Writing Complex Emotions In Deep POV: Shame

July 9, 2021 by Lisa Hall-Wilson 1 Comment

Deep POV is a fiction writing style that aims to remove the narrative or psychic distance between the reader and the point of view character — think first person shooter style. The goal is to completely immerse the reader in the character’s emotional experience, in a way that feels immediate. When done well, deep pov will grab your reader by the throat and not let go. But, deep pov leaves no place for weak writing, poor plotting, or under-developed characters to hide. Deep POV is the black-belt of fiction writing!

For the summer, I’m working on a series of posts that will look at different emotions. Emotions are really the heart of deep POV. Let’s take a quick minute to look at the role of emotions in deep POV and why it’s worth a whole summer of posts.

Omniscient POV

If you think of works written in omniscient pov, the narrator/writer voice tells the reader a story about one or a group of characters and shares everything the characters think and feel. Nothing comes to the reader directly from the character apart from spoken dialogue. An example would be Lord of the Rings.

Objective Third Person

This is still the writer/narrator telling the reader a story about one or more characters, but usually this style leaves out the emotions. It’s objective. You’ll get the character’s thoughts and actions filtered and interpreted through the narrator, but not very often will the narrator voice delve into how the character feels.

Limited or Close Third Person

This is the writer/narrator telling the story about ONE character at a time. That’s the big difference. There’s typically only one to three point of view characters, and you only get one pov at a time. The character’s thoughts and actions and emotions are filtered and summarized through the narrator, however — limited third person makes room for direct thoughts. Many like to italicize the thoughts of the characters to differentiate them from the narrator/writer voice. There are many newer writers who believe they’re writing in limited third person and they’re actually writing in objective third. Ask yourself what place emotions have in the storytelling?

Deep POV

Deep POV shifts everything, that’s why it can be so hard to learn. Every word on the page (every action, thought, feeling, bit of backstory, element of setting, every description — all of it) comes to the reader directly from the character. There is no author/narrator/writer voice to filter, describe, summarize or explain what’s going on. Hear me when I say this: N O N E. And the thread that makes deep POV really explode off the page, are the character’s emotions.

SHAME VS GUILT

If you google this, psychology sites are going to inundate you with a flood of conflicting answers. In fiction, there are primary and secondary emotions. Primary emotions are the gut reaction, without-thinking, knee-jerk responses to events, conflict, people, etc. Secondary emotions are the reactions to the primary emotions. Depending on the character and the situation, many emotions can be either primary or secondary (for the purposes of fiction), but some are almost ALWAYS secondary emotions. And shame is one of those (anger is another). Shame is almost always a reaction to another emotion.

Guilt and Shame are emotional cousins but there are distinctions — and the labels might not be particularly helpful for your writing but understanding the differences can be. Guilt can be good for us when it pushes us to change (our thinking or behaviour). Guilt can lead to regret, can lead to righteous anger, etc. Guilt says “I did a bad thing.” When I threw a ball in the living room and broke Mom’s favourite antique cup and she cried — I felt guilty. I won’t ever throw a ball in the house again.

False guilt is when we have negative feelings (real or perceived) about our own thoughts or actions, but you really had no control over those events or actions. I was texting in the backseat when the car hit a patch of black ice and we hit a tree. If I wasn’t texting in the backseat, Dad wouldn’t have had that accident.

Shame is not about something we did, it’s about who we are. Guilt says I did a bad thing. Shame says I’m a bad person. Shame can be placed on us by others and we can place it on ourselves through real or imagined perceptions of how others see us. Shame can arise from a loss of status or identity. You can’t just change your behaviour to get out from under shame like you can guilt. With shame, who you are is the problem. I am overweight, so that means I’m ugly, unlovable, and lazy. Or I was molested so I’m dirty and broken and unlovable.

Do you see the difference? Shame is debilitating.

