Today’s guest post is by Angela Ackerman (@AngelaAckerman), co-author of The Emotion Thesaurus: A Writer’s Guide to Character Expression (Second Edition)
Crafting characters that readers will connect to is every writer’s goal and dozens (hundreds?) of methods exist to achieve it: deep backstory planning, character profile sheets, questionnaires, etc.
Regardless of the roadmap a writer uses, writing an authentic character boils down to one important action: intentionally drawing from the real world, and specifically, the human experience.
The human experience is powerful, an emotional tidal wave that holds us in thrall. We understand it, relate to it, and live it. This is why, even when a character faces a challenge, barrier, or struggle that readers have not experienced in the real world, they can imagine it and place themselves within the folds of the character’s viewpoint.
Portraying an accurate mirror of humanity in fiction means we must master emotions. Getting raw feelings on the page isn’t done solely through a character’s shrug or smile; instead, a marriage of internal and external elements should show readers what is being felt and why. Body language, behavior, dialogue, vocal cues, thoughts, and internal sensations weave together to draw readers into the character’s emotional landscape.
Showing a character’s emotions isn’t always easy, especially when powerful emotions are at work. Characters may feel exposed or unsafe and instinctively try to repress or disguise what they feel. This creates a big challenge for writers: how do we show readers what the character is feeling when they are trying so hard to hide it?
Thankfully again, the human experience comes to the rescue. If a character is repressing an emotion, real-world behaviors can show it. Readers will catch on because they’ll recognize their own attempts to hide their feelings. Here’s a few ideas.
Over- and Underreactions
When you’ve done the background work on a character, you know how they’ll react to ordinary stimuli and will be able to write reliable responses. Readers become familiar with the character’s emotional range and have an idea what to expect. So when the character responds to a situation in an unexpected way, it sends up an alert for readers that says, “Pay attention! This is important.”
A character may fly off the handle at something that seems benign or behave subdued in a situation that should have them upset. When this happens, these unusual responses signal that something more is going on, and the reader is hooked, wanting to uncover the why behind this unexpected behavior.
Tics and Tells
No matter how adept a character is at hiding their feelings, they all have their own tells— subtle and unintentional mannerisms that hint at deception. As the author, you should know your characters intimately. Take a close look at them and figure out what might happen with their body when they’re being dishonest. It could be a physical signal or behavior, such as covering the mouth, spinning a wedding ring, or hiding the hands from view. Maybe it’s a vocal cue like throat-clearing. It might be a true tic, like a muscle twitch or excessive blinking. Figure out what makes sense for your character, then employ that tell when they’re hiding something. Readers will pick up on it and realize that, when it’s in play, everything is not as it seems.
Fight, Flight, or Freeze Responses
In the most general sense, the fight-flight-freeze response is the body’s physiological reaction to a real or perceived threat. We see this in everyday interactions: when a person invades someone’s space, stops what they’re doing mid-action, or literally flees the scene. It also happens on a smaller scale in our conversations. Remember that every character has a purpose for engaging with others. When that purpose is threatened, or the character feels unsafe, the fight-flight-freeze reflex kicks in.
- Fight responses are confrontational in nature and may include the character turning toward an opponent to face them directly, squaring up her body to make herself look bigger, or insulting the person to put them on the offensive.
- Characters who lean toward flight will have reactions centering around escape: changing the subject, disengaging from a conversation, or fabricating a reason to leave.
- If the character’s fear or anxiety is triggered, they may simply freeze up, losing their ability to process the situation or find the words they need until something external happens to free them.
Passive-Aggressive Reactions
Passive aggression is a covert way of expressing anger. If a character is angry but doesn’t feel comfortable showing it, they’ll often default to certain techniques that will allow them to get back at the person without revealing how they really feel. By employing sarcasm, framing insults as jokes, giving backhanding compliments, and not saying what they really mean (We’re good or I’ll get right on that), characters are able to express their feelings in an underhanded way that others may not recognize or know how to deal with. This can be a tricky technique to use, because, by definition, passive aggression masks the truth. But you can reveal it through a character’s thoughts, the physical signals they exhibit in private (particularly just after an interaction), and the cues they express when the other person isn’t looking.
Incongruencies
The most common way to show hidden feelings is to highlight the incongruency that occurs when the character tries to mask one emotion by adopting the behavior of another. Imagine a character saying “Come in, I’d love for us to visit” but their body betrays the untruth of these words, perhaps through a strained voice, by closing of the door an inch rather than pulling it open wider in welcome, or by the keyring in their fist with the largest key thrusting out between two knuckles like a weapon.
If the reader is in the character’s POV, thoughts can also counterweight behavior or to provide context if the character is hiding true emotions out of fear. Incongruencies work well because all people use them to maintain the status quo in a relationship or stabilize a situation.
Note from Jane: Want more help showing hidden emotion? Check out The Emotion Thesaurus: A Writer’s Guide to Character Expression (Second Edition) with description ideas for over 130 different emotions (view the complete list), including suppressed responses.
Also helpful: One Stop for Writers’ checklists on Showing Hidden Emotions, Expressing Emotions Through Body Language, and Show & Tell—free to download.
Angela Ackerman is a writing coach, international speaker, and co-author of The Emotion Thesaurus: A Writer’s Guide to Character Expression and its many sequels. Available in ten languages, her guides are sourced by universities, recommended by agents and editors, and are used by novelists, screenwriters, and psychologists around the world. Angela is also the co-founder of the popular site Writers Helping Writers, as well as One Stop for Writers, a portal to game-changing tools and resources that enable writers to craft powerful fiction.