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It’s the dog days of summer and I live in Houston. It’s hot. I want some cool relief. I also want some cool relief from overly intense emotional fiction. I’m tired of the overwrought. For some writers, the very purpose of writing is to provoke the most intense emotional responses possible in the reader. In Jean-Luc Godard’s Pierrot le Fou, Sam Fuller, the famous director playing himself, sums up his attitude toward storytelling: “Film is like a battleground. Love, hate, action, violence, death. In one word, emotion!” I think many of today’s writers have taken this to heart. There is too much emotion set at too uniformly high a pitch.
In preparing this essay I came across hundreds of articles on how to make your writing more emotionally intense. I found virtually no articles on how to dial back the emotion, and why a writer would want to do so. Of course, there will always be a market for melodrama, with its cloying sentimentality; fainting damsels about to suffer fates worse than death; passionate confrontations, one after another; frequent cliffhangers, sacrificing plot coherence to the need to keep the audience’s passions feverishly aroused. This form is still the norm in operas, soap operas, and telenovelas.
To each his or her own, but I have no desire to read or write this type of melodrama. My fictional tastes run towards the much cooler end of the emotional spectrum. I enjoy detective fiction where the goal is to enjoy pure intellectual rational deduction featuring clockwork plots with intricate and sinuous plot twists. The coldly analytic Sherlock Holmes stories are obvious examples. I occasionally indulge in a cozy where the suspense and emotional intensity is set so low that the writer can take time out to explore the nuances of cooking the perfect scone. I enjoy hard science fiction (SF) where the author speculates about how humans or aliens will adapt to new technologies, and where the writer can take the time out to explore the nuances of orbital mechanics or terraforming if that’s integral to the plot. I’m fond of the atmospheric ghost stories of M. R. James, which provide mild chills when compared to the gut-wrenching terror provided by Stephen King or Clive Barker.
So there are types of literature where emotions sometimes need to be tamped down. Even in works that seek maximum emotional intensity, the writer will often want to dial things back, to allow the reader to recover from shocks, to make the emotional highs more intense by contrast with muted passages, or to allow for a slow but steady increase in the arc of suspense.
So, what techniques allow an author to artfully dial back emotional intensity?
1) Use distancing to mute the reader’s emotional reactions. Distancing is another layer of point of view (POV) similar to the different kinds of shots in motion pictures. Films constantly alternate between long shots, medium shots, and closeups. Long shots are used to set scenes, capture epic battles, sometimes to pull back from the action to allow cooler, more reflective moods into a film. Medium shots are used for interpersonal action. Lovemaking, kung fu fighting, courtroom cross-examination, etc. Closeups are used to bring us as close to a single character as possible to show us intense individual emotions. The writer, unlike a filmmaker, can go further than the closeup to gain emotional intimacy and intensity by going directly into a character’s soul and revealing their direct passions either with God-like third person insight or with a first person stream of consciousness.
Compare these descriptions of the same character and situation:
a. People familiar with the staid banker, Benjamin Kite, today may be surprised to learn that in his teen years he was more susceptible to female charms.
b. Benny saw Carol and fell immediately in love.
c. Benny felt his face flush. Carol was the most beautiful girl he’d ever seen. He told himself that he had to win her.
d. Benny thought, “Holy shit. What a fox. I’ve got to ask her out. But if she says no, I’ll die.”
If you’ve chosen a third person POV you can dial back emotions by using your authorial voice to pull back from the action, put the emotion in a wider context or farther back in nostalgic time. When you want to ramp up the emotion, zoom in on the character’s direct actions and emotional responses. If you are in a first person POV, the same options exist: to put (d) in first person just remove the “Benny thought”. (a) would read, “People today see me only as a staid banker. They would find it hard to believe that as a teen I was more susceptible to female charms.”
A good writer will continuously vary the zoom for the specific moment-by-moment needs of the story. A movie consisting of only highly emoting actors seen in extreme closeup would be unwatchable.
2) Tell, don’t show. If you want to dial down the emotion, take some time to just tell your reader things. Not everything has to be action or dialogue. In Moby Dick, Melville takes the whole of chapter forty-two to discuss the cross-cultural and literary association between the color white and death. Neal Stephenson, in his bestselling SF novel Seveneves, describes how to simulate gravity in space by linking two pods with a cable and spinning them around like a bolo. I doubt many SF readers were upset with him for taking the time to do so. Enjoying the descriptions of such technological strategies is part of the joy of SF. Writers are told that if they tell rather than show, readers will lose interest. That’s only true if what you have to tell them is of low interest. Tell them something fascinating occasionally, and they will love you for it.
3) Don’t forget the old standby of comic relief. There’s a reason Una O’Connor appears in the films The Invisible Man and The Bride of Frankenstein. She allows the audience a moment of laughter amidst the grim suspenseful doings. Unrelieved emotional tension numbs an audience. You can increase emotional payoff in a work’s key moments if you allow your reader to recharge their emotional batteries in between.
4) You can tamp down emotional intensity by reminding your reader that they are reading fiction. In a previous blog, I’ve dealt extensively with postmodernist and metafictional techniques designed to intentionally throw the reader out of full immersion and thus emotional involvement with a text. Authors as diverse as John Fowles, John Barth, and David Foster Wallace have often traded emotional immersion for spectacular intellectual prose fireworks. In theater, Bertholt Brecht advocated the use of distancing effects such as lighting the audience seats as brightly as the stage or breaking the fourth wall to address the audience directly. He wanted to inhibit the audience from an emotional involvement with the characters and allow them a purely intellectual appreciation of the systemic wrongs that were causing the characters’ dilemmas. He wanted his audience to act on what they had seen, something that might not happen if they wallowed in emotion as passive escapism or experienced an emotional catharsis that encouraged an acceptance of the status quo.
There are many other techniques an author can use to control the emotional intensity of their work. Sometimes, for the good of the whole, you have to ease back on the throttle. Doing so with artistry and finesse is what good writers do.
Learn more about Mark H. Phillips and his writing here.
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