Shame seems to be one of those really universal emotions that I don’t see writers delving into too much in fiction — which is a “shame” (hahaha – see what I did there) because it’s such a powerful, compelling, and rich-with-complexity emotion. This can (and in many cases should) be part of what drives characters to their absolute lowest moments.

https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Compass-of-shame-avoidant-behaviours-and-masking-emotions-Webb-2010-developed-from_fig1_282152685?fbclid=IwAR2N0tRbq6iF38wEpWFL7WtEvYXXNc-BellFV-gS7sBiVGAFkgIdJoATvt4

This is a really awesome graphic that shows the many ways we try to shake off shame. Shame is one of those emotions that we carry around, it sits like a rock on our chests, and we can’t get out from under it by avoiding it, or being logical, or ignoring it. The only way out from under shame is to acknowledge its concerns, and answer those concerns. Those who struggle with perfectionism are more prone to shame. Those who care (too much) about what other people think of them, are more prone to shame. Shame is the shadow that relentlessly haunts trauma victims and whispers — it was all your fault — you’re a failure — there’s no hope.

Writing Shame In Deep POV

Because there’s no author/narrator voice to summarize, explain, or narrate what’s going on inside your character, you must capture the emotions with enough realism and immediacy that the reader can understand not only how your character feels but why those emotions are driving their thoughts and behaviours.

The unique blend of primary emotions that fuels the shame will be unique to your character. That unique blend will carry with it different triggers, different coping mechanisms, etc. You can learn more about primary and secondary emotions here and more about coping mechanisms here.

Someone who feels shame about being overweight and unable to lose the weight, will have different triggers and sensitivities than someone who feels shame because they were abused – for instance. The actual emotion will feel the same, but the primary emotions behind it may be different. The intensity may be different. The reactions to the shame will be different. The way it causes disfunction or change will be different.

The key to deep POV is specificity and particularity. Put the reader in the scene with the character, in their shoes, inside their head — keep no secrets. Then the WHY behind the character’s thoughts and actions becomes clear without you needing the writer/narrator voice to TELL the reader what’s going on.

Don’t Be Afraid Of Complexity

So many times, I’ve encouraged students to delve deeper into the emotions in a scene. What ELSE is going on here? They create these dynamic, powerful, tension-filled events, and the character is simply afraid, or simply frustrated or simply angry. NO! Life is never that simple, is it? We have emotions that conflict, that amplify, that contradict one another. Emotions can be fleeting or last a lifetime. Get curious about that.
Ask not only what ELSE is the character feeling, but explore what a better person would do in this situation? Why can’t they be that person? What would a stronger person do ? What keeps them from doing that? Ask them what they think they SHOULD do in this situation? Why aren’t they doing that — OR — why isn’t that enough?

Shame is one of those emotions that should add this sort of complexity for readers.

Are you using shame in your writing? Do you find it easy or difficult to write shame really well?

What Is Your Character’s Emotional Kryptonite?

February 17, 2021 by Lisa Hall-Wilson 5 Comments

Emotions are complex, nuanced, and rarely linear. Most of us have a specific, painful, crunchy, emotion we’ll do almost anything to avoid — even if the avoidance is harmful or at the least not helpful. Psychology calls this “emotional avoidance.” When capturing your character(s) emotions, particularly when writing in deep POV, you must be willing to dive into that character’s lived experience in order to offer surprise and authenticity for readers with a visceral impact that creates emotional connections.

What Emotion Does Your Character HATE To Feel?

This may be linked to the story problem/stakes you’ve created, or it may be an identity issue that adds obstacles to resolving the character’s story problem. But this emotion must be specific and sometimes with a specific trigger.

And to the character, this specific emotion is intolerable. They will do anything to avoid feeling this way. One example that comes to mind are super heroes who forsake a romantic relationship because they’re afraid the “bad guys” would use their loved ones as leverage to hurt them.

They are partly concerned that others would be put in harms’ way simply for their association with them, but for a character who is otherwise mostly invincible — the fragility of the love from an ordinary person (one who might grow sick, or ill, or come to harm) is a vulnerability. They don’t understand or even WANT to understand vulnerability. They will live a solitary, lonely, existence to avoid this vulnerability.

woman in a thinking pose with the text: What is emotional context?

The Avoidance Of This Emotion Becomes Their Kryptonite

Whatever emotion the character will avoid at all costs, the avoidance of that can cause harm. The specifics of this will vary. For those characters who have a trauma background, they may be able to survive only because they’ve voted specific emotions off the island – so to speak. I’m not allowed to be angry. But their inability to access or use those emotions eventually causes harm, right. In the case of anger, there are physiological changes that take place when we become angry — there’s an adrenaline rush, faster heart rate, shorter breathing, etc. That doesn’t go away, they need to do something with those feelings.

Like anything else, anger serves a purpose. By refusing to become angry, your character will internalize that and turn it inward. Because anger is about regaining control often, avoiding this emotion may look like an eating disorder, self-harming, addiction or substance abuse, excessive exercise, or stringent self-denial (I can’t go out with friends, I don’t deserve to/haven’t earned that). These behaviours are, at their core, about regaining or maintaining a sense of control.

Additionally, anger can be a survival or safety warning. Anger leads to change, to standing up for yourself, to ending abuse, ending injustice. Anger can be a very positive emotion.

Make sure whatever is used to avoid the emotion makes sense to the character. If they fear a lack of control, they may seek out ways to feel like they’re always in control. If they fear feeling taken advantage of, they may take responsibility for everything, even things that could never be controlled. The character whose kryptonite is failure may become a workaholic, may avoid any activities where they’re not assured they’ll succeed, cheat/lie/steal in order to appear successful, or avoid the feeling through substance abuse.

Tangible Consequences For Emotional Avoidance

It’s not possible to avoid specific emotions for an entire lifetime and not pay a price for that in some tangible way. Suppressing emotions can lead to all kinds of physical ailments and problems due to anxiety and elevated stress levels such as ulcers, heart/chest pain, chronic aches or pains without a physical cause, and certain psychosomatic disorders like psoriasis, eczema, high blood pressure, heart disease, etc.

I read one story where a woman complained that she hated going to family gatherings. Therapist asked why? Well, everyone’s judging me, she says. The therapist explored that a bit – well, she was sure that her family knew she drank too much and were judging her. The family had never said anything to her about the drinking.

The therapist continued to explore this. She admitted that she drank too much because she didn’t want feel the loss/sadness of a recent breakup. In her opinion, the consequences of drinking too much was acceptable to avoid these emotions.

How To Destroy The Kryptonite

Superman has it easy, he simply has to put some space between him and the rock. In real life, what needs to happen is an integration of those emotions that have been voted off the island. You have to sit with them, acknowledge their concerns, and find a way to live with them without having them take over the train and cause a wreck down the tracks.

What would that integration look like for your character? Most times, these are problems you have to think your way out of. Do they have a good friend they can unload on? Do they have someone who will hold them accountable for their avoidance behaviours? Do the consequences of their avoidance behaviours force them to seek change? And maybe they don’t. Some people, like in the story above, would rather live with the consequences than deal with the hard crunchy emotions that hurt.

If you’re looking for more ideas on how to destroy the emotional kryptonite, try this post where I got the inspiration for this one from.

What is YOUR character’s emotional kryptonite?

Been told you should learn Deep Point Of View? Had an editor or critique partner tell you to “go deeper” with the emotions in your fiction? Looking for a community of writers seeking to create emotional connections with readers? Join the Going Deeper With Emotions In Fiction Facebook group.

