This swirling often creates a more compelling interior emotional landscape - the human heart in conflict with itself, which Faulkner said was the only thing worth writing about. It’s a way to portray emotions that transcend simply happy or sad or anxious and instead swirl together a whole host of others that are more intense and nuanced and ambivalent. Doing so creates the potential to explore interiority at a greater depth than what’s afforded by mere exposition. In other words, indirection of image is a way to take abstract emotions and project them onto something concrete. Something as simple as a car parked on the street surely looks different to a lottery winner than to someone who just got evicted. By indirection of image, I mean an instance in which a writer takes into consideration how a certain character would see (or, for that matter, smell/hear/etc.) a particular setting or image based on his/her emotional state. Something as simple as a car parked on the street surely looks different to a lottery winner than to someone who just got evicted.Ī third option - what I’ll call indirection of image - is often a more successful approach, especially in crisis moments in a story, when emotions are most charged and complex. Such straightforward descriptions, even when accompanied by metaphor, rarely provide any greater nuance of emotional experience and usually pull me out of a story’s fictitious world rather than draw me into it. The most obvious alternative - a lengthy expository digression into the psyche of a character, perhaps accompanied by physical cues, i.e., So-and-so felt more upset than she’d felt in her entire life, so upset she thought she might die, her stomach was in a knot, her throat was on fire… generally proves detrimental to how I experience the story. But rarely are such basic expositions enough to make me feel known as a reader, to illuminate aspects of my own experiences that I didn’t yet understand or couldn’t yet articulate. There are occasions in fiction where it’s perfectly appropriate for a narrator to say, So-and-so felt sad/happy/anxious. Considering how powerful that emotional connection between reader and character can prove, and how empty a story can feel without it, it’s vital that the writer bridge the distance between reader and character in ways that are subtle and inconspicuous - unless, of course, an author has some higher purpose in being intentionally conspicuous - rather than clumsy, so as not to call attention to the writer’s hand at work and thereby break the fictitious world of the story, what John Gardner dubbed the ‘narrative dream.’īut how does one accomplish this? It depends on the circumstance, of course. Revealing the interiority of a character in a way that feels natural, yet resonates powerfully within a reader is one of the most difficult tasks of the fiction writer. Sign up for our newsletter to get submission announcements and stay on top of our best work.
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