Are your characters changing emotionally faster than your readers can follow?
In this episode of The Dialogue Doctor Podcast, Jeff Elkins sits down with author Hazel Behrens to work through a scene from her novel and examine one of the trickiest parts of writing emotion: How much space does an emotional change need?
Hazel is writing a novel about Liz, a woman struggling with the death of her only child. Years after the loss, Liz has buried herself in research, family history, and familiar routines as a way of avoiding the grief she still has not fully faced.
Hazel knows how to create emotional material. Her concern is that because she knows the story and the characters so well, she sometimes moves through emotional moments too quickly, leaving the reader behind. That leads Jeff and Hazel into a conversation about the velocity of emotion.
Some emotional changes happen slowly: a character drifts from one feeling into another through a series of small moments.
Other emotional changes happen all at once: something happens, and suddenly the character is somewhere completely different emotionally.
Those two kinds of changes need to be handled differently.
Jeff introduces a simple framework for understanding those moments:
- trigger
- transition
- response
Something creates the emotional movement.
The character has to move through that change.
Then we see what the new emotion causes them to do.
For a small emotional shift, the trigger might be nothing more than a thought.
For a major emotional shift, the trigger (and the space surrounding it) usually needs to be larger.
Jeff and Hazel explore:
- how to recognize when an emotional transition is happening too quickly,
- why emotional changes need a clear trigger,
- how the size of the trigger should match the size of the emotional shift,
- when a single line of inner thought can smooth out a transition,
- how body language communicates emotion more powerfully than explanation,
- why dialogue is more than characters simply speaking to one another,
- how a character can be "in dialogue" with an object, a memory, an email, or even someone who is no longer present,
- why interaction helps ground the reader in the present moment,
- how formatting and paragraph structure can change the emotional distance of a scene,
- how dialogue, body language, and internal thought can work together,
- and how giving an emotional moment just a little more room can dramatically increase its impact.
The conversation also looks at the relationship between form and emotion.
Longer reflective passages can create distance and make the reader feel as though they are inside a character's thoughts.
Dialogue and physical interaction bring the reader closer to the immediate moment.
That means writers can use the shape of the scene itself to mirror a character's emotional journey.
As Liz begins trapped inside her grief, the writing can feel more inward and reflective.
As she begins reconnecting with the people around her, the scenes can become more grounded, active, and interactive.
Jeff and Hazel also examine places where Hazel is already doing this particularly well, including the way food, family relationships, and repeated interactions with Liz's husband can become markers of her emotional progress.
The lesson is not that every emotional moment needs pages of reflection.
- Sometimes the fix is one sentence.
- Sometimes it is one more exchange of dialogue.
- Sometimes it is simply allowing the character to react before the story moves on.
Because if the character changes emotionally but the reader never has time to experience that change, the moment won't land.
The writer already knows how the character feels.
The job is to make sure the reader gets there too.
For more on the craft of writing, check out DialogueDoctor.com
