but there's effective ways and there's not so effective ways. So when we read passages where, where a character is doing all this body language, you know, their throat is clenched and tears are pouring out there gasping and they're moaning and their heart is pounding on their chest and their palms are sweaty. Yeah. I mean it goes on and on and on.

After while that stuff gets really tedious and it ends up being counter effective, you know, instead of making a reader feel emotion, they just, well, the emotion they feel is irritated but not the writer was hoping for. So the idea is that, um, you need to learn these tools and skills of how to show emotion and characters. There's, um, there's showing emotion by body language, right? Like I just mentioned, punching fish or whatever. And there's also am the emotion that your point of view character notices in other characters.

So there's a different emotional, um, pallet that's being put together here in a scene. So we don't just see the character, the point of view character emoting by their body language. But we also, they're also noticing what other characters are feeling and they're assuming what those emotions are too. So you have that kind of dynamic going on. Um, you can also tell emotions and it can be very effective. I have a module that's all about how you can effectively tell an emotion or name and emotion there's nothing wrong with a character saying I am scared, but it has to be in the right moment and it has to be fit the character.

Cause I'll tell you just honestly, you know, uh, there's a lot of people that aren't in touch with their emotions and you know, I don't mean to be sexist or anything, but you know, guys have like struggles a lot of times with naming their emotions. You know, they're not going to be, some guys I should say are not going to be quick to saying, gee, you know, I really am jealous and I'm not just jealous, but I'm kind of hurt right now. You know, they're not going to just come out and say that in a conversation. You know, maybe I have an example of a little passage I wrote with a friend that might come over to a guy saying, Hey, you're really jealous. I can tell, you know, and, and then he says, yeah, sure, I'm jealous.

You know, you'd be jealous too. You know? So I mean, that's more, that's feels more believable than having a typical person, male or female. Just sit there and go, gee, I am feeling really jealous right now. And I think I'm also feeling hurt, you know? I mean, for the most part, we don't sit and stop and psychoanalyze ourselves, especially in the middle of action. Right?

Jesper (14m 17s): Yeah, indeed. But, but there's also a huge difference between, I mean, w w what you just said that I, I fully agree with, but if the coater is seeing in as part of dialogue that I'm feeling hurt or I'm angry or whatever, that is perfectly fine. Um, but there was a huge difference between doing that as part of the dialogue versus you as the author telling the reader, now this guy's angry. You know, does that testing worked very well?

Susanne (14m 47s): Right. And, and the other thing that's important to tie in with what you just said is that when we're writing in deep point of view, writers don't realize that the entire scene is in that character's mind and voice. So when you're writing a scene and D point of view, all the narrative, every word, every line has to sound like the character. It's exactly the characters thoughts, whether you're in first person or third person. So you know, if a character is going, if you're going to say in the, in the, in the running text, um, Joan was angry.

That is really her thought at that moment. It has to feel like she's, you know, realizing that she's angry. Um, I don't know how better to put it, but there are exact, they are examples that I use to show how to do that well. Um, so in addition to showing, bodily emotion or physical tells to indicate emotion and the, and here's another thing that the character himself may not really be aware of the physical tells that he's displaying and what emotions that means. For instance, you can have a character in talking to somebody and he's, he, he's his clenched fists are clenched.

Okay. So we see that as the reader and he's aware of it because you're in his point of view. So you can't really show anything that he's doing in his body if he's not aware of it. Right? Like you can't say he didn't realize it, but as physical clench, you know, obviously he has to know his fists are clenched, but we don't, he might not know why his fists are clenched. You know, the, he might be clenching his fists, but the reader can get a sense of what's going on with him and make those assumptions of what kind of emotion is being shown. But if I just show my fist clenched, you don't have any idea what that impetus is.

You know what's behind that, right? Are you can kind of guess.

Jesper (16m 36s): Yeah, yeah, I agree. And there was also some, some part of denial and this you know, is especially the anchor element comes into mind. Again here you know that somebody, you know, maybe he has that clenched fist, uh, but, and then somebody will tell him that you are angry and then he will be like, I'm not angry. You know, that, that, that sort of denial element is, is also then I think that can work quite effectively as well.

