Tag Archives: Emotion

Season 18, Theory and Technique

18.09: Unpacking the Tension

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For the next several episodes we’ll be talking about tension. That may seem like a lot of time to spend on just one word, but as we unpack that word we see that there’s plenty of material to work with, and there’s a generous supply of tools in that material.

For our purposes, we’ve categorized the tension subcategories as follows:

  • Anticipation
  • Juxtaposition
  • Unanswered Questions
  • Conflict
  • Microtension

Your own taxonomy may differ, and that’s fine, but having a taxonomy is important because when we name our tools we’re better at using them.

Credits: Your hosts for this episode were Mary Robinette Kowal, DongWon Song, Erin Roberts, Dan Wells, and Howard Tayler. It was recorded by Marshall Carr, Jr., and mastered by Alex Jackson.

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In this episode we covered five types of tension: Anticipation, Juxtaposition, Unanswered Questions, Conflict, and Microtension. Look at your current WIP (or something that you are reading) and identify examples of each of these.

Dark One: Forgotten, by Brandon Sanderson & Dan Wells
This will be featured in an upcoming “Deep Dive” episode.

Archive Seasons 7-10, Season 09

Writing Excuses 9.19: Showing Emotion

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How do you go about writing a character showing their emotions without them sounding whiny (or whatever the “too-much” version of the appropriate emotion might be)?

Adding to the difficulty of the exercise, how do you know where that “too much” line is for your book, your genre, and your audience?

We talk about how we’ve each faced this challenge, and how that’s been very different for each of us. Sometimes it comes down to “show, don’t tell,” and sometimes that rule flat out doesn’t work. And sometimes it doesn’t come down to a simple rule at all. (Okay, most of the time that’s what it comes down to.)

 

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Write a letter to Jane or Vincent, and write that letter as if you were a person living in the setting of Mary’s Glamourist Histories.

Valour and Vanity, by Mary Robinette Kowal, and narrated by Mary, too!

Archive Seasons 7-10, Season 07, Theory and Technique

Writing Excuses 7.33: Authentic Emotion

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Writers, like actors, have to animate the inanimate, and evoke emotions that we may not have ever felt, and in this episode we talk about the things that we do in order to accomplish that. We talk about making faces, remembering analogous events, playing thematic music, and running around the kitchen with a knife.

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Describe a setting. Then, without using any emotion-words, describe that same setting again three more times from a happy, sad, and angry point of view.

All Men of Genius, by Lev AC Rosen, narrated by Emily Gray

Archive Seasons 1-6, Season 06, Theory and Technique

Writing Excuses 6.25: When Characters do Dumb Things

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Let’s face it. The characters in your book will do some dumb things. We’re here to help you make sure they do those dumb things for the right reasons.

Brandon, Dan, Mary, and Howard talk about the good, the bad, and the ugly of dumb, and how you as an author can write dumb smart. Or smartly write dumb. Something like that.

 

Audiobook Pick-of-the-Week: Variant, by Robison Wells, narrated by Michael Goldstrom.

Writing Prompt: Create a solid romance in which the characters cannot be together because of good, intelligent, character-driven reasons.

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Archive Seasons 1-6, Guest, Season 03, Theory and Technique

Writing Excuses Season 3 Episode 19: Emotion in Fiction with John Brown

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John Brown joins us again, and tells us that fiction “is all about guiding an emotional response in a reader.” We begin with a discussion of depression, which John (like many of us) had to deal with. He tells us about the paths for emotional response, and how a beginning writer can end up in the depths of depression just by looking at the work of successful writers.

But working through that, especially with cognitive therapy, can provide the writer with fantastic tools for informing his or her writing. And those tools are really why you’re here. Listen closely!

Writing Prompt: Give us villainous heroes, romance, and something that evokes terror.

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