I took a college level creative writing class, for English majors, focused in writing. The teacher wrote the definition of plot on the board and went on to cover what a plot is, along with several other words that we've known since 7th grade. This is how she taught the entire course. Your video series is the college course I expected when was paying thousands for the course, the college course is what should have been free.
@@Trazynn Not sure if lazy is the right word. I think a lot of creative writing instructors come from a technical language background, like English majors. Anyone who has done any significant creative writing knows that technical mastery of the language is ONLY PART of writing good literature. There is a lot of "feel", intuition, and psychology involved in developing interesting plots and characters. A technical language background doesn't teach that.
My university had a creative writing requirement, and it had a published local author as the professor. She made us read and analyze novels and begin writing a novel. It was incredible, and it motivated me to write despite having zero interest in it before the class. Maybe you just had a bad Professor :(
@@blackhawksfan2525 "Only" probably should not have been capitalized there, only "part." I thought you meant that mastery of the language is the *only* part of writing, and I had to do a double take before I realized you meant mastery of language is only *a small part* of writing.
This isn't about emotion but it is about melodrama: I just finished re-reading Agatha Christie's A Murder Is Announced, towards the end of which Miss Marple says, "It was the conversation at the cafe that sealed her fate -- if you'll forgive me using such a melodramatic expression." So, the next time you read that in a book or feel tempted to use it, just remember that an elderly woman in a book from 1950 was already apologizing for using such a cliche :D
This is hilarious and so true. Many editors would like to ban all "sighing" and "heart pounding" and "eye rolling" and "glaring." Even "nodding" and adverbs in dialog tags. If a reader can't tell what your characters are experiencing without adverbs and histrionics, then you need to rework the dialog and try other methods of grounding besides nodding and signing and heart pounding.
Thank you!!! Everytime i tried to write an emotional scene it was bad, but I didn't know what was wrong with it exactly, or how to fix it. And now I know how to make it better. Introspection is the key! :))))) A BIG THANK YOU!! I love your videos
I fall into this trap a lot. My character is in a very tense situation throughout the whole story, I think these tips might be very useful to avoid a lot of repetition. Thank you. :)
Best writing (and life) advice I just about have ever received is "show, don't tell". Showing emotion througj build up, actions and effects is so much more effective than DESCRIBING some emotion in abstract ways. You need to get into the guts if the character, how their experience has directing impacted them, not just fall back on easy cliches about general emotions.
I'm not sure if you still see these comments or if you still make videos as I can see that they're dated a couple years back or so. But I get so much from them. I came across one one day in connection to another video I was watching when I looked up something or other about writing. There is something about the way you convey what you know, it's very well explained and down to earth. Also, your demeanor makes me enjoy taking the advice from you. And you're easy to watch :). Thank you for sharing your expertise.
Hi Ellen, I've been watching your videos for a couple years, learning much and enjoying the experience. I use what I've learned when I teach my sixth graders creative writing. Your clarity comes through in my teaching! Thank you so much. In your August 2017 series of videos I have discovered your voice sounds almost identical to Hobo Ahle's; I was watching your video, got distracted and looked away for a time, and said, "Is that Hobo Ahle?" She is a young van-dweller with a RU-vid channel. I had been impressed with how well spoken she is, and now I know why--she sounds like you.
Aha! Thank you so much, Ellen, for making this video. I've been trying to put my finger on this for such a long time, and now it makes perfect sense to me. The examples really made it crystal clear. I can't wait to put this concept to use in my novel!!
After watching you, I'm seeing my story owning his life! I feel it's getting engaging and unique. Getting that feeling after 2 years of writing without feeling it, made me believe on my own potential!
This was such a helpful video, and one I already know I’m going to have to watch a few times. Thank you for giving examples, I wasn’t exactly sure what you meant by introspection until the examples. This seems like it really separates the great novels and characters.
Just had my WIP professionally reviewed and got exceptionally high marks (yay!) but it got tagged with being too melodramatic in the final scenes. This video really gave me some tools to rework what should have been the MOST impactful scenes of the story. Thank you very much!
