Emotion drives a story. With every word written the reader must be convinced that he/she cares, or that he/she will probably care further in.
Energy: Potential and Kinetic
Physics students learn about the concept of potential and kinetic energy early on. The idea is that potential and kinetic energy must always balance. A ball held over a cliff has potential energy: the same as the kinetic energy of it falling to the ground from the same position. An unmoving ball doesn’t look very energetic. But someone’s arm has to do work in order to keep it from falling (if you’re not sure about this, pick something up and hold your arm straight out in front of you for a few minutes).
Every object in a gravitational field has potential energy. The book on your desk (not on the floor, or in the basement, or being dropped down an abyss towards the center of the earth); the hands suspended over your keyboard; a plane in the sky; &etc. Work must be done by humans or objects to keep these things from dropping. Once it is dropping, we call its energy kinetic. A moving object (relative to some stationary object) has a kind of obvious energy that catches the eye, and is more about following the motion than imagining future or prior motion.
If we say that the energy of a story is its emotion, and the progression towards the climax is like a gravitational field (pulling one in one direction), then the kinetic energy of a story is action as directed by the choices and reflections of the character.
The potential energy of a story is imagery. Images exist in the gravitational field that is the progression of your story as well as other fields which exert force on those images, like the perspective of the characters, the background story, and the world. For non-physicists, a good word for the combination of plot, perspective, background, and the world is context. Images are being acted upon, albeit invisibly, by the context of the story. That is, every object in a story can convey meaning and be used to evoke emotion.
I Second That Emotion: Action and Imagery
Emotion can be expressed through both direct and indirect action. When Bernadette, a down-on-her-luck-forever malcontent who derives pleasure from the failure of others concocts elaborate fantasies of her friends and family meeting various forms of doom, that is indirect action as told in the story. When it turns out Bernadette is a subject in a top-secret experiment whose particular fantasies trigger real events to occur, the progression of those real events is direct action. When Bernadette reflects on family and friends who abandoned her when she needed them and hence (in her view) placed her on a hardscrabble road, that’s indirect action.
Emotion can also be expressed through imagery. First, let’s define imagery, since this seems to be something many writers (beginners and seasoned folk) disagree on. Imagery and description are not equivalent. Description is a guy rattling off every detail in the world, like a novice photographer with no sense for composition, lighting, and so forth. What makes a photograph (image) good? In some way it tells a full or a fragment of a story; it provides texture and context; it conveys a concept.
Stories are about emotion. If readers don’t care—aren’t emotionally invested—in characters/plot/concept, then you’ve merely copied the minutes of some or many meetings of your characters. There is no story.
Texture and context evoke emotion (think acrobats performing in a souq in Marrakech vs. a checker-clothed table of apple pies at a fair on a dewy Massachusetts morning). Texture and context are so much more than that, because they also evoke specific emotion depending on whose perspective we’re seeing the story through—to one character the souq might be familiar and comforting, and the New England fair confusing and stiff.
Concepts evoke emotion. Why would you say black mountains against a cobalt sky were the sails of a ship coasting through midnight seas? Even ‘midnight seas’ lends a particular image: silent, black/dark blue/blue-purple/gray, glittering stars, buffeting wind, fresh air, swoosh, splish of waves cresting and dying. What do you feel about the black mountains? It depends on the story. If the protagonist is a fugitive, and we’re in his perspective, those mountains-as-ships might be ominous, emblems of eternal movement. Even though he’s in a peaceful place so does the dark ship seem peaceful as it races towards its destination. Suddenly the black mountains-as-ships have evoked an emotion: they’ve become part of the story.
Good imagery is like an award-winning photograph in National Geographic paired with two perspectives, the perspective character and the reader. Fashioning a good image or emblem needs to take both perspectives into account, though I’d argue the well-fashioned image experienced by the perspective character should be able to evoke emotion in nearly any reader.
Stories are about emotion. A story can hook all the emotion into action, but might very well make the reader feel rushed and disconnected, like a stone skipping across the water. A story can hook all the emotion into imagery, but it might make the reader feel mired in mud (albeit beautiful mud). As usual, the decision whether to evoke emotion using imagery or action depends on the requirements of the scene, the character, the scenes before and after it, the author’s voice, and a hundred other variables. A story is a long poem, textured, with its own rhythm, bubbles, and valleys.
Will the fugitive notice aspects of his surroundings that reflect his own innermost fears and desires? Probably. Will he see the same black sails rushing towards him every night when he goes outside to smoke a cigarette in the shadow of the mountains? Perhaps. Is the story’s emotion augmented when you use imagery and emblems to reinforce the fears and desires of your characters? Probably. Will it fall flat if you ignore imagery and emblems altogether? Maybe.
Using imagery to deepen the emotion of a story might be the difference between, “I can’t connect with the characters,” and “Congratulations on the publication of your story;” or “This is a sellable book,” and “This is an award-winning (sellable) book.”
Stories are about emotion. Readers need a reason to care enough to read a story in the first place. Stories are also about creating art, an image, a poem, that unforgettable photograph in National Geographic. Anyone can paint. Not every painter is an artist. Anyone can snap photos. Not every photographer is an artist. Anyone can pound out a story. Learning to weave evocative imagery into a story can tranform a writer into an artist.
An idea might not be original, but a well-thought-out approach surely will be.
Some time ago I read the first fifty pages of Swain’s Techniques of the Selling Writer. It was good; I stopped reading not on its demerits but because I was itching to start a new rough draft. There were lots of gems I took from those first fifty, some enshrined in ink-and-post-it fame on the wall above my desk. One gem above all others has reared its significant head from time to time in my own writing:
