Getting Into Character: Seven Secrets a Novelist Can Learn From Actors (29 page)

2.
We can create characters who are completely different from ourselves—and perhaps even anathema to our own ways of thinking.

Through releasing the sensations of your own experiences, Emotion Memory allows you a surprising glimpse into souls whom you may have thought you could never understand. You can then enlarge these “glimpses” until you create a complete portrait of a character.

As the previous sentence suggests, Emotion Memory is not the be-all and end-all of your ability to feel your character’s passions. It’s only the beginning. It is the seed from which your understanding of a character can grow. Just as a plant also needs soil and water, so you must place the seed of your own emotions in your fertile imagination and creativity. With this mixture of your own emotions and imagination, you can create any character you choose to create.

There is no emotion known to man

that you
have not experienced.

At the close of this chapter, I will show you how powerful Emotion Memory can be in helping you create a character different from yourself. But first, let’s look at the steps to accessing your Emotion Memory in order to discover the passions of a character in a given scene.

1.
Find an experience or emotion in your own life that is similar to that of your character
.

Sometimes this is easy. If your character is experiencing his or her first crush, you’ve probably been through that yourself. Or if your character is at the funeral of a parent, and you’ve lost a loved one, you know the depth of grief. But when our characters face situations outside the realm of our own experience, this step becomes a little more tricky. We need to search our own experiences for an emotion that reflects what the character is feeling. Remember, the emotion need only be a “seed” for the passions of your character. For example, if your character faces crushing guilt over causing someone’s death, find a time in your own life when you felt guilty. It could be a time from your childhood, and it could even be over some relatively minor issue. The circumstances aren’t important and don’t need to match the severity of what your character is facing. What is important is that you felt guilt.

Years ago when I was single, I awoke suddenly one morning, thinking I’d heard a noise in my apartment. I’d been cold during the night and had burrowed down into the covers. The bedspread was over my head. I tensed, listening. Again, I thought I heard something—a footstep entering my bedroom. My heart turned over, scudded into panicked beats.
Pull down the cover!
my insides screamed.
See who’s there!
I knew I had to do that. I needed to see what was happening, be ready to jump from bed and defend myself. But in that second, an amazing thing happened to my body. Every limb, every sinew locked up tight, and I could not move a muscle.
Do it!
my mind screamed—and still I couldn’t move. Internally, I wrenched against myself, willing my arm to throw off the bedspread. Suddenly my arm lurched. I flung the cover aside. Snapped my head toward the doorway.

Nothing.

Absolutely nothing. Whatever sound I’d heard had been imagined

Later, when my heart had slowed to a normal pace, I realized I’d discovered an amazing truth. I’d discovered that a person really can be “frozen in fear.”

That minor incident of imagined danger hardly seems comparable to a scene in which my character faces a real intruder and her life is at stake. But, again, the circumstances aren’t important. I
was
frozen in fear. That small, otherwise insignificant event in my life, no more than five seconds from start to finish, was a powerful experience of raw fear. When I need to, I can expand on my Emotion Memory of that event to write believably of a character’s fear—even if she’s facing death.

2.
Relive your own experience by telling it out loud to yourself.

This is where the “getting personal” really begins. You may at first feel inhibited or even scared, depending on the emotion. But this is not the time to hold back. Find a time when you can be by yourself and uninterrupted.

Tell your experience to an imagined, captive audience, relating every detail you can remember, using all your five senses, if possible. First describe the setting. Then describe your actions and emotions, one by one. Get up, move around if you like. Act out the events.

Are you reliving a moment of excitement? Tell your experience until your eyes shine with the memory. Are you reliving jealousy? Tell it until the fire burns in your stomach. Loss? Tell it until you feel the pain.

Don’t stop to take notes to record your emotions. Just
feel
them.

3.
Add any external stimuli that may help you relive the memories.

Is there anything that might help you in the retelling of your experience? A picture? A certain object? A certain smell, such as a perfume? (As we saw in the example of my friend and her baking, smell is often a great way to trip emotion memory.) Music? Use anything you can to help release the memories.

4.
Once you have connected with your own emotions, use them as the seed for those of your character.

Just as you had to translate your own Inner Rhythm to actions of your character in chapter 5, here you must translate your past experiences of emotions into the unique passions of your character. This is the step in which all the rest of our Secrets come into play. Once you connect with your own emotions, once you fully remember how fear or grief or joy feels, you need to blend this knowledge with everything else you know about your character. What are his Action Objectives in the scene, and how could these emotions translate to them? What is his Inner Rhythm, and how can he show it? If he’s talking with someone, will he be honest about his feelings or will they be subtexted? Write your scene infusing all of these things. Your renewed memories of the emotion, plus all you know of your character, will blend together to create a vivid and believable scene.

At a writer’s “boot camp” I critiqued a novel’s opening scene in which a five-year-old boy was watching his father preparing to walk out on the family. The boy felt responsible. The scene was told in his POV (point of view). The scene was sad, but I didn’t feel it at all. The emotion felt shallow, and sometimes downright wrong. Something the author said made me suspect he’d lived through a similar scene in his own childhood—which would have put it over fifty years in the past. This author had everything he needed within him to write the emotions of that scene well, but he hadn’t tapped into it. I suggested he find a time when he could relive that scene.
Really
relive it. Let all the emotion bubble back up and spill onto the paper. This isn’t an easy thing to do. It’s downright scary when the event is a traumatic one. But sometimes this is what’s needed to make a scene come to life.