Creating unique voices for multiple POV characters – and how to show their emotions

July 29, 2020 by Lisa Hall-Wilson 2 Comments

So excited to have Aiki Flinthart on the blog today. I’m recovering from knee surgery and Aiki generously stepped in for me and is sharing about creating unique characters. Aiki describes every pantser’s nightmare below, *grin* but don’t panic. You would go through all the same steps to pants your way through this, you’d just do it through a first draft and a lot of rewriting.

Be sure to check out Aiki’s book for writers (I’ve already ordered mine):

As authors, we all know that she who makes the reader cry, wins. If a reader connects strongly to your character, then they will react emotionally to the character’s conflicts.

But, for many genres, it’s not the external conflict the reader gets caught up in – it’s the internal conflict; the character’s feelings about what’s happening. That’s where the treasure lies.

So how do we ensure the reader cries when we want them to? Or laughs? Or gets angry?

By creating characters the reader identifies with in some way. Then showing how that character reacts, so the reader can easily imagine themselves in the story.

A Personal Challenge

A couple of years ago I wanted to improve my ability to write unique character voices, in close first person POV, with deep emotional connections for the readers.

Sounds good, huh?

Yep. Except that I like to make things hard for myself and chose to create a mosaic novel – a collection of intertwined short stories that all advance an overarching narrative.

But wait! It gets trickier.

Set in 1486 London, Blackbirds Sing consists of 24 short stories, each from a DIFFERENT woman’s POV. Each story is stand-alone, but also interlinked with the larger narrative (someone trying to kill Henry VII). And various POV characters pop in and out of each other’s stories for continuity.

One of my readers has called it the literary equivalent of a quadruple back somersault.

It certainly wasn’t easy.

And the hardest part was creating so many unique voices, unique backgrounds, and unique emotional reactions to conflicts. Twenty-four different characters that people cared about enough to cry over in just 4500-word short stories! Sheer madness.

Readers Bring Their Own Past Experiences To A Story

When the book came out, I sat back, biting my nails. Would it work?

Then I started getting message from readers. So many said they’d loved this character or that; cried at various points; stayed up all night reading.

You know what was most interesting?

Different readers cried over different characters.

I counted that as a win. It meant readers were bonding deeply with all the characters. They cared when terrible things happened to these women.

Here’s how it worked.

Planning Twenty-Four Unique Characters

To begin with, I ensured the overarching narrative, the novel’s theme, and the internal conflicts/character arcs for every POV character were all closely related. Then I made sure that each short story’s external conflict also revolved around the central, universal theme. (The sacrifices people make to protect their families, lives, livelihoods).

Next, I meticulously created the POV characters – resulting in a very large, complicated spreadsheet. (I’m sure there are better ways of doing that part!)

I started with their birth-personality (use whatever personality profiling system you like) then layered on backstory influences – traumas, culture, family life, physical and mental limitations/issues, mental health, wants, needs, occupation, etc etc.

Then I noted their dialogue and physical tics – the ways of speaking or moving that indicate to a reader which character is talking even if you’re not using dialogue tags. So every character had a unique way of speaking, favourite words they used, way of swearing – all of which reflected their upbringing, personality, and education.

And when they were under the influence of a strong emotion, their dialogue would change – perhaps become faster or choppy when they were angry; halting and hesitant when they were feeling vulnerable; sullen and monosyllabic when hurt; etc.

They also each had a unique stress-tell. A physical action to show the reader the character was upset or worried. Perhaps rubbing at their skirt, fiddling with hair, or twisting rosary beads etc.

Additionally, I worked out how they filtered the world – what they noticed around them. That’s usually based on either their occupation and hobbies/interests, or on their emotional state/priorities. A pessimistic work-a-holic girl who’s frightened and walking the streets alone at night will notice different things than a scatterbrained optimistic girl who’s partying on with a group of friends as she strolls home. The frightened girl will jump at noises and shadows that the party girl won’t even notice.

The spreadsheet noted each one of these traits for each of the 24 POV characters, so I could keep their reactions consistent.

Lastly, came 24 internet images – one for each woman – based on physical appearance and personality. If the character was 40-year-old dark haired woman with a happy-go-lucky optimist personality, I’d google ‘happy middle aged woman with dark hair’ until I found an image that suited. It helped to remind me of how she would most likely react to conflict, and how to describe her facial and body movements to reflect her emotions.

All of these things, when added in as little details to each scene, help immerse a reader into the character’s feelings without ever having to say, “Sarah felt frightened.”

Of course, not all characters need that level of creation information. But even listing personality, dialogue tics, and physical tics for a minion will help the reader to understand what each character is feeling, and to distinguish between various characters. Which, in turn, helps them connect with the one they love best.

Show Your Character’s Priorities – Don’t Get Distracted

Spend time creating a fully-fleshed human for your POV characters before you launch into writing the entire novel. Whether you use a spreadsheet or do some freewriting from that character’s POV, it doesn’t matter.

Just learn how each character thinks, reacts, swears, talks, moves etc. Then use that information to show the reader how the character feels about the conflict.

One more crucial thing: leave out the distractions – the details that don’t show us what’s important to the POV character.

Keep only what will make your reader understand or care more deeply about your POV character/s. Keep only what makes each character – each person – unique and fascinating. Keep only what will make us smile, or laugh, gasp, or cry.

What’s your process for creating unique character voices in a multiple POV story?

About Aiki:

Aiki Flinthart has 14 published speculative fiction novels, two collections of short fiction, two non-fiction author craft books, several short stories in anthologies and e-mags, a romance novel, and has edited several short story anthologies. She has been three times shortlisted in the Australian Aurealis Awards for Speculative Fiction, and a top-8 finalist in the USA Writers of the Future Competition. When not writing or running her business, she teaches workshops to authors, trains in martial arts, knife-throwing, archery, and lute-playing. Every once in a while she even sleeps. Find Aiki on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.

www.aikiflinthart.com

Using Defense Mechanisms To Create Emotional Depth In Fiction

April 30, 2020 by Lisa Hall-Wilson 1 Comment

This is part two to a post I wrote last week for Writers Helping Writers on giving characters emotional context.

Your character has a reason for feeling the way they do and reacting the way they do. In deep point of view, everything is filtered through your POV character’s perspective. What does this situation mean to THAT character, RIGHT NOW, based on their own unique past experiences, prejudices, fears/concerns, priorities, and goals (emotional context)?

We know that emotions serve a specific purpose – they’re always trying to keep us safe, protect us, or inform us of a concern. In last week’s post I talked about the kids at the table. Here’s what’s important to know – not every kid at the table represents an emotion. Some of the kids at the table will be defense mechanisms. Everyone has defense mechanisms they default to, some are chosen involuntarily, some we aren’t even consciously aware of. But all of that will show the reader a lot about who the character is and what’s important to them.

Defense mechanisms (or coping mechanisms) are emotions or behaviours that step in when we are faced with something that’s uncomfortable, overwhelming, that creates cognitive dissonance, or leaves us feeling vulnerable/exposed. Some defense mechanisms are learned (often in childhood), some are involuntary, and some are unconscious.

Let’s unpack that a bit. Emotions that are uncomfortable or overwhelming, or leave us vulnerable or feeling fearful will usually force the character to DO something to resolve the discomfort. Whether they choose to avoid the problem, channel it into exercise, fantasize about what they should have said, or rationalize why doing nothing is the right path, they will DO something to feel better. They will DO something to feel as though they’ve regained control of the situation or their emotions.

Cognitive dissonance is when we simultaneously have two or more conflicting beliefs and act against one. Your character meets this really great guy, she really likes him — but he got angry once and hit her. Does she marry him? There are two opposing ideas of safety at play here. Will she choose to remain alone (which she believes makes her vulnerable), or somehow rationalize, intellectualize, or even repress the violence? How does she make these opposing beliefs somehow appear to agree with each other?

