Customer Reviews

Creating Character Emotions

5 star:		(8)
4 star:		(7)
3 star:		(13)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

Creating Character Emotions is broken up into different sections like Anger, Happiness and Love.

It's easy to flip to the section you want and read that particular chapter. Ann Hood offers a "GOOD" and "BAD" example of writing on that particular subject. There are even exercises at the end of each chapter so you can try your own hand at creating emotions.

However, the sections are short and don't offer a complete explanation to give you the writing edge. It really just touches base with the emotion and how to write about it without offering a deeper sense of "creating character emotions."

The last few books I bought and read on writing from Amazon.com were excellent and I started this with high hopes. Unfortunately, I started skimming about three-fourths of the way through and ended up skipping the last couple chapters.

This book has a fault I have noticed with others. When they quote another work, it always falls flat. The quotes are taken out of context, we are missing all the author had to say about the character in the previous hundred pages or so. What this means, is the "good" examples she gives us seem, well, so so. Of course the bad examples stand on their own and are bad, something anyone would do with little thought.

Rather than so many chapters on each individual emotion, I would rather see more extensive general work. I would like to see many, many examples of good emotions written by the author herself, and not a quote from a book, but a paragraph written that stands on its own. Hood tries to set up the "good" examples, but it can only be done imperfectly.

Bad emotion writing are cliches (mad has a hatter, hungry as a horse, etc.) and miss identifying the emotion, anger instead of fear.

Good emotion writing accuratly and freshly describes the emotions the character feels.

In conclusion, like cough syrup, you have to take this, but could it just taste better? Worth reading, perhaps, but put it down in your priority list.

PS My short list of must reads:

The First Five Pages, Noah Lukeman
Writing the Breakout Novel, Donald Mass
45 Master CHaracters, Victoria Lynn Schmidt
Dialogue, Gloria Kempton
Description & Setting, Ron Rozelle
Scene & Structure, Jack M. Bickham
You Can Write a Novel, James V. Smith Jr.

PPS My short list of stinkers that slipped through:

Creating Character Emotions, Ann Hood
Writing Dialogue, Tom Chiarella
Theme & Strategy, Ronald B. Tobias

I would recommend this book to anyone who writes characters and wants to portray them as real people with emotions and reactions others can relate to. It really opened my eyes to the kind of cliched emotions many of us are caught up in while writing characters and how that really stiffles a story or novel's effectiveness. This book teaches you how to make your characters feel, and not just label them as 'sad' or 'happy' - that doesn't involve the reader. You learn how to describe your characters in such a way that the reader knows how they feel without you having to label the emotion.

This book discusses every aspect of human emotion in short, concise chapters. Ms. Hood gives bad examples of writing that is either overdone, cliche-ridden, or just plain awful. She follows each of these examples with a better approach. Then she assigns exercises at the end. The sections on grief and forgiveness remain with me, two years after I read this book.

The advantage of this book is its narrow scope. Because it confines itself to character emotions, it can go into more detail than the usual omnibus book. This is also its weakness.
She begins with a 15 page essay on writing about emotions. How to do it wrong: clichés, lack of specificity, ambiguity (which she, unaccountably, equates with labeling), "not trusting your characters" (meaning, lack of consistency or "too consistent"). How to do it right gets a little vague, but fresh language, the power of suggestion, dialogue, interior monologue, showing an emotion by "indirect" behavior (i.e. displacement) are the right ways.
She then has one chapter each on 36 different emotions: anger, fear, grief, guilt, etc, but including worry, resignation, surprise, sympathy. Each chapter is about 4 pages long-much too short to be very useful. The bad examples given first are obvious, but they need to be. And many beginning writers make these mistakes, so they need to be shown. The good examples are useful, but sometimes debatable, illustrating that conveying character emotions is a nontrivial task. The exercises are reasonable, but how will a writer know when she is doing it well?
This is also a very short book. Still, it should make every writer think before charging ahead and merely assuming that because the writer feels it, the reader also is going to feel it. Think again!

Imagine my surprise when I recognized my own writing mistakes in the examples of bad writing. This immediately helped me take my writing to the next level. I have many cherished writing books, and this one holds up well in comparison. It is helpful because it's specific and focused. I couldn't wait to get to the computer and apply the things I learned in this book. I'm happy to add it to my bookcase.

