Posts tagged euphoria

The more powerful an emotion is, the simpler the description should be.  If your character is at the saddest moment in their life, use clipped sentences and only deploy words with two syllables sparingly.  This seems counter-intuitive — this is something huge for the character and it needs a big, fantastic description.  If there’s any time to break out the purple prose, it’s when Emily is describing how incredibly happy she is, right?

The thing about powerful emotions, though, is that we can’t really think straight when we experience them.  The character will have a hard time making coherent sentences, and the narrator should be little better.  Raw emotions bring out the animal in us, and the animal in us isn’t any good at making metaphors.

You should aim for the words describing emotions to be far simpler than the usual prose.  Even in third person omniscient, the descriptions of emotions will sound phony if they make elaborate comparisons to angels and philosophy. 

If your characters are talking, they will not talk the way they usually do.  Their grammar will go out the window, and exclamation points will be the normal way to end their sentences.  People in real life don’t generally deliver elegant monologues while in the throes of rage, and neither should your characters.  Expect your characters to repeat themselves a lot, because once you’re trapped in an emotion, it’s hard to think of something different to say.

Emotions make thoughts simple.  The greater the emotion, the simpler the thoughts.

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