I was going to try and write something insightful about writing, and managing stress, but what I was thinking about required more research than I have the time or ability to do this morning. I slept in. I was up until two in the bloody morning binge reading. I haven’t done that in I don’ t know how long, but it’s been years. I’m late with this post, have obligations today I cannot fail in, and…
Right. So. Let’s talk about the endocrine system, shall we? Keeping in mind this is all off the top of my head and I’m still waking up, so more research is required, and so forth. My anatomy and physiology professor was a funny old bird. I enjoyed him. The class where he really lit up, though, and you could see his passion coming through even as he worked through thirty-year-old transparencies on a projector (and no, I did not have this class more than a decade ago. He really loved his transparencies) for a class he’d taught perhaps a hundred times before, was the endocrine system. The most overlooked and underestimated system in the body, he pointed out, bouncing on his toes. The one that, really, determined how every other system in the body ran.
We are, all of us, every moment, adrift in a sea of hormones. They are the chemical messenger equivalent of the human internet. The brain uses them to @everyone when it needs to flee or fight. The unconscious circadian rhythms of hormones help us sleep, and wake, and keep the human race going by signaling ovulation. There are hormones for making sure babies get fed, which is an obvious biological need for the continuation of the species, and there are hormones for making sure you can properly process your food. There are, as I’m sure you are getting my drift, hormones for most everything.
Much of our emotions on a deep, unthinking level, are hormonal responses. Those gut feelings are the end result of a rapid subconscious reaction of the brain, and they really are fast – faster than the brain can logic its way to the same conclusion. Something wrong, and we are flinching, hairs raising, eyes dilating, before we are even aware that we are doing this. Something right, and a similar process has entirely different external tells to the pleasure center being activated: lips curl upward, the posture loosens, turns towards the stimulus, and again the eyes dilate but not in the same way. The book Left of Bang has some excellent descriptions of these tells, and what they mean. It is a good book for the writer and for a person in general who wants to improve their situational awareness.
From a writing perspective, when we are considering a character, their reaction to the situation that we, the author, have placed them in, we need to tunnel all the way down to this hormonal response. Not in great detail on the page. But we should know what’s going on, and why, from a physiological perspective. For one thing, it will enable us to write in small bits of description that will give the reader a visceral reaction they may not even realize is happening – the mark of a really well-done scene. For another, it will help the author understand why the character is motivated to do something – or why when they force past the realities of hormones and cause the character to do something literally inhuman in violation of those unconscious urges, the reader rejects it and leaves a review (which rarely pinpoints why that reader was disgusted with the character’s actions, in another telling point towards no-one paying attention to themselves). We talk about breaking characters, and this is one way to break a character for the author, and the reader. If you are stuck on a WIP? Go take a fresh look at it once you’ve looked at hormones and what they do to us and for us, and see if that makes a difference in what that character should be doing, versus what you’ve made them do.
Emotions are important to crafting a compelling story with characters that will draw you in and keep you reading. The books I was binging last night (and this morning, heaven help my sleep schedule) were all about the emotions as they were romance novels, but that doesn’t need to be the case. You don’t need to write romance to have emotion in your stories. There can be emotions in any story – and should be, if you want to connect with your readers. Unlikeable characters are more often than not unemotional (because the author didn’t take time to ground them in motivation and meaning behind their actions) or are acting in an unnaturally emotional way (the reason I wall probably nine out of ten romance novels I try to read these days). Even if we can’t articulate what our hormones do, we know when we encounter a human reacting as though they are completely without them, that we’ve found a pathological type. Unless that is what you want – say, in creating a villain – then make sure you’re paying attention to the endocrine system.
And now, I’m going to go be awash in coffee for a while before I need to put on the public face and do a guided nature walk. After that I’m hoping to invoke some melatonin and take a nap…
Mad Genius Club 
11 responses to “Awash in Emotion”
Subtlety in expressing emotion in writing is a fine path to travel. It is far too easy to throw out ham-handed expressions that yank on those emotional triggers like a child on a rope swing. Stuff like grief, loss, wrath, and violence are rather easy to stoke, but slow growing affection or fear or doubt require more investment.
