Actions Amplify Emotions

Has an agent or publisher or editor (or your writing instructor) told you to 'go deeper into character'? What did you think they meant?

There are two ways to 'go deeper'. One is global: looking at what your character wants/needs most desperately, and what stops them going after it effectively. The other is minuscule: in what tiny ways do they most effectively convey and then amplify to the reader what you, the author, know are their thoughts & feelings about the story or scene they're in?

Writers learn about their characters by (mostly) writing what the character thinks.

Readers will tolerate reading what the character thinks if that's all they've got, but they get deeper into understanding characters, and thus into your story, by reading as well:

• What the character says
• What the character does
• What other characters say about/to them
• What other characters do about/toward them

Thus it's fine for a writer to write 'what this character thinks' in order to learn it for themselves. But then it's on the writer to turn those thoughts into actions and words that reveal the character's layers and complexity to the reader through these other steps. 

The activity of discovering the character (rather than having it handed to them in a long inner monologue) is a key reason why many readers get hooked on stories long before the central plot grabs them.

Think of your current manuscript. Have you got mostly 'thinking' or is it mixed up with words and actions? 

"But I've got actions!" you may cry, and point to your characters walking, drinking, eating, or flying a kite between lines of dialogue or paragraphs of inner monologue.

megaphone from Freepik

Here's a secret for you:  

Actions can amplify the emotional subtext of even the simplest line of dialogue, dragging the reader along with the character, or they can leech all the emotions out of it and leave the reader emotionally flat too. An emotional flat reader is apt to put the story down and pick up something that makes them FEEL.  

You want every action, however minuscule in itself, to AMPLIFY  

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So how do you amplify those emotions that the reader is seeing in dialogue and monologue?

 

Micro-actions.

 

Here's a good exercise for you, especially if you want something writing-related to practice while watching tv or movies: pause the screen on a person or people, and, knowing what you know about them from the parts of the story you've already seen, look at where their hands are, their eyes are, their bodies are, relative to each other. 

 

Now think about what they were saying when you paused. Does their micro-action, their body language, reflect that? Is the dialogue and tone of voice in tune with the body's tiny actions or not?

When you're ready to start up again, reverse about 30 seconds and watch the small actions they do leading up to that moment when you paused. Which ones match or amplify their tone of voice and their words, and which ones seem to be saying something else or negating what the words are saying? 

Everything in a movie is supposed to be deliberate, but some actors (like some writers) just aren't good at making their actions match their words match their emotional context. When we say two rom-com leads 'have no chemistry', it boils down to their body language, facial expression, and/or tone of voice that isn't reflecting true-seeming affection or attraction toward the other person. 

 

When readers read actions that don't amplify the emotions that the author has presented to them in dialogue, they can conclude a character is 

• a) boring, and therefore unworthy of getting to know better, or 
• b) a liar, and distrust them even if the author intended them to be trustworthy. 
  

If actions don't match inner monologue, the reader stops feeling like the characters are 'real'. Then they stop trusting the author to deliver a story that holds together, an alternate reality in which they can suspend disbelief in order to go on this fictional journey in safety and comfort. 

So it can be good exercise to pause on one of those movie or streaming shows that aren't fully satisfying you, and think what you would change to make the less emotionally believable actor seem more believable. Would you change where their hand is? What are their eyebrows are doing? Are they looking at or past the other person? Are they leaning inward or turning/pulling ever so slightly away?

It might still be a challenge to translate that into your written characters--to deliberately write a single amplifying micro-action in place of a generic action or a repetitive phrase of dialogue--but it's a powerful way to help readers engage with your story...to experience it through both actions and words, and ultimately through their visceral understanding of the characters' emotions. Working to make this a writing habit might be helpful for you, too, in getting around the parts of your writer brain that like to focus on inner monologue alone to show your characters to your readers.