“Hi Susie. Um, Susie?” Sally sat down in a chair opposite me, handed me a coffee. “Kathy said you’d forgotten this.”

I took it, tearing my eyes from the woman I’d been watching across the room. She wore a pair of sweatpants, the baggy kind, an oversized sweatshirt and a bandanna over her hair. Curled up in a leather chair, she was drinking coffee while buried in a novel.

I sighed. “I want to be her. Just take a day off and read.”

“That’s apparent, by the look on your face,” Sally said. “I know you’ve been busy these past few weeks – hello, I completely feel abandoned, but you look like you want to go rip that book from her hands, push her out of the chair and take her place.”

“I do. Which brings me to our conversation point today. We were talking last month about how to layer emotion into your scene. I gave some hints about how to use storyworld to trick your reader into adding mood to the scene. Today, we’re going to talk about using other people.

“I love to watch people. Especially in an airport. Yes, I admit I compare myself to others—“

Sally nodded, “It’s a woman thing, I think.”

“Right. I have discovered that it’s a great way to reveal the emotional landscape of a character. See, we often project how we feel in how we might describe a character. If I were writing a novel about a stressed woman, who sees the casual reader in the corner, I might say:

Across the room, a woman in sloppy sweatpants, without a care to her hair, tied up in a bandanna, sipped a tall cup of coffee. Her nose buried in a book, she appeared oblivious to the chaos, the line of customers, the patrons barking into their cell phones, the sense of urgency as customers waited for their coffee, checking their watches and email on their smartphones. She had pulled her knees up, curled onto the leather chair and peered into her novel, a calm, almost peaceful expression on her face. Susie wanted to know what novel might be so good it could pull her free from all the commotion. 

“Do you sense a touch of jealousy from the POV character? She almost portrays this woman as irresponsible at first, and then adds in a wistfulness as she wants to know how to have this also.”

This powerful emotional layer technique takes a person in the setting and uses it in two ways. 

First, use these other people like a mirror to your character’s emotional state: 

This is from a book called the Second Coming of Lucy Hatch; about a woman who longs to figure out how to live away when her husband dies, and discovers that she never really did. Her description of a local country singer, Ash Farrell, is juxtaposed to the dismal life she has lived.

A flashbulb went off, illuminating the fact onstage, igniting an image from some dim, long buried corner of my memory. Ash Farrell. 

If I’d given him any thought at all, I have picture him on his bike, flying down some wooded highway with his guitar strapped to his back, his hair whipping clean back from his face as the center stripe beneath him blurred to solid white, taking him away from the rest of us and our small finite lives; I would not have thought East Texas could hold him.

“Really, she’s wondering how it held her all this time.

“Another way to use other people is to juxtapose them with the character. Here’s another line from Lucy Hatch – she’s in grief, but she sees her mother, also in grief… 

She wandered the house in a dirty satin negligee, drinking whiskey out of a jelly glass…her future dragging behind her in the tail of her ratty robe. 

“We don’t have to have Lucy tell us that she doesn’t want to be like that. This technique is just a matter of letting your character see someone who embodies the same or opposite emotion as your character, and letting them describe them in their voice, adding inflection, opinion, and using strong verbs and nouns to convey that emotion.

“Try this: look around the scene. Who do you have in the scene who might have been there, done that, in terms of your character’s emotions. What do they look like now? Or, is there someone your character would like to emulate? Or even, is there someone your character would never want to be?

“This is another way to “trick” your reader by layering in the emotions of your character without naming them, but rather bouncing them off an ancillary character.”

But Sally wasn’t listening anymore. She too was staring at the woman in the corner. “What book is she reading?”

Truth: People can act as emotional mirrors, reflecting the POV character’s emotions in a scene. 

Dare: Pick one person in your scene and use them as a short emotional prop. 

Next Monday, we’ll continue this discussion with the strongest way to show emotions: ACTION!

Susie May

P.S. If you’re headed to a conference, check out the new MBT book: The Truth about Conferences! How to have a successful writers conference! http://thetruthaboutconferences.mybooktherapy.com