You texted the wrong person—you blush—you feel embarrassed. A snake slithers toward you—you lurch backward and hyperventilate—you feel afraid. You scored a soccer goal—you pump your fist—you feel elated.
In Science
Note the order: stimulus—physical response—emotion. It’s as if your body knows, in advance, how you’re about to feel. According to scientists, it does.
Your body reacts first, before your brain feels an emotion. How can your body react so fast and your brain lag so far behind? If our mighty brain distinguishes us from other animals, why that slow response?
Rather than a bug in the system, think of it as a feature. Our species evolved to prioritize readiness over reflection, survival over sentiment. This post by Christine Walter and this post by the Eastside Counseling Center discuss the phenomenon in more detail.
In Fiction
Knowing this human characteristic, how do fiction writers exploit it? How can you use it in your stories?
In books, characters often respond to a stimulus—an event or spoken dialogue. A given character’s body reacts in an instant, most often in an appropriate and unconscious way. That physical reaction may or may not be noticeable to other characters. A moment later, the character feels one or more emotions.
For Point-of-View characters, the writer may (or may not) state the emotion felt. For non-POV characters, the writer must convey their emotions in a second-hand way—by physical actions, tone of voice, word choice, etc.
Sabyasachi Roy expressed these ideas well in this post.
Show, Don’t Tell
A writer may omit naming the emotion, allowing the reader to infer it. Often, the bodily reaction suffices to inform the reader what the character is feeling. Flared nostrils, bared teeth, and flinty eyes convey enough without having to state the character’s anger.
Not only does showing the body reaction make it unnecessary to tell the emotion, it makes for superior story-telling. Readers want to feel emotions along with the characters. Show readers the tingling of a spine, the gasp, the shallow sigh. Don’t just tell us the character felt scared, awed, or nostalgic. In fact, avoid naming emotions at all—allow readers to feel them.
The Emotion Thesaurus
While writing, I struggle to think of the appropriate bodily reactions for a given emotion, especially if I’m not feeling it myself. The Emotion Thesaurus by Angela Ackerman and Becca Puglisi rescues me every time. This valuable resource provides lists of physical signals for seventy-five emotions. Look up the feeling and peruse the list of bodily reactions. A given character won’t display all the physical signals on the list, so select one or two appropriate ones. You needn’t describe the bodily reaction the same way the thesaurus does. Choose your own words. The book serves as a catalyst for your creativity.
Leaning back in my chair, hands clasped behind my head, smiling as I review this post, I’m—
Poseidon’s Scribe
