I Got Your Feelings Right Here, Part 2

In yesterday's post I wrote about some adventures in Revisionland, where I floundered for some time while trying to get my main character to express himself.

After revising based on some helpful feedback from other agents and then signing with Joanna, I still had more work to do.

For many of the revisions, I added some internal thought to help readers connect with the character more. Many scenes and chapters had ended too soon, without saying enough about what was going on in the character's head. Again, especially because it's told in the first person POV, the reader should be in the character's head with him, not wondering what he's thinking.

Today I'm posting some "before" and "after" examples from the manuscript, along with Jo's comments.

Before: I try my best to look brave.
Jo: But inside he feels...?
Me: Um...not brave?
Revision: I try my best to look brave, but I worry I'll never feel safe again.

This is from a scene where Hastin surprises his mom with a visit after not seeing her for a couple of weeks, and he notices her smile seems forced:

Before: I run toward her, then stop. Doesn't she want to see me?
Jo: How does that make him feel? Tie it to his elation, then being deflated in some way.
Revision: I run toward her, then stop. Doesn't she want to see me? All this time, I thought she must be missing me as much as I've missed her, but not it feels like I've done something wrong.

Here, a character is giving instructions about trapping an elephant:

Before: "Come here each evening to see if we've caught anything," he told me as we stood at the trap's edge. "...After a day or two, we will have our elephant."
And the chapter ended there, so Jo asked me to elaborate on how he feels about this. In the revision I tied this back to Hastin's family, specifically his sister having to leave home for medical care after a bite from a disease-carrying mosquito.
Revised to add: And that elephant will not have its family anymore, because of us. My stomach sinks. I'm no better than the mosquito who bit my sister.

A later chapter circled back to that idea, when Hastin is making a promise to the elephant they've just trapped:

Before: "I won't leave here without you, I promise."
Jo: End the chapter with his final thoughts to keep us connected to how he's feeling.
Revision: "I won't leave here without you, I promise." And I mean it too, but I don't feel any better. I feel like a mosquito promising to take back its bite.

At times I used Hastin's actions to show how he was feeling. I hadn't shown enough about him feeling afraid when he was alone in the forest. He's an eleven-year-old from the desert, so of course he's not comfortable wandering around the forest by himself. He may not come right out and say "I'm afraid," but I try to show that fear by the way he freezes when he hears an unfamiliar noise, jumps away from a spider, or checks a tree branch for snakes and bugs before climbing it. (That also helped with another revision task, firming up the setting.)

In Part 1 of the post, we had some great comments about authors who have ninja-like skills at showing a character's feelings. When it's done well, you finish a book feeling like you've been on a roller coaster ride with the character. It's by no means an exhaustive list, but here are a few to start with if you need some good examples. Suggestions from yesterday's comments were Mary E. Pearson, Sarah Dessen, and Megan McCafferty; other authors I thought of were Sara Zarr and Jo Knowles. (I dare you to read Jumping Off Swings without crying!)

I Got Your Feelings Right Here, Part 1

Recently I finished a round of revisions for SuperAgent Joanna to get my mid-grade novel ready for submissions to editors. In addition to sending an edit letter that addressed big-picture issues, Jo sent a hard copy of the manuscript with notes written throughout. After a while, many of the comments started sounding familiar: "And how does he feel about that?" "How does that make him feel?" "And he feels...?"

And it wasn't the first time I'd had feedback like that. Sometimes the comments on chapters I'd brought to critique meetings showed that readers wanted to see more about how the character was feeling or what they were thinking. A couple of agents who were nice enough to send feedback with the rejection letters indicated the same thing-- I wasn't showing enough about what was going on in the character's head.

Obviously I was being too sparse in my descriptions of my character's thoughts and feelings. Why was I holding back? I love the quote from this article: "...although the Irish have a marvellous ability to tell stories, when it comes to their emotions, they may have no words." So maybe that explains it. It's hardly my fault. Or maybe I was worried about the dreaded "telling" too much instead of "showing." Sure, if I filled the story with internal thoughts like, "I was sad," and "I was so angry," that would be really boring, but there are ways of showing those feelings that help readers connect with characters more, and thereby root for them and keep reading the story to see how things turn out.

So it's taken some work since for whatever reason the feelings thing hasn't come naturally for me, but here's some feedback I got from agents and the revisions I did in response to that.