Susanne (16m 59s): Yes. And so there's three basic ways that you can convey emotion in your characters and I mentioned two of them. One is the physical tells and then one is actually telling the emotion naming the emotion. But the best and most effective way to show emotion. And I reiterate this over and over and over with many, many passages. Samples is by using the characters spots, you can, you can write an entire scene that is so emotionally riveting and makes sure readers just anguished and you only show what their character is thinking.

And you never once show their heart pounding or tears coming to their eyes or sighing or moaning or groaning or anything else physical. The thoughts are the most powerful way that we can convey emotion. And they're the, they're the best way because they generate all those complex emotional feelings that we can't name. So when you have a character that's thinking about how they did something long ago and because of it, somebody was hurt, you know, maybe they forgot to pick up their kid from school or whatever, and then the child, you know, kidnapped, I mean, whatever.

Um, when you go through the thought process with the character, the reader starts feeling all these emotions because they're, they're visualizing what's being said. They're putting themselves in that character's shoes. And, um, it's the experience that creates the emotion. So if I'm reading about a character that's going through something and I'm hearing what they're thinking, I start going through that with them. And that's where the empathy, you know, connects where between reader and writer and character.

So, um, you can use all three and I give lots of examples of passages, you know, we highlight these different passages and you can see, and you can do this too, again, with those paperback books that you pick up from your friendly use bookstore just to, um, highlight in one color for instance, all the examples are tells of body language that are in the scene, you know, so anytime a character, you know, his throat gets tight or you know, they um, they sigh, you can highlight that and you can see how often that's being used by this particular writer.

Or maybe this is a bestselling writer in your Shaundra and you want to write the way they write. So this is how you can kind of get a feel for the distribution of these different lines and phrases and even words that can convey emotion. So you have that. Then you might have an instance where the character might name his emotion at the moment. Doesn't happen very often. It's very rare, but it is useful and it's good to know how to do it and win. But then when you look at the thoughts and you start highlighting in a different color, all the thoughts that evoke emotion in you as a reader, all the thoughts that imply the, an emotional feeling in the character, all of a sudden you start seeing this emotional landscape start coming to life.

And it's really fantastic. It's a great exercise to do. Just grab one of your favorite books and just start highlighting, especially the thoughts with the characters thinking that makes you feel something and makes and shows that they're feeling something. Um, even just a word or a phrase can do that. And um, I think a lot of times writers, especially beginning writers, don't understand the power of thoughts. They, they feel that they must, right? Uh, at least every other line has to be some sort of body language to imply emotion.

But you know, honestly, you don't need barely any of it. I like to throw in a few things here and there because I feel it's, it helps punch home an emotional feeling. But, um, you, you know, try as an exercise, just try writing a scene without using any of that, but using thoughts and seeing how much emotion you can convey from your character via that characters thoughts and also how much emotion you can, you know, affect into, in your reader or in yourself as you're writing. Um, it's a really eye opening exercise.

Jesper (20m 58s): Hmm. Do you have any thoughts around how much or how little you should try to, you know, use to three different ones or do you think it really does matter? It completely depends on how you want to write or, or am I hearing that you're saying you should be most focusing on conveying emotions with the thoughts and then maybe sprinkle in a bit of the other ones or how do you see that?

Susanne (21m 21s): Yeah. Yeah. I, I exactly, I think you should rely mostly on thoughts, but again, what you want to do is grab those best-selling novels that you love. I mean I have, my favorite fantasy writer is Patricia MacKillop and I just, she's just the most amazing writer in the world to me. And for years I've tried to copy how she writes, you know, my dream when I grow up is to be like her, right? So, um, I study her books, I tear them apart, I look at the language and the imagery and I think about how I feel emotionally as I react to her writing and her characters.

