- by Tara Maya
How to Take the Emotional Temperature of Your Novel with Kubler-Ross
When you’re describing emotions, do you ever think about their temperature? According to the Atlantic, “A new study by Finnish researchers published today in the Proceedings of the National Academies of Sciences, suggests that our emotions do indeed tend to influence our bodies in consistent ways.” The temperatures that people report do no reflect physiological changes (or at least none as dramatic as the maps suggest), but they do seem to reflect psychological experiences that transcend culture.
The mapping exercise produced what you might expect: an angry hot-head, a happy person lighting up all the way through their fingers and toes, a depressed figurine that was literally blue (meaning they felt little sensation in their limbs). Almost all of the emotions generated changes in the head area, suggesting smiling, frowning, or skin temperature changes, while feelings like joy and anger saw upticks in the limbs—perhaps because you’re ready to hug, or punch, your interlocutor. Meanwhile, “sensations in the digestive system and around the throat region were mainly found in disgust,” the authors wrote. It’s worth noting that the bodily sensations weren’t blood flow, heat, or anything else that could be measured objectively—they were based solely on physical twinges subjects said they experienced.
The correlations between the subjects’ different body maps were strong—above .71 for each of the different stimuli (words, stories, and movies). Speakers of Taiwanese, Finnish, and Swedish drew similar body maps, suggesting that the sensations are not limited to a given language.
So what are we seeing in these illustrations? The authors note that, measured physiologically, most feelings only cause a minor change in heart rate or skin temperature—our torsos don’t literally get hot with surprise.
Instead, the results likely reveal subjective perceptions about the impact of our mental states on the body, a combination of muscle and visceral reactions and nervous system responses that we can’t easily differentiate. Feeling jealous may not truly make us red in the face, for example, but we certainly might feel like it does. Read the whole article.
Keeping these subjective sensations in mind is a great tool for describing character emotion. But describing a character’s emotional state in a scene is just the beginning. It’s also important to portray how emotions change over the course of the story. A character who remains all “blue” or all “red in the head” throughout a book may express emotions alright, and yet still become boring and tiresome.
Emotions also need to change in a way that parallels the story journey.
Shawn Coyne, in The Story Grid: What Good Editors Know, tosses out good ideas like candy. One, which could be a whole book in itself, was how to use Elizabeth Kubler-Ross’s model of grieving as a thermometer to take the emotional temperature of a novel.
It works like this:
Act I begins with a Shock, followed by Denial.
Compare this to Joseph Campbell’s Universal Journey of the Hero, and these would be The Call, and The Hero Refusing the Call.
Act II brings the protagonist into the stage of Anger. Something makes it impossible for him to ignore the call any longer, and he fully enters the adventure. Think of Luke after he finds his aunt and uncle incinerated by the Empire.
As problems and conflicts arise, the protagonist enters the stage of Bargaining. He’s trying to do his mission, that’s true, but he’s also still trying to hold on to his old life. He still has the illusion that he will go back to what he was before once the adventure ends.
When he reaches the Point of No Return, he falls into the stage of Depression. This is when it hits him that the past is gone…and he may have gambled it away for a future that holds only pain and failure. This is also sometimes called the All Is Lost moment.
The protagonist finally rallies one last, desperate bit of courage or cunning. This is like Kubler-Ross’s Deliberation stage, and it brings us to the end of Act II.
Act III revolves around the Choice, which is when and how the protagonist confronts the problem or the villain. The last stage, Integration, is the new reality that results from the protagonist’s journey and battle.
By itself, this might not be enough to guide one in organizing a novel, but I do think that as an “emotional thermometer” it can be helpful. In fact, I’ve read a couple of books lately where the emotional journey of the protagonist just felt off kilter. I couldn’t quite put my finger on why until I read this.
Here’s what I’ve seen in a couple of different Urban Fantasy novels. The heroine (and it was a heroine in all of the examples I read) encounters the Shock. Something makes her realize that Magic is real, or Vampires are real, or a family Curse she’s scoffed at is real, or that she is now indentured to a hot, sexy Vampire against her will, or what have you. Even if it’s as clichéd as having the mundane Miss discover vampires or magic, I have no problem with this. I’m still game, still eager to see how she reacts.
She reacts with shock—and denial. She can’t believe it. She may even go so far as to call the cops on the Vampire who has indentured her or ignore the warning from a mysterious stranger that the Curse is nigh.
So far, so good.
But then more shit happens to her, like mystical stuff keeps blowing up in her face, or someone dies from the Curse or she signs a contract with the hottie Vampire and pledges to work for him.
And yet even after all that, she still keeps denying that magic/curses/vampires are real, and still keeps trying to back away from her commitments. In other words, she’s not moving past Denial into something more interesting, like Anger or Bargaining.
And as the story goes on, the emotional temperature still doesn’t change. She’s not growing. She never reaches that point where she loses hope and truly gives in to despair. So she never really makes a Choice to change. When she wins at the end, she just sort of blusters into it, whining and half-disbelieving, just as she was at the start of the novel.
