emotional connections

I’m often asked HOW to go deeper in fiction. Even if you’re not writing in deep POV, there are always places in many scenes where you’re looking to show insight/motivation/desire, use subtext, create setting – in a deeper way. You’re setting or characters come alive on the page. Personification is one of those tools that every writer can use more effectively.

Personification is giving human-like qualities to non-human things.

The last piece of pie called his name.

The story jumped off the page.

Opportunity knocks.

Pie doesn’t talk. Stories can’t jump anymore than opportunity can knock on something. These are figurative meanings, but there’s a lot of variety and uses for personification and is a great way to be economical with your writing.

Personification can be used in a variety of ways: anthropomorphism (a non-human animal, object or deity literally acting like a human), pathetic fallacy (attributing human feelings to the natural world), embodiment (a person or thing is representative of an abstract concept – she is integrity itself), etc.

Personification is efficient – it can create both setting and mood for instance. A simple phrase can carry a lot of weight with readers and create mental pictures.

Use Personification For Setting

The environments we find ourselves in can be varied and particular, but by infusing those everyday things with emotions or human qualities, we add emotional depth to our writing. You can avoid the dreaded lists of description by using personification to show how your character is feeling, what they think/feel about the place they’re in or what they’re about to face. Show what the character is focused on or prioritizing.

I live in Canada and we have many descriptors for snow: whiteout, blizzard, flurry, squall, powder, slush, packing, frost, flake… Each descriptor dials in on intensity, impact/disruption, potential for damage, etc. Snow can cover the land in a crisp clean blanket, trace every branch with glittering frost, or cause multi-car pileups and kill with hypothermia. Now imbue some emotion or human qualities into those pictures.

The snow danced in the air, melting on my skin like a soft cool kiss.

The snow pelted my face, a thousand tiny needles freezing my face on impact.

Personification gives the setting mood, tone, and intent. How your character perceives the world around them, is it for them or against them, can show the reader the character’s mood, priorities, expectations, etc.

A man running through the woods for his life could perceive that the trees hide and shelter him. Or, he could interpret that the branches pull and tear at his clothes and skin, slowing him down. Be intentional and strategic with your word choices.

Personification Provides Immersive Sensory Details

Neil Gaiman writes, “Personification is an effective tool for placing the reader in the story with a 360° view of the setting. In Bleak House, Charles Dickens describes a thick fog settling as rolling, hovering, creeping, and ‘cruelly pinching’ the toes and fingers of a boy.” (source here)

A warrior waits on the brink of a battle. How do they feel about what’s to happen? About why they’re there? How do previous battle experiences influence their priorities, goals, motivations, and fears? You could use backstory, you could use a flashback, or you could use personification.

Zerynthia bounced on her toes and cracked her neck. Sucked in a long breath and exhaled. The leaves waved their encouragement and the sun pushed away the rain clouds and chased off the lingering shadows.

Can you picture her on the edge of battle, ready but nervous, and the trees with their waving fluttering leaves? The sun could stand in for some deity’s support perhaps. How does she feel about being there, about how her chances in the battle?

Personification Uses Subtext And Connotation

Subtext is what’s going on beyond what’s been said – it’s black-belt writing level. Use personification to show how a character feels, create a specific mood. Use connotation, the baggage that comes with a word beyond it’s surface meaning to evoke imagery and/or emotion.

If a character is in a forced labour camp, that invokes a particular kind of image. If the character is in a concentration camp, the connotation of that sends us back to 1940s Nazi Germany, even though technically a concentration camp was often a forced labour camp. See how connotation works?

Your character walks up to a house. How you describe that walk, the house, the weather, all of it creates this immersive effect for readers.

The house might loom, glare, impose its shadow, stand immovable against time, or keep secrets. Is the house cheerful or tired? Maybe the house has a veneer, a false façade? Does the character trudge, skip, drag their heels?

