All the Feels
Recently, I was in a second grade classroom during a Readers’ Workshop. The students had been studying character, specifically, characters’ feelings in the books they were reading.
Every time a student noticed a tone of voice, a gesture, an action, that student would write a note on a sticky note, and slap it on the pages of their book.
On this day, after sharing their observations of characters’ feelings, the class came to the conclusion that a character goes through a multitude of feelings in a story. From a craft perspective, the students decided that this is one component of good storytelling.
The teacher gave everyone a half-sheet of paper and asked her students to create a timeline of feelings for the main character in their book. Above the line, students wrote the event, or what was going on in the story, and below was how the character felt. What I found most interesting about this exercise was that very rarely in their stories did they find that an author wrote, “She was sad,” or, “He was angry.” Rather, students could tell from the plot, characters’ dialogue, and action, how he/she felt.
So it is two skills, I think, we should pay attention to as we write our stories:
how many feelings do we, or our main characters experience, and
how do we render those feelings in our writing without specifically naming an emotion?
This month, try this exercise with your writing and with what you read.
If a book sounds daunting, try pictures books. Here are some that do this well: After the Fall, Islandborn, Dotty, The Legend of Rock, Paper, Scissors, Drawn Together.
On a half sheet of paper, take note of what a character is feeling at the bottom of your timeline, and at the top, write what was going on in the story. Try this for your writing, as well, and see what kinds of emotions are experienced throughout. Another idea: consider walking through your own emotions as you read a piece, both your own writing and the writing of others. This is a great way to practice empathy as you read.
This exercise reminds me of a memory from elementary school. I was at the pool with a group of friends and it was during the dreaded 15-minute rest period that occurred every hour. Instead of staring longingly at the water that was basically empty save for a few of the elderly in flowered swim caps side-stroking in the lanes, we decided to have a Fireball contest. A Fireball is a jawbreaker that’s dipped in some kind of flavor from hell. To our 5th grade taste buds, there was no candy hotter, and for ten cents, we could pop one in our mouths, and see who could hold it there the longest. No water allowed.
One of my friends was convinced that it was not possible for someone to feel pain in more than one part of one’s body, and so her strategy was to pull the straps of her swimsuit away from her as far as she could get them, and then let them go, thus slapping herself with basically wet spandex.
The rest of us followed suit, and I’m here to bear witness to the fact that it is possible to feel more than one thing: the heat from the Fireball, the sting from the slap of our bathing suit straps, the shocking discomfort of a self-inflicted wedgie we gave ourselves from pulling our straps in a direction they shouldn’t be pulled, the hilarity of the situation, all of us with red drool running down our chins looking like vampires. All of this, so we could take our minds off the torture of not being able to swim for 15 minutes – perhaps the greatest agony of all. Because for an eleven-year-old girl on a summer day with a sky so blue and a sun so yellow, the only thing that seems right is to jump in and swim.
Don’t be afraid to dive into the stories you read and the stories you write, and see where they take you. When you arrive at the surface again, my guess is you’ll hold treasure you didn’t expect to find, and you will see the world forever differently because of it.