Dig Down For The Primary Emotion

Your reader won’t ever understand why your character is mad if you don’t know. You might become frustrated that your beta readers aren’t getting it, but more likely you’ll fall back into telling to get the point across. Resist!! Primary emotions are emotional reactions to things that are instinctive or knee-jerk. Secondary emotions are the thinking reactions to primary emotions. Learn more about that here. Defense mechanisms can behave like a secondary emotion, but don’t be fooled.

A Google search might bring up a variety of lists of primary emotions and if that’s helpful to you that might be a place to start. There isn’t really a template here or definitive list to go by to tell you if something is a primary or secondary emotion.

Many many emotions can be either a primary or secondary emotion. Fear could be a primary emotion: Little dog has a barking fit and the character looks up from her weeding to see a bear in the yard. The bear moves towards her little dog so she picks up her trowel and pail, stands up and starts cursing and banging and yelling and waves her arms around at the bear. What makes her decide to behave that way? Fear is the primary emotion fuelling her reaction and then anger kicks in that the bear would threaten her dog.

The anger is a secondary emotion – it’s a reaction to the fear. But if all the readers know is that she’s trying to scare off the bear (which might seem irrational), they won’t understand WHY. If the readers don’t know that the reason she’s doing it is fear, because she lost other dogs to a bear not fear for her own safety, they won’t connect with her struggle.

Afterwards, the adrenaline has worn off, her pup is safe and the bear is gone. The fear won’t go away, it’s uncomfortable, it’s unsettling, she’s trembling, feels out of control, unsafe. She returns to her gardening like it never happened. She doesn’t choose to sit with the fear, or let it dissipate, she ignores it (defense mechanism).

Suppressing the fear should have consequences. Will it make her twitchy? Will she decide she no longer wants to garden? Will she put up a fence? Will she buy a gun? What will that suppressed emotion force her to do to make it soften back, to sit quietly at the table again?

Smoking can be a defense mechanism, and if it is — you can use it to SHOW how your character is feeling or what they’re avoiding feeling. Excessive exercise is another defense mechanism that can help you show readers that the character is struggling for control or trying to sort something out. A character who actively avoids a particular person or situation does that for a reason and it can create emotional depth for readers to understand why they do that. Alcohol and sleeping a lot are both defense mechanisms that attempt to numb emotions — show the WHY behind that behaviour.

I’ve created a list of 22 different defense mechanisms to help spark your imagination or provide a label for further research as well as a chart to help you brainstorm and organize how you’re using emotions and defense mechanisms. You can download it for FREE in the Resource Hub.

What defense mechanisms are you using in your current WIP? What emotions are they avoiding or trying to feel in control of?

Been told you should learn Deep Point Of View? Had an editor or critique partner tell you to “go deeper” with the emotions in your fiction? Looking for a community of writers seeking to create emotional connections with readers? Check out the Free Resource Hub and then join the Going Deeper With Emotions In Fiction Facebook group.

Brene Brown’s Guide To Creating An Emotional Arc Using Shame

April 30, 2019 by Lisa Hall-Wilson Leave a Comment

Shame is one of the most powerful and underused emotions in a fiction-writer’s toolbox. Shame is pervasive and common, it’s ugly and hard to capture well, but deep point of view is the perfect technique to use with this complex emotion. Readers cheer for characters who are relate-able, who stand up to bullies, who stay and fight when they don’t have to. They relate to characters who have flaws!

And shame is one emotion everyone studiously avoids, denies, and conceals and because of that can have some awful negative consequences like rage, anxiety, depression, emptiness, isolation, addiction, substance abuse, violence, bullying, suicide, eating disorders, etc.

Guilt says you did a bad thing. Shame says you’re a bad person.

This is an excerpt from a guest post – click here to read the whole post on Writers In The Storm.