Last year I got "the call" from an agent who was interested in representation, but she wanted to see a lot of revisions first. Here are some comments she had about the need to show my main character's feelings more, and I think it shows that line we try not to cross between saying too little and overdoing it:

"The story needs to pack a strong emotional punch."
"Currently, the connectedness between [the characters] is lost...you need to focus right in on these two and show us how crucial they are to each other...Let's SEE the connection between them, rather than just being told about it."
About the main character, Hastin: "I wonder if there could be more feeling from him. I don't mean a lot of breast-beating and over-writing, but we never really see him get angry or in strong emotional pain. I think we should see more of what's in his heart, though it's possible to convey this with a lightness of touch and understatement."

She was right--the character was going through a pretty miserable time, but he didn't express that. One suggestion she gave for improving the manuscript was to strengthen the character arc, and to do that I'd have to show not only the events that happened to him, but how he changed on the inside as he went about his journey.

I went through the manuscript and highlighted all the places where I could show the character's reaction to what was happening. And there were a lot. Then I tackled each highlighted scene by doing a little freewriting about how he felt at that time--not just the emotion, but what he felt physically too. Is there a sinking feeling in his stomach? Does he hit something out of anger? Does he feel like things are so bad, he'll never be happy again? I picked out my favorite words and phrases from the freewriting to add a concise description of the character's feelings to the scene. The Bookshelf Muse has an amazing Emotional Thesaurus that helped tremendously. (It's also great for setting descriptions, so bookmark it!)

I also added a rock--a gift to Hastin from his dad--that he'd hang on to when he was nervous or afraid, because it helped him feel safe and closer to his dad. Later in the story, when his hand reaches for the rock in his pocket, Hastin doesn't have to say anything for the reader to know how he feels. (When I mentioned this to my awesome manuscript critiquer Uma Krishnaswami, she told me I was using an example of T.S. Eliot's objective correlative. Hmm, yes, objective correlative...I meant to do that. Now write that down so I can Google it.)

I spent about three months on that round of revisions; here's a bit of the letter I got back after resubmitting:

"The story isn't quite 'singing' to me the way it needs to...We would need an editor who fights to acquire it because they have fallen in love with it--because they feel with Hastin in his loneliness and fear..."

Not what I wanted to hear, of course, but I knew the manuscript was a lot better than it was before, so the time I'd spent revising wasn't at all wasted. But I still hadn't quite accomplished what I needed to. After some more revising I submitted to agents again, and here's a paragraph from a response I got back from another fabulous agent that was so helpful:

"...I felt that there were first person point-of-view issues. I like it when characters play it close to the chest and show instead of tell how they feel, but first person POV requires the occasional outburst of feeling. ...The author gives external hints to the character's state of mind, and were it not in first person POV I would find those enough, but it's jarring to be in Hastin's head and not know explicitly how he feels."

Of course--since we're in that character's head, we should always know what he's thinking and feeling. If it were too stream-of-consciousness the story would get bogged down with too much description, but the reader should never be left wondering what's going on in the character's mind. That makes so much sense but it hadn't occurred to me before.

I have some examples of how I revised the manuscript again based on Jo's comments, but I'll save those for a new post. For now I'll leave you with a couple of unputdownable books I've read recently that showed the main character's feelings so well on every page: The Dead-Tossed Waves by Carrie Ryan and The Chosen One by Carol Lynch Williams (here's an interview with her on Cynsations.) Certainly there are many more great examples, so leave 'em in the comments and I'll include the suggestions in Part 2 of the post.

Let Them Eat Cake!

Welcome to our blog!

As you can see from the column on the right, we write children's books and meet every other week to read & critique, talk books, agents, contracts, and trade gossip in general.

Oh, and yes, we eat cake -- whenever good news hits, or even if we've had a string of bad news (like the week our collective rejections hit the double-digits).

The cake doesn't happen every time we meet, but lately we've been swimming in it.

Our latest cake-worthy news just officially rolled in today -- in the form of member Lynne Kelly Hoenig's decision to sign with agent Joanna Stampfel-Volpe at Nancy Coffey Literary & Media. Joanna also happens to represent fellow WWFC member Monica Vavra.

So congrats to Lynne, who has worked very HARD for this for a long time!

What's next? Hopefully a book deal, and definitely, CAKE!

We'll keep you posted!

Christina