No matter how good the action, or how hot the romantic subplot, in a book where the protagonist never grows emotionally, the whole thing falls flat. This is true even if she grows in other ways—if she learns magic, or her powers grow stronger. It’s true even if she discovers new things—like who her mother truly is or that she’s fallen in love with Hot Fangs. She still needs to have an emotional inner life outside of what she does or what she learns or even who she loves.
And frankly, if she’s never grown past the Shock and Denial stage of the spectrum, it’s hard for a love story subplot to come across as believable. On the contrary, if there’s a romantic subplot, the heroine and hero both need to display an even more dramatic emotional journey. What’s less convincing than trying to show two characters fall in love if their feelings are two-dimensional throughout the entire novel? If he’s always contemptuous and haughty and she’s always snarky and defiant, there’s no room for any deeper connection. We need that moment when the masks finally strip away, that instance of raw, naked tenderness when the hero and heroine can finally be honest with one another—and themselves.
Trolling through my Book Log, to look for other examples of emotionally stagnant stories, I remembered one particularly awful book that suffered the same problem. In a way, it was even worse. This one was science fiction, with a male protagonist.
The opening scene showed the protagonist attempting suicide. Dramatic, but this could have been the wake-up call to begin the rest of the book. In fact, if the novel had followed any kind of decent story arc, it would have been fascinating to see what would have constituted the All Is Lost point—depression and despair—for a character who started out suicidal. Perhaps a fate worse than death, or the loss of a loved one, or the end of the world… and in realizing that there’s something worse than suicide, maybe the protagonist would have also realized, ironically, that there was something worth living for. That would have been a story I’d have liked to have read.
The author delivered something else: a monochromatic emotional ride, in which the protagonist started out in the Depression stage and simply never rose above (or sank below) dysphoria. He was suicidal at the start, in the middle, and at the end. In the final scene of the book…surprise! He killed himself. Believe me, if I could get back the four hours I spent reading that drivel, I sure would. (I read it all the way through for the same reason one can’t take one’s eyes off a fifteen-car pile-up…I just couldn’t believe how bad it was.)
Now, I admit, I don’t like stories that end in suicide, but I can recognize, even admire, if not quite enjoy, the beauty of a truly Shakespearean tragedy like The House of Sand and Fog. It wasn’t the grimness that made the novel untenable; it was the sameness.
Finally, I’ve read a number of novels stuck in another mono-emote: the Choice. Let me explain, because this might be a little counter-intuitive. The Choice, as I see it, is when the hero finally decides to throw caution to the cats and doubt to the dogs and try something desperate and crazy and brave. The hero is completely, even insanely, committed, although he’s already accepted he probably has no chance of winning. By this point, the hero decides, he must try, no matter what. He does, and against all odds, succeeds.
A few books I’ve read, and it seems to be a particular fault of Young Adult Fantasy, attempt to create a daring-do character but instead only create a protagonist who constantly rushes into conflicts with nary a plan and never a second thought. Or if there’s a moment of doubt at all, the protagonist quickly decides to throw caution to the cats and doubt to the dogs and try something desperate and crazy and brave.
And it works! Yay!
The next crisis comes up and again, the hero goes all out, completely, insanely committed to some rash and ridiculous plan, like simply running into a room full of the Evil One’s minions. The heroine might draw on power she didn’t know she had, and despite having no training, no practice, and sometimes even no idea that she has magic, she blasts away the baddies through sheer force of willpower/gumption/awesomesauce. And this is how the heroine smashes through the whole book, making one stupid mistake after another but never really suffering the consequences for it.
This kind of thing isn’t quite as annoying as a character stuck in Denial or, the Ancient Ones forbid, Depression, but it’s still… ridiculous. The character never really has to work for her magic, she never has to plan her strategy, she never has to try and fail and grow and learn and try again and finally succeed. Some superhero stories operate like this, and Mary Sue fan fiction and an awful lot of bad cartoon fantasy (Winx Club, I’m looking at you); but a novel should know better.
It might be interesting to actually map out your hero or heroine’s changing emotional temperature, changing internal color, over the course of your story. What state is she in at the start of the story? Happy? Depressed? Neutral? And how far down does she dip–does she descend into depression or spark into anger? And, if it’s not a tragedy that ends at the low point, how does she find the positive energy to achieve her goals at the end?
Here I’ve shown a hypothetical character journey: Surprise –> Anxiety –> Anger –> Depression –> Shame –> Pride –> Happiness. (I’ve equated Shame with the Experiment stage because the character becomes ashamed at being inactive in the face of adversity; Pride or even Anger takes over, giving the character the energy to fight back.) But other emotions could also fill in the basic arc from Shock to Acceptance, for instance, Shame might be the starting state, and Pride the ending condition; or the character might start out expressing Contempt, learn to feel Guilt or Shame at the low point, and finally find Love at the end.
Whatever emotions your hero experiences, above all, they must not be monochromatic!