If you’re writing pulp, it’s not so bad to throw abrupt, intense emotion in there. Horror, too. It’s expected in those genres. The readers are more tolerant. Don’t try the same in cozies, mysteries, or intrigue dramas. Different audience, different taste, more selective with what kind of reader cookies are to their palate.
And there’s the other thing – don’t overindulge in any one emotion for too long. The reader will get overwhelmed, and so will you, and it loses it’s edge.
Bathos – when wallowing in emotion just isn’t enough!
Yep. Don’t smother the reader or beat a tattoo. It’s okay to revisit emotional themes later in the story arc. You can reinforce them, invert them, create a new variation on the theme.
Pacing is key. Know when you need speed, when you (and the reader) need a pause, and when and how to adjust as necessary. Pacing serves the plot and adds tension to the adventurous parts when it’s fast but it can also add tension to the slow parts when you need suspense. It can give you relief when the characters take a breather and can give satisfaction when a looming threat is faced squarely with resolution in sight.
When your pacing matches the story it always flows better, even when the prose is junk. You can fix crap prose easier than crap pacing, too.
Just bought Left of Bang. Two things I’ve discovered about myself: I notice things no one else seems to. And, I don’t notice things everyone else seems to see. Interested to see how this book compares to those two categories in my life.
I have a similar pattern. Some of it is training on my part (I can tell you what a plant or tree is as we fly past it on the interstate at speed, for instance).
I tend to notice movement around me, as well as movement in the environment. People, birds, critters … A lot of people don’t see what catches my eyes. Part of it is operating in a daily environment surrounded by people who don’t look where they are going. Part of it is because noticing a bush that moved backwards (against the wind) kept me from getting ambushed as a teen. And part stems from lots of hikes as a kid and looking for birds and critters.
Went to get in the car Friday and found it covered in yellowish green pollen thick enough that I had to run the windshield washer to gain visibility.
Had our (hopefully) last hard frost last Tuesday so I waited until Wednesday to set a Big Boy tomato plant in it’s home pot on the back deck. Will pick up some cherry tomato plants to join it in the next week or so along with probably a couple of green pepper and perhaps a cucumber or two. This one was a gift so lived inside for a few days. Two raised beds are settled in with a bed of compost and yard trimmings in place but the garden soil to fill is still in bags. Was not as productive as I’d hoped over the very strange winter we had. Intention was to have one ready for vegetables and herbs while transplanting several volunteer blueberry plants from the bed in front of house to the other, but missed the window on those as the bushes are already in flower. Should have another bumper crop long about mid June. Need it as my new recipe for blueberry cobbler has become a favorite amongst my friends and relatives.
Psychopaths really can trip these “broken human” alarms.
When I was a child (10?) I played for a while with a neighboring boy a year or so older. His parents were wealthy, and we never saw them. He was raised by servants, as best I could tell. He seemed normal enough, and we played board games.
Then, one day, I dropped by on my bike and discovered him in his gravel driveway. A robin had somehow fallen to the ground alive, and he was casually standing next to his bicycle and rolling the wheel of it back and forth over the injured bird, to see what it would do.
I froze when I saw this, horrified. He lifted his head to look at me with an expressionless face and said nothing. Every hair I had raised itself, my ears drew back along my skull, and I turned and never went back.
All of this was silent (except for the bike in the gravel and the dying bird). Before I could even think about his actions, it was the lack of affect in his face and posture that raised my alarm. I’ve never forgotten that visceral feeling of “not human, dangerous”.
This is a fascinating, scary, look at a psychopath so bad that other criminals decided that enough was enough. https://www.city-journal.org/article/habeas-corpus Well written and scary as heck. I’m not certain many writers could carry off a character like that. I don’t want to try.
That’s quite an article.