You don’t have to be writing concrete poetry or avant-garde fiction to use form to convey emotion. This simply means invoking an emotional reaction in your reader – usually to illustrate how a character is feeling – using the shape of the writing. You could create a fast pace and short clipped sentences to show anger, and give us poignancy and sadness using a slow pace and long sentences, for example.
At the beginning of Jośe Saramago’s novel Blindness the dialogue isn’t punctuated, creating a sense of confusion after a character goes blind. Saramago replicates what it would be like to suddenly go blind – to hear voices but not know who is talking – so that the reader’s confusion matches the character’s.
The objective correlative, or what we called the OC where I used to teach, was made famous by T.S. Eliot. In fact, Eliot said the objective correlative was the only way to communicate an emotion to a reader, which is why I’ve left it till last. There’s no need to read up on literary the theory unless you want to; as readers and viewers we’re used to seeing this technique in action, especially in films.
It’s where a writer uses a thing – an object or a place or event (even the weather) – to invoke an emotional response in the reader, and therefore, in a story, to demonstrate how a character feels, without mentioning the emotion. Earlier I said that using a ray of sunlight to suggest hope is a bit of a cliché. It’s also an example of the OC. Watch a few Hollywood blockbusters and see if you can spot some more over-used examples of the objective correlative! They are often weather or nature-related.
Embedding small details and actions between the lines of speech can be described as ‘adding emotional beats’ to your dialogue. That is, moments of pause where you show us your character’s feelings and what they’re experiencing, even when it’s only a raised eyebrow.
At a structural level, emotional beats are the moments when a character has an emotional response to an event, and it motivates them to take action. Emotional beats are, therefore, like the character taking a breath before continuing to solve the dilemma set up at the beginning of the story.
You’ll want a character to be doing something active during the emotional response. Being overcome by grief or realising they’re in love while working on the checkout at a supermarket or arranging flowers in a hospital, for example, works better than the same thing happening when they are lying in bed or watching TV.
Geen opmerkingen:
Een reactie posten