How To Show And Not Tell Shame In Fiction

Brene Brown in her book Rising Strongdescribed shame as living with a rock on your chest. Shame feels like a crushing, inescapable weight on our chests, cutting off our air, knotting our guts, stealing our words, making us flushed. (The Emotion Thesaurus is a great resource.)

Whether your character starts off feeling shameful about something (past or present) and works to shake that off, or shame is something that they take on in the course of the story, the key to a shame emotion arc is what Brene Brown calls The Reckoning, The Rumble, and the Revolution. It looks a lot like the 3-act structure *smile*

In Rising Strong, Brown gives this example: “…Your face turns red and heat radiates from your chest when you learn that your boss gave the lead for a new project to your colleague.”

Here are two scenarios Brene poses to this emotional problem:

“My boss is an a—hole. Todd’s such a brownnoser. Who cares? This job sucks and this company is a joke.” This is the shame-train reaction—the knee-jerk, off-loading, emotional avoidance caused by shame. As long as your character stays here and never questions WHY they feel this angry, then your character is letting emotions they refuse to admit they feel to drive the shame-train.

“I’m so pissed about her giving the lead to Todd. I need to figure this out before I lose it with everyone on our team…” This curiosity begins the process below. There’s an inciting incident that causes the character to take a proactive step to get off the shame-train.

The 3 Act Structure For Writing Shame According To Brene Brown

The Reckoning: At some point in the story, your character decides to jump off the shame-train and gets curious. Why do I feel like this? Why am I reacting like this? Why do I think of x or y when this happens? Hopefully your character has a friend or ally with them. The Reckoning is about identifying and/or labelling the emotion or thinking that’s got them convinced they’re a bad person (put them on the floor of the arena).

The Reckoning is heart-breaking work because it’s one step forward and two steps back over and over. Their best thinking is what put that boulder on their chest (either as a reaction to something they did or is a survival mechanism to something done to them) to begin with and they’ve managed the rock by ignoring it was there altogether. Now that they acknowledge it’s there, life is going to get harder as they reckon with hard emotions they’ve trained themselves to numb or off-load onto others.

This kicks off The Rumble.

The Rumble:The Rumble is the shame-showdown. Now that your character acknowledges the thinking and emotions that have put them on the floor of the arena, now they’re going to THINK their way out from under the shame-boulder. But they’re acutely aware of those in the stands staring at them, at their repeated failure, their unworthiness.

The Rumble is about living with, allowing to well up, wrestling with the emotions they’ve avoided all this time. It means admitting they over-reacted. It’s about acknowledging emotions they might not understand or memories that seem unrelated that keep popping up. It’s doing the hard work of figuring out how they feel and WHY!

Now the character moves on to The Revolution.

The Revolution:Once the character has gotten the rock of shame off their chest, once they’ve rumbled with the emotions that put it there, now comes the revolution. They now must rebuild their self-esteem. This provides incredible character arc if you look for it. How does one let go of perfectionism? How does one learn to forgive themselves? What do they ask themselves as they stumble in The Rumble? That’s narrative gold, right there.

Questions To Ask Your Characters About Shame

What emotions does your character refuse to acknowledge they’re struggling with? Does the tomboy refuse to acknowledge the girly side that’s vulnerable? Does the warrior refuse to cry? WHY?

When something negative happens, we create the stories in our heads we expect to hear. We filter everything that’s said and done through how we believe we’re perceived even if there’s no evidence for that conclusion. How can a self-fulfilling prophecy of shame play into your story?

What thought does your character avoid having confirmed in any conflict or hurtful event?

What is your character’s go-to emotional substitution? Do they lash out in anger? Do they self-flagellate with destructive internal messages?

Been told you should learn Deep Point Of View? Had an editor or critique partner tell you to “go deeper” with the emotions in your fiction? Looking for a community of writers seeking to create emotional connections with readers? Check out the Free Resource Hub and then join the Going Deeper With Emotions In Fiction Facebook group.