Using connotation, each of those descriptions add additional meaning on top of the personified meaning. The house that looms lends the impression of dread, vulnerability, inadequacy, shame, etc. That same house could stretch up to the sky stalwart against the effects of time. To a character who hates change, that might mean something comforting. To a character fighting tradition, this upcoming scene would feel like an inevitable failure is about to happen.

If the tired house leans over the broken walk, do you need to describe every broken shutter or missing shingle for the reader to understand how the how the house looks, or how the character perceives it? What’s fun is to then juxtapose the POV character’s perception of something against another character’s. The tired house with the broken walk might evoke hopelessness or dismissal from the POV character, but to another character that house offers opportunity, restoration, excitement.

Personification Easily Falls Into Cliché

Be vigilant to avoid cliché unless you’re using it intentionally to add meaning. Always build in surprise for readers. Give readers two plus two, don’t simply tell readers the answer is four. Show what the character takes in and let the reader do the math. Create an immersive experience where the reader has to lean in and care, to sympathize, to cheer for the characters because they know how this feels!

Emotions are universal across time and geography. The expression of those emotions, the understanding, social acceptability, of emotions is what changes. The reader may not know what it’s like to have a sword in hand and fight Vikings trying to destroy their village, but they understand being the underdog, they understand loss and fear.

Do you regularly make use of personification in your writing?

Something I’ve observed over the last two years or so is how different personalities react to uncertainty. Very little about life is certain, that’s always been true, but when the stakes are raised different personalities handle uncertainty in varied ways that can create all sorts of really compelling internal conflict. So how can you use this for your characters?

What Is Uncertainty?

Most of us can probably parse out what uncertainty means, many of us are word nerds after all. Uncertainty is a situation in which something is unknown or unknowable. Simple enough. But let me take you through a brief thought exercise that helped me wrap my head about this idea that on the surface appears simple but is astoundingly complex.

I googled a bunch of synonyms for uncertainty because I was curious about the true scope of what uncertainty includes. These are a few of the results I found: doubt, confusion, upheaval, unpredictable, unreliable, precarious, variable, ambiguous, concern, distrust, suspicion, skeptical, conjecture, indecision, hesitant, prolongation, wanderlust…

Now, as word nerds we can look at that list and understand how context, connotation, and nuance lends to meaning. Upheaval and indecision are very different, but inherent in both is this element of uncertainty. Do you see where I’m going with this? Uncertainty runs through almost every aspect of life and how your character deals with uncertainty can really increase the stakes for readers.

Let’s get more curious about this and see how this can add emotional depth to our fiction.

Personality Types And Uncertainty

There are several popular personality typing systems out there, and diving into each one with their multiple descriptions and labels is just a time-wasting rabbit hole in this context. Instead, I poured over three of the bigger ones to try and parse out five different ways that the various personality types are said to respond to uncertainty. These are just how I interpreted those personality descriptions, it’s completely generalized, but I wanted to focus in on the WHY behind each response to uncertainty, because that nuanced information is really helpful to writers.

The WHY helps us understand the character’s priority, their goals with certain behaviours or thinking patterns, predispositions to react in specific ways — but then you force them to find another way through the problem, you remove the crutches, the familiarity, and BOOM! Instant tension.

Order And Predictability

These types find uncertainty extremely difficult and the way to a sense of safety is through a step-by-step process, a rigid structure (either self-created or imported from other sources). They may doggedly follow (or break) rules to fit into their chosen structure. Their focus is on safety (like many of the others below), but the WHY seems to be a need for a guarantee. There is very little or no tolerance for uncertainty of any kind.

From their trust in the process, they can find ways to help or offer pragmatic solutions. Helping is used as a distraction from the uncertainty, the helping isn’t the WHY behind their actions or thinking. When those processes don’t work as promised or predicted, anger and resentment follows and they shift the blame because the process can’t be the problem or weak point.

Intellectuals Who Question Everything

I’ve observed two general types of intellectuals and they’re both excited or energized by uncertainty and change. They see opportunity instead of calamity and it fires up their out-of-the-box thinking. These types can appear spontaneous, but every decision has been thought out, they just rarely bother to include others in the thought processes (think Sherlock Holmes).