And so for me, when I was writing my seven but fantasy series, I would always go back to her books and just study them. And I would make lists and lists of like for phrases, not because I wanted to take her phrases and put them in my books, but I wanted to just study how she put those together so that I could copy the idea and get the same effect. It's just, it really is helpful to, you know, if you've got those writers that you love and you want to have your book stand up right next to their books to do this type of exercise.

Because maybe like for instance, if you're writing romance and maybe it's a fantasy romance, but romance will usually show a lot more body language for emotion and it will also be packed with a lot of thoughts that generate emotion, you know? And so, um, if you're writing a suspense thriller, you may go pages without any line at all that shows any emotion. You just might have a lot of action. Now the action also implies emotion. You know, if you know, if a person, you know, here's something behind a door, kicks in the door and runs over to somebody and grabs him by the throat and throttles them, you can guess that that person is feeling some sort of emotion.

You don't have to hear their thoughts. You don't have to know that their fists are clenched or that their anger is welling up in their gut or their heart is pounding heart in their chest. You can just watch the action and you can tell. So keep that in mind. That action is a great way to show emotion. And so a lot of times you can just show what's going on in a scene between characters and you don't have to even get into the thoughts. You don't have to get into the body. Physical tells, um, you know, that tell the character or the reader that there's a specific emotion that's being experienced.

So, you know, again, when you're reading through these books, when you're studying these bestsellers, look for those, look for those bits of action that some very specific emotion uh, you'll be amazed at what you find. Uh, it's at first, you know, sometimes readers say, well, I don't see anything. I'm not seeing any physical tells and I'm not really seeing an action. And then they start digging in deeper and they pull back and think, okay, what actually happened on this page? Um, if it's boring writing if you know, then you might not see anything that's really tapping into motion.

Because to me, if you don't, if you don't show characters feeling inner conflict, because it's really all about conflict, you know, when we feel emotion we're conflicted about something and if we can't get our readers to feel some sort of emotion, then obviously we're failing. There's something that's just not coming across that tends to happen when we have scenes that are very predictable, boring, ordinary on the nose type of scenes where the characters are sitting around eating. You might be in a fantasy book. Okay. So they're in the woods and they're sitting around by the campfire and they're talking about, you know, that they're going to cook tomatoes or whatever it was that, um, salmon, uh, and um, Mary they were doing, they were doing up on whether top or whatever.

Uh, yeah, I mean if that scene was just about, you know, here I have some cooked tomatoes and you know, it would be really boring. There wouldn't be any emotion. But instead we see Frodo freaking out. Like, Oh my goodness, what are you doing? You made a fire, don't do that. And all of a sudden the, the black writers come and there's a big, you know, attack and you know, that is packed full of emotion so that, you know, the, the action is, you know, it needs to be evoking that emotion or evoking that tension, creating tension between characters inner conflict, you know, inside a character, all of those different elements.

So, um, yeah, this is covering a lot of stuff, but yeah.

Jesper (25m 28s): Yeah. And dude, but I also think that there is an important point around that action part because it's not, it depends on depending on what happens in the particular scene, but if you are in the middle of some sort of action sequence, maybe the characters are fighting or whatever they are doing. I mean, I think there, it's also important as the writer, not to get too much into, uh, the, uh, OK. I should show emotions by thought because in the middle of the fight, the character will not start thinking about what, how they feel about it.

They will just do stuff. So, so, so there is also that element to be mindful about that. You don't start showing the character thinking about emotions in situations where that just is not natural to do,

Susanne (26m 14s): right? Yeah. There's usually like visceral, uh, brief thoughts that might pop in when somebody grabs you from behind or smacks you in the face. Like, ouch, that hurt. Yeah. I have a am I have a module on my course, which is, you can see it for free too. So if anybody's listening to this and they want to just go pop over to my online school and just watch a 38 minute free module, you can do that by just scrolling down and clicking on the preview. And I put this module up for free because it's one of the most important things that I teach that I never have heard anybody else teach about.

But it's, I find it really essential and it's very eyeopening for a lot of writers and it's basically what I call the action reaction cycle. Um, what that entails to me is that everything we do all day long is done in this cycle, right? Something happens or we do something and then there's a reaction. So you have an action than a reaction. But what follows the reaction is the processing of that reaction.