Refilling Your Emotion Memory

With all this dipping into the well, how do we keep our own reserves filled? As surely as water can run low, so can our Emotion Memory.

Keep the well of emotion memory full

by watching others and yourself.

Once again, we need to observe life. Strong writing requires an intimate knowledge of humanity. The only way to gain that knowledge is to live life to its fullest and to watch and record it as though your very life depended on it. In fact, your writing life does.

First, you can refill your Emotion Memory by watching others, mentally recording their actions and perceived emotions in certain situations. Perhaps you’ve never been in a non-injury car accident but have observed one. How did those involved react as they hurried from their cars? How did others act as they stopped to help? How did
you
feel as you empathized with these people?

Second, you can watch movies and plays and read books—always with the goal of recording emotions. Third, and most important of all, you can watch yourself. Now that you’re aware of the Emotion Memory within your subconscious, you can actively record your own feelings in a way that will keep them closer to the conscious level, more readily available when you need them.

I’ll confess something. No matter what I’m going through, no matter what my emotion, even in moments of greatest joy or sorrow, there is a little part of me that disconnects to float to the corner of the ceiling and observe. Whether I laugh or cry or sink to my knees in despair, this writer side of me looks on quite objectively—watching, recording, saying, “Hm. I’ll have to remember this.” If I don’t feel her in the midst of my passion, I feel her soon afterward, scrambling to take it all in, to remember the emotions in all their colors.

Remember to watch your insignificant moments as much as you watch major events in your life. As we’ve noted, a seemingly insignificant experience can unleash a powerful Emotion Memory. In fact, only when we discover this truth can we employ Emotion Memory to its fullest.

Richard Boleslavsky, a director of the Moscow Art Theater, wrote a wonderful little book called
Acting: The First Six Lessons
. In his lesson on Emotion Memory he tells an aspiring young actress, “We have a special memory for feelings, which works unconsciously by itself and for itself. It is in every artist. It is that which makes experience an essential part of our life and craft. All we have to do is to know how to use it.” These memories, however small, Boleslavsky continued, are “just waiting to be awakened. And what is more, when you do awaken them, you can control them in your craft …. You command them.”

The young actress asks, “Suppose I don’t find a similar feeling in my life’s experience, what then?”

Boleslavsky replies that anyone who has lived a normal existence has experienced to some extent
all the emotions of mankind
. The woman challenges him. Surely this can’t be true. What if she must play a murderer? She has certainly never murdered anyone or even felt the slightest desire to do so. Hogwash, replies Boleslavsky. (My paraphrase.) Ever been camping when mosquitoes were around? he asks. Ever follow one with your eyes and ears, your hate spurring you on, until you killed it? The actress admits that she has. “A good, sensitive artist doesn’t need any more than that to play Othello and Desdemona’s final scene,” Boleslavsky declares.

What a startling thought.

To show you firsthand the power of Emotion Memory, I want to lead you moment by moment through my own version of Boleslavsky’s example. When I read his book, I never dreamed how important the example would become to me. Years later, I set out to write my first suspense novel,
Eyes of Elisha
, and found myself in the mind of a killer. Who, me? How could I possibly write, with any believability, a scene about a soon-to-be serial killer stalking his first prey? What did I know of such bizarre, sick behavior?

A lot more than I’d ever have guessed.

And so do you.

Follow me now through this scene. You may not have experienced this exact situation, but chances are you’ve experienced one very similar. From the smallest, most insignificant moment of your life you can unleash the Emotion Memory needed to portray one of mankind’s most heinous acts.

Finally, the time has come. The time set aside just for you, when your guests have waved goodbye after their weeklong stay. You are alone in the house and exhausted. You don’t care that you have work to do. All you can think of is: The Book.

You were reading it, loving it before the guests came. But all during the week you could only catch bits and pieces of it after falling into bed each night, your eyes fighting sleep. Last night you managed to read for almost an hour. You only have fifty pages left, and you can’t wait to see how it all turns out.

Your guests now gone, you make a beeline for the book, grasp it from your nightstand and hurry to the family room. There, your steps slow. You want to enjoy this long-awaited time to its fullest. Tossing the book on the couch, you head for the kitchen to make your favorite hot drink to sip and savor as you read.

You hum a little tune as you make the drink. Its wonderful aroma tickles your nose as you carry the hot mug into the family room and place it on an end table. You pick up your book, settle into the couch with a sigh. Smiling, you open the novel, slip out the bookmark and begin to read.

Your eyes glide over the pages, your muscles relax, your mind empties of all but the events in the novel. Once in a while you pick up your mug, sip your drink. The house is quiet save for the distant ticking of a clock in the kitchen. You wish this time would never end.

The scene you’re reading heats up. Oh, no! The heroine can’t do that; whatever will become of her? And what about her nemesis—you know he’s still up to no good. Surely he’ll leap from the pages any moment now, aiming his intended miseries at the characters you are cheering. You turn the page. Aha. There he is. Oh no, surely he won’t—

A fly cruises across the room.

Your eyes flick at it distractedly, then back to the book. You continue reading, devouring the words. Oh, the passions. You can feel the scenes. They sweep you off your feet, transport you. You want to hurry and finish the story to see what happens; you want the story never to end. You’re almost done with a chapter. The evil adversary is turning to the hero and heroine, opening his mouth—