Are Your Characters Embodied?
When my older sister died, at age sixty, a sea change happened in our family. We live far from each other, but at the holidays that year I missed my siblings more than usual. We were all shocked to lose one of our own much too early, although she’d been ill for many years. I noticed the grief, how we all responded to it in different ways. I was fortunate to have friends trained in bereavement counseling, one who had also lost a sibling, and they helped me through.
A big empty place resided in my life and heart for quite a while. She was the oldest of four, I was the second oldest. Now I was the elder. It didn’t seem right.
Each holiday, I think of her. She used to take the train south on Christmas Eve from her home in New York City to my parents’ in Baltimore, laden with shopping bags from Bloomingdale’s where she was a manager. Her gifts were always unexpected and in exquisite taste, even if I, as a hippie teen, couldn’t yet appreciate them. Now that she’s gone, we three remaining sibs reach out a bit more during the holiday season. My sister texts us photos of her homemade apple pie, my brother of his sourdough bread, me of the laden Thanksgiving table. We talk about how we wish we were together.
Years now, and still that grief rides inside with its keen sense of loss.
I write about this today because so many of us experience strong emotions during the holidays, or winter months when the light shifts. I write about the grief and loss—and it’s some of the hardest writing I do. Each person processes these subtler emotions so differently. I write loss into my characters, specifically into their bodies.
I never really understood the term “embodied characters” until I realized how smart the body is to convey emotions. I began writing this embodiment of emotions into my characters many years ago, yet I wonder why so many writers avoid it? Maybe it’s my personal honoring of my own grief and loss from my sister’s—and others’—deaths. Maybe it’s a deliberate health practice as well, to counteract what my chiropractor used to tell me: for many years, until I lived through two serious illnesses, I resided a few feet from my body.
Many people do, and why not? It’s not easy to be physically present in this wild world. As a creative person, I’m often in my inner worlds, dreaming up stories. Some days, I don’t feel thirst or how uncomfortable my shoulders are from typing for hours. Maybe you are aware of this too? Or maybe you are perfectly at home in your body.
But are your characters? That’s the question I’m ruminating on today. Do your characters effectively convey emotion on the page by being embodied or do they live outside their bodies (for a reason, perhaps)?
Writing simple and complex emotions
Emotions are easy for some to write, especially when the feelings are straightforward. We can add a wave of anger, a shiver of fear. We can enhance our characters with these simpler feelings—or at least we write them in as perceived (thought) emotions, which is not the same as felt emotions. We’ll go over the difference in a minute!
Simple emotions in literature, to me, are the more obvious ones: rage, jealousy, anger, fear, joy, contentment. They are straightforward in expression. They don’t go unrecognized that often.
The complex ones, like grief, come in unexpected waves, and they often hide beneath the more obvious emotions. I’ll be doing something completely unrelated to the loss of my sister or parents when I feel a disorienting sweep that fogs the brain or causes instant irritation or leaves me wandering. I can tell I’m mad or distracted. I can’t always tell why. Usually, I’m grieving.
In early drafts, though, writers often keep character emotions in the thought realm rather than translate these emotions into the characters’ bodies. It’s a natural placeholder, but if we writers don’t recognize that, we may neglect to take the emotions a next step. And this is vital because readers don’t feel the character’s emotion unless it’s embodied.
Why most of us write dis-embodied characters
Since I grew up in a family that carefully curated emotions—meaning, my dad preferred the silent child to the weeping or angry one—I had to first learn how to tell what I was feeling in my body before I could let my characters feel in theirs.
The body is a great translator but it depends on your background whether you are adept at recognizing emotions in the body. For most of my childhood and young adulthood, I could tell intellectually that I was irritated or sad, but I couldn’t always locate the feeling in my body.
When we’re writing a character’s emotions, they also may not be aware of what they’re feeling—and this is fine, as I said above; the reader doesn’t care. But the reader does need to be cognizant of the character’s emotions. Ideally, feeling them viscerally as they read. Why? Emotions translate the meaning of a scene. It’s the primary take-away, and it sets up the narrative arc, or the character’s growth pathway through the story.
So we writers have a task before us: to figure out how to let the character’s emotion seep in. It usually comes through most strongly via stuff they do with their physical body: movement, body sensations, gestures, facial expressions, what they avoid looking at or hearing, to name a few ways.
You may think you’re already doing this! But after thirty years of teaching writers, I’ve noticed how many of us don’t! Our default is to create characters who are not residing in their physical bodies, who operate from a few feet away, as if the body was a drone. They “feel” but only in their heads. They “remember,” but it’s distant detached memory that may have a reaction but it’s not a felt reaction, at least not felt in the body. They move around, yes, but they are thinking thoughts far removed from the way their feet hit the floor. They talk as well, but the emotion is also conveyed in thought as they react (interior monologue) or via adverbs (“She said angrily”) which isn’t embodiment at all.
It was totally confusing—and illuminating—for me to learn this as a writer. If you’re still with me, we’ll see why all of us can use some fine-tuning on this important skill.
I have to say it again: many people live this way today, absent from their bodies, so it’s no surprise literary characters do too. Our world isn’t inviting or cozy, especially in literature today. But if you want to create characters who are suffering (as most good characters are, in story), and they want to live out of the body rather than in it, that’s fine too. But the body still exists on the page. Its reactions still need to be perceived by the reader.
First step: Move your characters from absent to embodied
My early drafts of scenes, fiction or nonfiction, mostly reveal characters as physically absent from their bodies. I start with a plan. I decide what I want them to do, how I want them to move around, the ways they’ll interact with others via dialogue, and when they’ll react to the setting or action. This is normal in drafting: we need time to get acquainted.
The second stage of bringing characters into their bodies often comes via interior monologue, as mentioned above. This is when a character will begin to recognize their feelings as thoughts. I hate this place, he thought. We’re not actually feeling the hate as readers yet, but the character is thinking it which is a first step. The feeling of being repulsed, trapped, or disgusted isn’t yet manifested in the character’s body.
When I worked as an editor, I saw how often writers relied on interior monologue to convey feelings. It was strewn through scenes in early drafts and even revisions. I could tell the writer hoped this IM would create enough of a breadcrumb trail to the interior life of the character, but it didn’t, at least not for me. I wanted more. I wanted to feel how those emotions translated into the character’s body.
But hey, whatever works! As a first step to get acquainted with these people, it often works quite well. But just know the scene might still be once removed from the reader.
I usually counseled these writers to interview their characters on their background—create a little bio for each. Then to describe the character’s physical appearance (long red hair, round like a basketball). Then explore how the character moves across a room, at a lope or tentatively with small steps or taking up all the space with their energy. Finally, think about a character’s habitual gestures, their favorite objects, what they wear, eat, and listen to.
All part of acquaintanceship. It’s primary character research, in my mind, and it’s needed. Whenever I feel distant from one of my characters, like a bad guy I’m loathe to get closer to, I take these steps. When I know more, when I can see them walk and gesture and move, when I understand their longings and their history, I can more effectively write them into scene. Like watching a good play, there’s a sense of stepping back and enjoying the world they create as they feel their way into story.
I also expect some new information to come through, as I let them become embodied. I know what they’ve told me about themselves, how they “present” to the world. Now I get to see who they really are.
But if you have trouble even imagining how to do this with your more reluctant characters, here are some ways to start.
A link from Greatist helps the writer explore the placement of different emotions in the body—where anger would most likely be felt, for instance.
Another version from NPR is equally helpful and interesting.
A feelings list from Hoffman Institute shows the variations of feelings that your characters might be experiencing.
The well-regarded Emotions Thesaurus, which I’ve appreciated using for years, is a handy guide to help you translate emotions.
Parents with young kids: you’ve probably come across the ways children learn to tell their emotions by body sensations. Not any different from how we writers do this same work. What’s your experience with this process?
As we begin to write a character’s embodied emotions into scene, we usually stumble in two ways:
We tell the reader the emotion behind the body sensation rather than letting the body show the feeling with sentences like She was so angry she felt her head pound,
We overload the body sensations so they create confusing with sentences like Her head pounded, her throat tightened, and she felt nausea churn her gut. What emotion are readers supposed to get from that except overall stress?
Just like any device, embodiment techniques can be overused. They become too obvious, like a stage manager narrating meaning. So, it’s vital to proceed carefully, delicately, and believably.
The goal is to become aware of the background rumbling of emotions in a character, then the way these emotions manifest in the character’s physical body, and how the character is reacting or avoiding them.
And remember, if you move into complex emotions like grief, they have unpredictable moments which need to be considered.
Your Weekly Writing Exercise
Start with one of these ideas to embody your character. If you find it too clunky as you revise, dial it back. Hopefully, it’ll get you more aware of your tendencies as a writer and you can practice growing that awareness until you can omit the device.
Place your character clearly onstage. Review a scene and ask yourself: Where is my character physically in this scene? Are they standing or sitting, walking or running, crouching or kneeling? What part of their body is contacting the earth or a piece of furniture? Where are they in relation to objects and other people? If it helps, draw a quick sketch of the location and where they are. Or write yourself scene notes: Jane is kneeling on the ground by the porch about three feet from her grandmother, who is sitting in her rocker.
Try using movement to convey character feelings. This works even if the character is not aware of those feelings. Imagine how your character is moving through the space you’ve created. Do they run, walk, crawl, jump? Do they move carefully or boldly?
Have your character use gestures. Pay attention to their hands, face, shoulders, feet, fingers: even if they are not moving around, these can convey inner states. Jane tears a cocktail napkin into neat squares conveys something going on behind her tense smile, right?
Have your character notice emotion in other characters, as a kind of mirror to their own emotions. Jane didn’t understand why Robert was so angry, but she could see how his eyes narrowed even though he appeared to be sitting calmly.
Play with a physical illness, injury, or problem the character tries to ignore but can’t. What would really hang them up, physically? (I tend to use this one when I really want to force embodiment.)
In a future post, I’ll talk about one of the most common questions I got about my recent novel, A Woman’s Guide to Search & Rescue, and the embodiment techniques I used there. Also, why I gave each of the two adult narrators a physical challenge, what this gave me in terms of emotions to play with was worth every bit of careful revision I had to do, to keep the device from being mechanical. Stay tuned!