Okay. So, uh, I give the example of let's say there's, um, your character is in the kitchen and she hears a crash. Okay? So that's the action. Her immediate visceral reaction is, Oh no, what was that? Right. So there's always, there's two parts to reaction. When is the immediate visceral reaction, which, you know, you might get that in a high action scene with like fighting scene like we were just talking about where there's only time for the visceral, there's only time for that immediate quick action because quickly you have to make a decision and move on to another action.

So, um, so the character, here's the vase fall over, a crash goes, Oh no, what is that? That's the first initial reaction. And then she runs into the room and she sees the cat has knocked the vase over from the table onto her laptop and all the water is just pouring all over the laptop. Okay. So now there's an extended reaction, right? Characters like, Oh my gosh, my laptop. Oh, you stupid cat. You know, so maybe whatever they're thinking, but this reaction now is more extensive because she's taking in this situation and that's leading to emotion, right?

So she first she's shocked. Maybe you're a little bit startled by the sound. And then when she sees her, what really happened? Now she's feeling more emotions, uh, conflicted emotions. She's upset, she's angry, she's freaking out because her dissertation is on there and that she hasn't backed it up to the cloud. Right? So there's all these emotions going on. So you have action reaction. And then after the reaction you have the processing. So processing can take a second or it could take three weeks. It could take, you know, an hour.

It really depends on the situation. Um, for instance, like a detective can find a clue and then the whole next chapter can be processing. Okay, what does that clue mean? What, you know, now we understand that, you know, Joe is actually in the, in the bar and he wasn't at the hotel, you know, blah, blah, blah. And there's all this processing that goes with that. So after the processing comes a decision, what am I going to do now with what I just processed? In the case of our character who's laptop is wet, she's going to act really quickly after that reaction.

She's going to swoop down, grab her laptop, shake it out, grab a towel, wipe it off. All the while S swearing at her cat and her thoughts are going to be spinning like, Oh my gosh, my dissertation and if I have to write this again, I'm going to fail. Blah, blah, blah. So there's all these thoughts that are going on, which is part of the processing. Um, and then, um, of course then there's going to be a decision that comes after that. You know, part of the decision in response to the reaction was grabbing the laptop and wiping it off. Of course. So that's just a, again, a visceral decision, but there's usually going to be a more extended decision that happens.

Like, what do I do now? I've, you know, if I've lost my dissertation now what now I'm going to be processing this and having to make a decision. And that decision leads to new action. So it's sort of a five prong step. You have an action reaction process, decision, new action. And if you're writing a high action type scene, like a fight scene, you've got like, you know, some dwarves run into some elves in the forest and they start fighting each other. You and your main character is, you know, trying to, you know, push away all these, you know, horrible creatures and you know, kill a few in the runaway escape.

That action reaction decision thing is going to happen very, very quickly. Like in seconds after seconds after seconds, right? Your character isn't gonna like smash somebody with a sword and they'll sit down and think for five minutes, gee, I wonder what I should do next. Right? But there's other times when you have a low energy scene, right? Where your characters are sitting around talking or they're walking down the road and they are processing like, what are we going to do now? Where are we going to go? Well, if we go here, you know, it's gonna take five more days and we don't have time. This is going to happen. And you know, you need to have those low energy scenes where your characters are talking in their processing and their thinking, but that's going to lead to a decision.

Okay, so now what do we do? Let's go here. Okay, let's go do it. And you know, whatever happens will happen and then you're seeing it. So you can have scenes, um, uh, scene in itself could have this process many, many, many, many times or a scene could be all action and even end inaction. You know, you can have a fight scene and some guy just falls off the side of a cliff and that's how the CNNs or you can end with your character, your point of view, character reacting, uh, where the, his friend falls off the cliff and he goes, Oh man, dude, better you than me.