I'm wavering between giving this book 3 stars or 4 stars. I was hoping this book would give me the background techniques for showing emotions in my fiction. Well, that information is in this book, but you have to dig for it. The book deals with emotions one by one, an emotion dictionary, rather than outlaying a few useful techniques for showing emotion in general -- tips such as the word for the emotion need not be used to portray the emotion. & also, even though the word for a particular emotion is used, the passage may not describe that emotion. Tips like sometimes you can get to the heart of the emotion by showing contrasts etc etc. The techniques are all there, but they are explained in odd places, during her discussion of her "bad examples," her "good examples" or even during her exercises.

The dictionary/exercise format is why I say this book came at the wrong point in my life. Right now I am "1 fiction week" away from finishing a first draft and the end is pulling me. I can't carve out the time in the day to finish it as quickly as I'd wish too. Tonight ideally. So, unless an exercise fits right into the next scene I need to write, I'm not going to do it. However, if I were reading this between projects, I'd be doing the exercises thoroughly and looking for my next story between the lines.

I will say that her "good examples" are incredible excerpts from incredible authors. If you are trying to hone your writing skills, you'd do well to read her excerpts and then the books her excerpts came from. The underlying lesson of this book is if you have a trouble spot in your writing, you can go to your library and see how someone else has handled the problem. A very important lesson.

And here's another lesson that is not a new idea but it is still a valid idea. Hood says "Years ago, in Barcelona, I visited the Picasso Museum. As I wandered through the building, admiring the still lifes and nudes, I kept wondering where all the Picassos were. And then an English-speaking visitor explained to me: These were all Picassos, done while he was a student there. In other words, Picasso didn't begin by inventing Cubism. He first had to study and experiment with the same ordinary forms every painter begins with." What a personal and elegant way to say, start simple, study your craft, have patience with yourself, have persistance. Doesn't her quote mean a lot more than my little interpretation of it?

So, this is a good helpful book, and when I'm not running after that ending of my first draft, I'll go back and look at this book more closely. It may give me what I need for the second draft.

This book does an adequate job of cataloguing the numerous feelings a writer might write into his or her characters. Think of this as an emotional reference book for the writer, not a menu of emotions to employ in your work.

I found this book valuable for a handful of reasons, notably the author's "good example" sections, which contained contributions from notable authors from a wide literary basis. These collected "good examples" help the reader identify exemplary manifestations of emotion.

However, in some cases her "bad examples" seemed repetitive and simplistic. In other cases the examples didn't seem so bad in my opinion (i.e. in a certain context, the text would be perfectly acceptable).

In the end, her advice on trying to write emotions freshly and from new perspectives is a useful reminder, making the book a worthwhile read.

The Point of the Book. Ann Hood, noticing a gap in her fiction writing teaching syllabus, decided that a book on writing convincing character emotions was in order. The goal of the book is tied up in that very subhead: wanting to get writers to understand their character's true feelings and express those feelings in a compelling manner.

The Good. The book is divided by alphabetical emotional groupings which makes the book an excellent resource. You want to write about fear? Turn to page 54 under FEAR. Extremely clear in that respect. She also makes sure to divide each section into four helpful categories. First she defines the emotion, usually using an author's definition and her own personal retelling of a life-event; secondly she gives three bad examples of the emotion; thirdly she offers three good examples (chosen from various authors); fourthly she closes with a brief work exercise to provoke personal exploration of the emotion.

The Bad. There's really nothing bad about the book. A couple of sections came close to being repetitive but Ann Hood was extremely smart in cross referencing sections when she had to to round off the picture. I would also say that sometimes some of the GOOD examples she chose to portray a character emotion didn't quite achieve the goal they were going for without the context of the larger story. True, she tries to encapsulate as much of that broader context as she can in the small space, but it really doesn't fully pan out the way she would want in some of those sections.

The Ugly. Nothing. The book binding is good, the size is great, the typeface is easy to read and the writing is clear.

Conclusion. The book won't make you an Emotion Writing Jedi: that's outside of its scope. What it will do is provoke you to think about the character emotions (a task that can be further accomplished by tons of reading (a task the author recommends). The book is worth a library read but if you're a serious writer it should have a spot on your shelf as a reference tool and thought-provoker whenever your writing is stumbling. 3 Star with a should-buy for a writer and a should-read for aspiring writers.

This is a nice, quick reference to depicting several emotional states without getting bogged down in deep psychological discussion. Though the "bad" examples seem obvious (as they should to those who enjoy good reading), the good examples are excellent. The exercises at the end of each chapter are also a nice touch.