How do you write a character's emotions when the character doesn't actually understand what they're feeling?
In this episode of The Dialogue Doctor Podcast, Jeff Elkins sits down with author Joan Lightning to work through a scene from her epic fantasy novel A Jealous God.
Joan's protagonist, Cherix, presents an unusual writing challenge.
He has spent his life inside a culture that has left him disconnected from his own emotions and relationships. He forms attachments. He feels guilt, sadness, fear, loyalty, and affection.
He just doesn't recognize those feelings for what they are.
That creates a fascinating problem for the writer. The character can't tell the reader what he feels, but the reader still needs to feel it.
Jeff and Joan dig into how to solve that problem by using inner thought, physical responses, rationalization, body language, and emotional contradiction.
Instead of having Cherix think, "I'm sad," the scene can let him experience a strange physical discomfort, question why it is happening, and then explain it away.
The character remains emotionally unaware.
The reader doesn't.
The conversation also explores how to build tension in a scene that contains a great deal of dialogue but very little physical confrontation.
Jeff and Joan talk about:
- how to create tension through subtext
- how to use inner thought between segments of dialogue
- how to let the reader understand emotions the POV character cannot name
- why emotional reactions still need to appear on the page even when a character represses or misunderstands them
- how to use physical sensations as clues to hidden emotion
- how a character can rationalize feelings instead of recognizing them
- where to pause dialogue and let the POV character process what just happened
- how to introduce unfamiliar cultures and social structures through character perspective
- how to describe objects the POV character has never encountered before
- how much worldbuilding explanation a reader actually needs
- and how fear, curiosity, and uncertainty can make a first encounter feel real
The scene also gives Jeff and Joan a chance to look at one of the great challenges of fantasy POV.
Cherix encounters people, customs, musical instruments, horses, saddles, and social expectations that are completely normal to the reader—or to other characters—but entirely new to him.
That means Joan has to describe familiar things without letting Cherix suddenly possess knowledge he could not possibly have.
And sometimes the answer is not to explain more.
Sometimes it is to let the character misunderstand.
The episode ultimately comes back to a simple principle:
The character does not always have to understand the emotion.
But the reader does.
For writers working with deep POV, emotionally repressed characters, unreliable narrators, fantasy cultures, subtext-heavy dialogue, or characters with major emotional blind spots, this conversation offers a practical look at how to bring the reader inside an experience the character himself cannot fully explain.
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