And just the scene ends right there. You know, um, we see this in a lot of suspense where the scene ends with a visceral reaction. You know, the character finds the dead body. Um, I mean, you might just end in action. Like the character just finds the dead body. And we don't see reaction. But for more emotional punch, you'll notice that really good writers will end a suspense scene with a tiny bit of reaction. You know, the character sees the dead body and gasps, you know, God.

Jesper (32m 29s): Yeah, exactly. Because you also playing on, I mean, as providers, we are thinking about this stuff. So, you know, as right as we thinking about how do humans actually react then, and you're breaking it down nicely in these different, uh, sort of thesis or whatever we want to call it. But, but for, for the reader who doesn't think about these things, they will just pick up on it maybe, you know, so subconsciously they'll know, okay, there's gonna be some sort of a further reaction to this because it leaves in a strange place.

So to beat the, the chapter cuts in a strange place, so, so they will be very inclined to read on just because they just know that there's going to be more, let's say, emotional impact for, from what just happened. Right. So, so that's sort of what you're, what you're playing at day, I think.

Susanne (33m 14s): Yeah. And also, as I mentioned, um, in that example that you know, like let's say there's an avalanche and this guy sees his friend, you know, go off the cliff and the avalanche is going on in the scene right there. If the next scene shows him barreling down the mountain in his car, we, the, the decision is implied, right? He made a decision, I'm going to get the heck out of here before I died next. Right? You don't have to have the characters sit there and go, gee, I better leave the mountain because maybe I'm in a fall in a hole too. You know, if the mountain is falling apart.

So, um, you might not show the processing and decision, but you'll show the effects or the results of the processing and the decision, right? So, um, that's, you know, what happens is if readers read a scene and one of those stages is missing, whether it's implicit or explicit, you are going to, they're gonna, they're gonna feel that something's off. And this is what happens with a lot of the manuscripts. I critique about 200 manuscripts a year.

So I see this a lot, especially with the beginning writers where they're gonna show a scene. You know, somebody runs in and says, George, your, your mother was just hit by a car outside. Um, and George goes, Oh no, what am I going to do? I mean, how am I gonna live? I don't have somebody to earn a living and buy me food. It's like, what? You know, it's like, that's not how you're gonna react. I mean, right. It's their Holy Hubble. So we want to have our characters to act believably. So you have to put yourself in your shoes, in their shoes.

If you had somebody run in and say, you know, Oh my gosh, your mom, your brother, or your mother or your best friend, or your kid was just hit by a car, what is your reaction going to be? Your immediate visceral reactions, just going to be this, this is what you're going to be like, slammed with the shock of it. And you might feel you're gonna feel some body emotion. You might like all of a sudden your, your breath might get caught in your chest or you might gasp, right? Um, you might get dizzy, whatever.

You might fall down. I mean, a lot if you just even say to somebody, it's a mean trick. But if you say to somebody, am, you better sit down, I have some bad news for you. They will physically feel ill, they will fall down or fall into a chair if you'd, if you're a good actor. Right? I mean, it would be, it would be mean to say that to somebody, but this is how we, this is how our bodies react in that fight or flight, adrenaline, releasing hormone reacting, you know, physiology that we have as bodies, as human bodies.

So, um, we have to remember that our characters need to have those types of bodies too. So if somebody is going to come running into the room and say, Hey, you know, your mom was just hit by a car, uh, and then they run back out. Your, your character has to, you know, immediately register some sort of shock, some visceral reaction. And then of course they're going to go run outside and, and their thoughts are going to start, you know, running through their head. What kind of thoughts will those be? You know, they're definitely not going to be planning like what I'm going to do next year if I don't have my mom earning a living and how am I going to get kicked out of my house?

I mean that might come three weeks later, but it's not going to come right now. So am

Jesper (36m 23s): yeah, I agree. And I think part of why that probably happens sometimes w in, in the writing is because the writer knows what story is supposed to be told here. So, so therefore you, you quickly jump to, okay, I need him to talk about how am I gonna live now? Because that's the sort of the next hurdle that he's going to be hit by an in this story here. So I need to start telling the reader that this is a huge issue, so therefore I'm jumping to that. But whereas I think that the main point is also to say that, you know, all those emotional faces that they have to go through.