Those more prone to analysis, their WHY is a solution. Iron Man comes to mind. “Things are gonna get weird.” They will turn to research and raw data and experimentation to find the solution. They are constantly looking to make things more efficient or streamlined or scaling things, creating uncertainty even where none appears to exist, but if solutions remain elusive, if overwhelmed or lacking agency, their focus gets very very narrow and depression can set in. Their solutions can drift to focus on “the greater good” without thought to consequence or costs.

Those intellectuals who lean more to towards philosophy than analysis (my own explanations) are collectors of knowledge so turn to research because their WHY is truth (more Dr. Banner than Iron Man). Once they know the truth, they can make a decision but no source of info is off the table – raw data, conspiracy theories, expert opinions, personal experience, historical records — they’re going to research and read all the things and then decide for themselves. But if the truth remains elusive, if they can’t parse out the truth from the varied sources available to them, they throw up their hands and can become fatalistic. What’s it all mean?

Both types may qualify their opinions by acknowledging that new information may present itself, or that things might change, or they can’t know everything, While these types are skeptical by nature, they aren’t cynics.

The Sky Is Falling Cynics

Cynics face uncertainty with negative-bias split decisions. There is no uncertainty. By expecting the worst, by assuming the world is against them, their focus is protection. They tend to eliminate uncertainty by creating a narrative, but that narrative brings tension rather than comfort. They tend to have a negative view overall, so they blame corruption, abuse of power, someone is untrustworthy, something is broken or unjust — things that are outside their perceived ability to control or change. The focus is protection, but their WHY seems to be avoiding guilt, shame, responsibility, etc.

Now, a caveat to this is trauma. Someone facing uncertainty who is viewing the world through a trauma lens, their focus is on preventing what happened before at all costs and their WHY is a perceived sense of control. They tend not to trust anyone. They doubt everything that’s said to them, because they’ve been lied to, gaslighted, etc. Often, they struggle to even trust themselves because they may have believed the lies or they learned to ignore emotional or physical pain. An almost universal sense of helplessness appears to others as fatalism. For childhood trauma, all kinds of things lend to a play-dead response because fighting back or running away wasn’t an option.

So, a trauma survivor may be predisposed to one of the other uncertainty personality responses, but this trauma response will either be overlaid or in conflict with that.

The Avoiders And Optimists

Uncertainty causes some profound discomfort so they isolate and insulate. The avoiders flatly deny the uncertainty exists even when it makes them look irrational. Some take a very laid-back approach and decide to keep their heads down and just wait things out and see where the dust settles. The optimists are the perpetual silver-linings types, meme-warriors and inspirational quote-collectors. All of these types focus on personal safety, but their WHY is internal peace and that’s an important distinction.

From within that place of safety and internal peace, some are able to engage their out-of-the-box thinking to create or find solutions – so they may appear to be intellectual analysts but their WHY is different so that would change their internal conflict and internal dialogue. Some divert energy into finding/offering hope to others (this could be a tangible help, but it doesn’t have to be). They are more prone to sympathize without empathy (because true empathy would threaten that inner peace), but mature individuals and/or those with strong support systems are able to empathize and offer powerful help to others. When overwhelmed, this type can lean towards cynicism.

So, those are my big picture classifications based on reading the way different personality-typing systems describe a tolerance for and approach to uncertainty. The focus and the WHY are the key take-aways here because that’s how you can make your character’s journey unique and individual. That’s how you can SHOW the reader why they’re making decisions, their priorities, etc. Your next steps would be to take these basic groupings, and decide what response best fits with your character and then how uncertainty creates internal conflict for them. You could go a step farther and take away the option of responding in the way that comes naturally — remove the option for the denier to deny, remove the option of the intellectual to find a solution or parse out the truth.

Lisa’s 5 week masterclass on learning to write deep pov launches January 24, 2022. Find more info here. This class will also run in April and October of 2022.

Is there one type, or a blending of types, that you’re using for your POV character?

Go Deeper Writing Fiction With Personification