You are a godsend, I had an agent went pretty but not far enough far about ten years ago but my career took off and took precedence---now, through your video's I have dramatically improved the work....thanks so much!
Really enjoyed the examples. They really put in perspective what you were saying and gave me more ideas of what I could do to convey an emotional scene.
I have been binging your vids this weekend. So happy you showed up in my feed. Clear, concise...i have listened to so many other writers share thier knowledge here on yt and was left confused or sidetracked by thier 'methods'. Thank you for just teaching what writers need to just write!
I have always thought that my greatest weakness in my any of my writings has always been dialogue. But now I have begun to realize that it is not as much the interactions between the characters that it is more the lack of emotion, depth, and introspection. Conveying emotions in general has always eluded me in writing. I have never reached any kind of level of even melodrama either. Thank you for helping me realize this.
Thankyou for this very sound advice, I have found that as a writer I tend to do nothing but go on about what the character is thinking when their emotions are involved so I am happy I have this part right.
This was more helpful than almost all the information I've devoured about writing. I love your perspective and no-nonsense, authentic way of sharing it. Subscribed.
Wow, this was great. I've been writing for 10 years, listened to hundreds of hours of podcasts on writing, read dozens of books on writing, and never before have I come across this concept, which is pretty genius. I am 100% guilty of doing the whole "how to I find another way to say 'his heart was pounding'?" thing and am psyched to have this tool as a better option.
a bit late, but: thank you a lot, Ellen! This helped me. I was really frustrated cause I always wrote the same things in the scenes but had no idea how to fix it. Now I do. Great advice, much appreciated!
Hi Ellen. I know I'm a year late getting to watch this program, but it was definitely worth the wait. I don't understand how someone as young-looking as you can be so brilliant, but I am so glad that you are. Thank you so much, this was excellent.
As I watch your video I feel as though you have lead me to doors of rooms I didn't even know existed! With your help the doors are opened and what awaits me inside is undescribable! Thank you!
Fight Club is always the first work that comes to mind when I think of character-defining introspection. Leveraging the character’s experience and worldview to highlight her internal reactions to events is always going to trounce the surface-level approach.
I understood your point about introspection and I intend to review my righting from that point of view. I was also interested in the examples you gave from your phone. It proves the fact that one person's great book is anothers worst. I could never enjoy that style of writing. Thanks for your well produced talks. I find them most informative.
Excellent advice. Especially giving the greater importance to introspection. In the famous "Death of Phoenix" storyline [in X-Men 137], the evening before the battle showed all the X-men and revealed their individual thoughts, all of them centering around their partner, Jean, whose life was at stake in the battle to come on the morrow. Originally the issue was planned to end with Jean Grey being defeated, and then psychically lobotomized. The scenes of introspection by the X-Men revolved more around their own issues, rather than being centered on Jean. This made story sense in the original version because Jean would survive [though without her power], so it was more important to show the individual members' thoughts, since Jean wasn't to be the absolutely central focus. But when the editorial mandate came to kill Jean Grey, the focus of the characters, in their introspection, was all on Jean, and it made so much better story sense to do it that way. Raised the dramatic tension to the Moon.
I’m so glad to have found your channel. This video is explains something I appreciate in others’ writing but didn’t understand what they were technically doing to create that effect. Now I have more of a chance of doing similar! Thank you for your generosity in sharing such high quality content with us here!
Following up, this is the kind of video I wish I could have shown my old writer's group after endless hours spent trying to figure out how to show emotions without resorting to gasps and sighs. I always said, "what's going on in their head?" But they would all just look at me funny.
I've been watching your videos for a while now, but never really thought to subscribe, until I watched this. I'd felt that while your videos are very informative, there was something missing in a lot of them. Now I realized, it's the examples. I love how you used them here. Keep it up!
This is exactly where I'm at in my editing process right now and the timing, for me, is perfect. I'm so glad I've discovered this, even if it is in mid-2019. All things in due time. Thank you.
Recently discovered your channel, I've watched at least 20 of your video's in the last week. It has become part of my morning routine, very good information, thanks!