And if you really put yourself into coach's shoes and they're like you just said, and then what would you feel like if it happened to you that that is also the story, you know, was that we need to be careful. We don't get to plot-driven here. And we remember to, to know that the emotions that the characters are feeling, that's what the readers will connect to and the character is to story.

Susanne (37m 22s): Yeah. I talk about too how to create beats because um, one of the main things that that happens with beginning writers is they can see the scene in their head, kind of like what you're talking about and they know what it's supposed to feel like and sound like. And so they'll do like rapid fire dialogue where they characters saying something in the next character saying something back and they're going back and forth and back and forth. But there's moments where certain things are being said that are unexpected or shocking or upsetting.

And if you don't stop and give a beat, like have the character pause and process again, this is part of that action reaction cycle. You know, I can just be talking casually with you, but if you say something to me right now that, uh, I, I didn't expect and that can affect me is important or can affect me emotionally. I'm in a need to take a beat. I'm going to have to stop and process that. And so the way that we do that in our writing is we, we have the character pause, we have the character stop and process and think, you know, a thought will come in, a reaction will come in a S.

there's lots of different techniques that you can use to slow down a scene. One of the techniques I like to use is to have a character notice little things and good writers do this very well. Little details. They might hear a clock ticking in the background or they might notice the bottom of their pants leg is frayed. Um, when we start noticing little things around us, it slows down time and it or stretches out time. However you want to think of it.

And it helps to create that beat, that moment to let the character react and respond to what was just said or done. But also you need to let the reader do that. And one of the, one of the basic ways we do that as writers is we do a scene break or we do it, we end a chapter, right? That's why I was saying that suspense authors often will end, uh, a scene of high action with a big action moment or a visceral reaction to that moment and end it really quickly.

And then there's an X, then there's a new chapter. And the purpose for that is that it gives the reader a chance to go, Oh, okay. Uh, and process that, I mean, oftentimes at the end of a chapter, if it's a great chapter, you know, we'll stop and not just start reading the next chapter. We'll kind of take a breath or get up and get a drink of water or something. Because we need, we need the moment to sink in. So as writers, we want to always write our scenes to build to a high moment. The high moments should come at the end, at the very last line or the last paragraph.

And that high moment should pack a punch, whether it's an emotional punch to reveal a clue or move the plot forward in some way. But you want to end with that emotional punch at the end of your chapter because then you're creating, you're creating a beat. You're creating a way for the reader to breathe, to process, to absorb what they just read, get them ready to move into the next scene. And again, you can do it with a scene break too. You don't always have to have a chapter in, but you can have multiple scenes in a chapter, but you want to aim for that with every senior, right?

You wanted to build to that high moment and then you want to stop it right there and give the reader a chance to react. And that's part of manipulating your readers so that they'll feel the emotions that you want them to feel. Okay.

Jesper (40m 43s): Yeah. That's why I think it's important. What you talked about a bit earlier as well with the, with the, uh, what should we call them, like campfire scene. So you know, that, uh, the Maslow scenes, those are important because if you're writing, let's say a 300 page fantasy novel and every single chapter is this height intense stuff all the time, I think most, most readers will get pretty tired before they at the end of those 300 pages. And they probably will not enjoy it that much. So you need some of the slow pacing in-between just to take, get also give the reader a bit of beading boom here and there.

I think that's important.

Susanne (41m 19s): Yeah, it's really good to alternate. And again, this is all part of that action reaction cycle because if you have a lot of action going on, at some point the characters need a process which just happened. And um, as I said in a mystery, you might have a whole chapter where they characters the detectives talking or whatever. And uh, but in a fantasy, you know, it might just be a page. It really just depends on your writing style. And it depends on your plot. Um, there's nothing wrong with having lots and lots and lots of great action in a fantasy novel or any novel, but they readers aren't going to get engaged with the characters unless you can really get into their thoughts and into their inner conflict, you know, just show what they're struggling with.

If our characters aren't struggling, you know, if they're not vulnerable, if they're not, you know, having, um, doubts if they're not, um, you know, finding the journey hard other than just, you know, I can't climb the mountain fast enough. Um, it's just not going to have enough meaning for the reader. You know, we want, we, we like to go on those heroes journeys and those heroes journeys are all about, uh, the internal journey, not so much the external journey.

Jesper (42m 26s): Yeah. Yeah. We, in previous episodes we've actually talked about the character arc as well and how it's incredibly important that, that both, there is like a, a meaning behind why the character is feeling the way that they are feeling. So it's not just because they were slapped in the face and now they're feeling angry or something, you know, that that needs to be some sort of underlying driver that that also links in with the character too, to how they're going to transform over the course of the story. And then you use all of these different elements, uh, to, to basically push them to watch that transformation.

Um, so, and I do think that that's important that, that you give with everything basically, that you have some sort of reason for why things are happening. Uh, and it's not just, uh, because you, I mean, of course you, in order to give all that suspense and that bad things needs to happen and it has to be difficult for the character, but it should not be random bad things just to show that the coaters struggling and they are feeling, you know, emotions so that you can, the reader can connect to that. But if the reader cannot see that there is some sort of purpose and we're going somewhere with all of this, then it becomes a bit like, yeah,

Susanne (43m 37s): right. I always call, I always liken it to a string of scenes. If you have a character that just has ups and downs and has a good day and a bad day and things just keep happening to them, but there's no overarching purpose, there's no plot goal that they're striving for, there's no passion toward a goal, then, um, it's just kind of meaningless. It just feels like the characters just wandering around. I write a lot about that in my other books too. Um, so yeah, it just, I just feel that I'm becoming an emotional or emotion master in your fiction. Writing is one of the most important skills that you can learn, but nobody teaches it and nobody really talks about it.

And so I hope that you know, by giving, and this course is six and a half hours of video, but I also have about 40 different assignments that I give out that you can download, which I think is really cool because what I'm hearing back from writers, I've got hundreds and hundreds of writers now that are taking this course or who have already taken it since I launched it September 1st I am I'm really excited to hear that they're enjoying doing these exercises. And part of these exercises as I mentioned, is getting these books and marking them up and studying passages and analyzing how good writers do this.

Cause honestly, the only way that you can become great at anything is to emulate great people in that field. But you know, if you're a painter, you know you people go to the lube and they set up their easels and they copy the masters. They try to paint exactly like them, not so they can copycat, but so they can learn the technique, they learn the skills, they can see what colors go well together and create what kind of effects. And we really need to do that with our writing. And I never heard anybody ever give me that advice for the decades that I was writing novels. Nobody ever said, go study these great novels and tear them apart.

See what kind of words they use. Sentence structure, paragraph structure. How long are the chapters, how much description do they use? What type of description? Um, when you study masterful writers, it's just amazing how incredible they write is that Toni Morrison said, easy reading is hard. Writing and that's so true. When we read a beautiful scene that just seems to just flow beautifully. Like everything is just perfect in it. That was not an easy scene to write.

And we all should know that if we've struggled writing great scenes, you know, I mean, there's there scenes that I've read that I wrote years ago and I'll go back to a book that I wrote and I'll read a scene out of my book and I'll just go, I can't believe I wrote that scene. It was like a fantastic scene. Where did that come from? You know, and, uh, and I'm just amazed that that somehow came out of me and I don't ever feel like I did it. I always feel like somebody else wrote that scene through me somehow. But I know it's because of all the studying that I did. And I think that's how painting works or playing music or whatever.

If you practice and practice and practice. My husband's a jazz sax player, so you know, every night like three hours hearing scales right in my bedroom because that's where are his studio is set up because we have a tiny house. So, uh, you know, we get that, but you have to, when you practice and practice year after year and you get really good at something and seeing with writing when you get really good at writing scenes and conveying characters and their emotions and describing them and bringing a scene to life, a lot of that can just start happening naturally. But at first it does take a lot of work.