Introspection is better because it is how we actually communicate our emotions to ourselves. Not that we stop and think in a textual or conversational way, but that we think these kinds of things in a visual sort of way (for most people anyway... I have run across at least one person who said he never sees things in his head, just hears words or some such -- which is, to me, a sad thing). This is why we easily relate to introspection and why it works to convey emotion -- we are experienced at interpreting our own emotions in this very way.
It is way more powerful to show your character trying to supress emotion than showing it outright. A character holding back tears is often better than just crying
Thank you, Ellen, for the great advice. The examples really help to illustrate your points. I've done all of the online MasterClass writing courses by established writers and you are a better teacher than all of them combined. :)
Yeah I think precision and specificity is the key. After all, the reader should be triggered, so you shouldn't present him a general "final result" of a thought process leading to an emotional response. I think you should enable the reader to either directly follow the specific thought process in a specific situation leading to a specific emotion or if you use outrospection, don't present the final result, but use some physical detail to trigger the reader into realizing what might be going on inside the character. As correctly stated, most of the time, emotion is hidden (at least in our society, this is by no means true in general, but if you choose to have an emotionally very expressive "convention" within the context of your book, it needs to be clarified so the reader can "translate"). So I would focus on subtleties and body parts where you have limited control, so you achieve two things at the same time: You clarify that something unusual is happening and you leave it open to interpretation for the reader (put him into a position of a person having to read another character, which is the aim of outrospection).
So the main POV character would describe other characters physical subtleties and let the reader draw the conclusion, instead of saying "they had a look of unease (or whatever adjective) in their eyes" or "their hands shook with fear". Unless maybe the main character IS highly observant and can name the emotions others are feeling pretty spot on. Don't know. But for the main POV character it would be reverse since we can say their thoughts/motivations/reactions more, so it's better to leave out physical emotional descriptions. Is this kind of what you were saying?
Oh my Goodness, he thought as she understood everything all at once. Of course, she knew a little bit about writing but this person had given her a hole new perspective which she couldn't wait to explore!
Thanks so much, I knew my story was missing something, good thing I'm not too far into the story 😂 I hope it isn't too dramatic though, my friends and co-authors (not to be rude) really like to write about pain and being hurt by their family and spouses who leave them and it's so uncomfortable reading, got to take that innovative approach 😂
I try to make it so I can use introspection to manipulate their reactions to situations. I'm also a pretty visual person though, so I try to write body language that conveys that emotion without actually saying it outright.
I get it! Here's a Storiet on the fly: "The beach cave." There was no way she was going into the cave, she thought. It wasn't the darkness, or even the howling wind at her back. It was a life of past events, closed in spaces, and tight situations where she always had to make her escape. The waves pounded against the rocks behind her, demanding a decision, live or die. She drew a breath and closed her eyes, and took a step forward. Visions of things gone bad haunted her with each additional step until finally, but not without reservation, she entered the cave. It was dark, and she could hear the sound, footsteps coming closer. There was a bright flash of light. A lantern. It's light reflected from his teeth as he smiled. "I told you, you had nothing to worry about," he told her. It was Danny, the man they thought lost at sea. She thought that she could hear a voice from the beach while escaping the coming storm. He offered her a beer. He liked beer. She took it and had a sip, and then another. It was going to be a long night.
The problem is that I see the scene in my head. And of it were a movie, I could communicate so many feelings through their microexpressions and movements. But I can't possibly morph it into written prose, because you can't describe such minuscule things in words.
Heart is slamming against her lungs ... P. G. Wodehouse once did this satirically: the character felt as if there were spiders crawling up his spine, and then after a couple of rounds, the spiders were doing a can-can dance a la Busby Berkeley
Hey Ellen! I'm learning so much from your videos (although some of the language/wording advice is harder to apply as I usually write in German :D). I was wondering if you could maybe do a video on upmarket / mainstream fiction because I'm really interested in writing that kind of novel. However, I feel like it requires a different kind of approach in some areas and most writing advice I find on the internet mostly focusses on genre fiction. So I'd be super happy to get some specific tips :)