It takes, um, it takes intention. Like you can't just, just write and just write a lot. It's just sort of like giving, you know, giving a kid a three year old kid, a big bag full of airplane parts and say, well, just keep putting them together and eventually you'll have a working airplane. You know, it doesn't work that way with writing writing practices. Great. It's great to write every day. It's great to journal, whatever. And I highly encourage that. But you also have to write very deliberately, and that involves the studying of great writing and doing like read Hemingway said, study how other writers did this.

And then you try to copy it so you can do it yourself and you can get the same results. Right? So just like anything else. And I, like I said, I rarely ever hear writing instructors tell writers to do this, but this is the number one thing I think writers should do. They should, as part of their discipline or their writing practice, they should beat, you know, reading widely and not just reading, but studying what they're reading. Um, I've heard people say, yeah, you should read a lot of books, great read books. It's fun to read books, but if you're not really paying attention, if you're just enjoying the book, which I like to do from time to time, just read a book for fun.

Um, that's a different thing. But for the most part, when I read a book, I just tear it apart. You know, what's working, what's not? Why is this boring? Why do I hate this scene? Um, it's good to know why you hate something. It's good to know why you don't like a scene. It's good to know why your board or why you don't care about a character. It's good to know why you halfway through the book, you just give up. What was the point? What was that tipping point for you that said, okay, forget it. I'm not going to waste any more time reading this book that teaches you a lot and you should learn from it so that you don't do those same mistakes in your writing.

Jesper (48m 33s): Yeah, I think that's, that's amazing. There. There's so much a GM Pactor good stuff in it. In this episode. He has a center, so thanks a lot for, for that. And, uh, I will also put a link in the show notes to the uh, live write thrive.com website where I think people can, there was like a one free session or something off the course. Is that right?

Susanne (48m 54s): Well that's my blog. Um, my online school is that CS lakin.teachable.com and that's my writing, that's my writing for life workshops online school. So I have my video courses on that. Um, so yeah, I'll send you the link and then if you put that down there that good. And um, yeah, so I have a, I have a handful of courses. I'm working on a new course right now on your cast of characters which are really excited about because I'm going to be interviewing a dozen or so bestselling authors starting this week. I'm doing video interviews with them to ask them how do they come up with their characters, how many characters, how did they decide which characters they want.

That's also another thing I've been trying to research online. I can't find any information on it. How do you know how to populate your story with how many characters and what are they, what are their roles? Uh, it's, so, it's a fascinating topic again when that I just feel writers should know and I'm, I'm excited to see what I'm going to learn in my exploration as I go through this. But yeah, so I hope, I hope people come check it out. And again, if you go to C us lakin.teachable.com and you click on the emotional mastery course, you can scroll down to the curriculum and you'll see the free preview.

So if you want to just watch the one module for free on the action reaction cycle, do that. You don't have to commit or enroll or anything like that. Uh, I feel like the course take it, uh, if you don't like the course after you pay for it, you get a full refund. So there's no commitment. It's like 30 day money back guarantee. So, um, but I, I do think that you'll learn a lot from it and, um, check out my other courses. I think I have free previews on all my other courses too. So if you see something else that you need to learn, like what your 10 key scenes are or your four foundational pillars are.

I have courses on those things too, um, based on my books. So, um, I hope you check them out. Yeah, thanks for having me here. I really appreciate being able to share all this information and I, I really love to help writers and I love to see writers improve in their writing so they write great books. That's what matters

Jesper (50m 50s): indeed. Yeah. And thank you so much for joining us. So I hope you got a lot out of this. Uh, DLS snow and there was a lot of good, good, good stuff in here. So I will see you next Monday. And then autumn, we'll be back a posting with me

Narrator (51m 5s): if you like what you just heard, there's a few things you can do to support the amwritingfantasy podcast. Please tell a fellow author about the show and visit us at Apple podcast and leave a rating and review. You can also join autumn and Yesper on patrion.com/amwritingfantasy for as little as a dollar a month. You'll get awesome rewards and keep the amwritingfantasy podcast going. Stay safe out there and see you next Monday.