Psychosomatic Observation: The Writer’s Secret Weapon

In various corners of my experience, I have received messages that emotions are bad—at least certain ones—and that I should fold them up, tuck them in a bag, and set them on the curb. (If what you say makes me angry, I shouldn’t show it.) In the middle of our public square, emotions are king: how something makes me feel is truth, and the person with the loudest feeling wears the crown. (If what you say makes me angry, you shouldn’t say it.) In response to these dangerous messages, I have taught my children that emotions are emotions. We have them. Some are pleasant; some are not. It’s what we do with them that matters.

For art, what we do with emotion also matters; emotion is our primary medium. We can afford no emotion to sit on the curb—we need every feeling in our palette—nor any to wear a crown. In art, especially literary art, emotion must reveal something greater than itself.

Emotions Point to Truth

“emotion must reveal something greater than itself”

No matter which part of the public square you inhabit, the corners or the middle, emotions have a bad reputation. God created us with this important capacity as part of being human. Through emotions, we enjoy beauty and connect with others. But since emotions are subjective rather than objective, often we either dismiss their value for truth telling or empower them to create their own truth like little despots.

Emotions are neither truth-tellers or truth-makers with a capital T, but they point us to truth if we are willing to look harder. The problem for our modern culture’s love of outrage is that emotions more often point back to truth about me than truth about you. How I feel reflects my mental and physical health, my cultural status, my perception of justice, my history and future, my connection to purpose and eternity, and the condition of my soul. How I feel has a higher probability for affecting my actions than anything I know intellectually.

This connection between my emotions and my physical, mental, and volitional person is why psychologists remind us to avoid telling someone how they should feel; feelings are deeply personal. They are point-of-view-driven. If we want to change how people think and act, we need to enlarge their emotional perception so that truth feels true. Consequently, emotions are a tremendous and necessary resource for storytellers and communicators who want to persuade, even if that persuasion is just to believe a character is real.

Observation of Psychosomatic Composition

We have the power to shape our emotions; our emotions also have the power to shape us. They contribute to our outlook as well as our appearance, posture, and posturing. And this is where writing gets interesting—because naming emotions reduces their power to shape. Naming emotions throws the act of feeling into the arena of analyzing. This naming (and subsequent processing) of our emotions is helpful for psychotherapy but harmful for storytelling and persuasion. I can guarantee that if you name an emotion on the page, the reader won’t feel it. If you want your reader to feel, you have to paint the emotion on the page, sing it through your syntax, act it through your setting, and hide it in every cranny of your manuscript’s heart.

“naming emotions reduces their power to shape”

Visual artists develop the skill of using space, texture, line, and color to represent emotion through its connected body posture, its intensity, its grasp on our souls. Musicians develop an ear for how rhythms mimic and affect the body’s life processes—our breathing, our heart beat—and how discord or euphony, major and minor or atonal modes (within our Western cultural pattern) affect mood, emotions, and memory through the limbic system.

Writers, too, need to recognize all these elements. They need to learn how to use the tools of their craft to create emotion that points to subjective and objective truth in both their characters and their readers. The key is knowing how to re-create the atmosphere, electrical impulses, and postures in the marks and gaps on the page so that emotions flood the reader and not the book.

When I work with beginning writers who are trying to paint emotions on the page rather than name them, I read a lot of shrugs, sighs, eye rolls, and slammed doors. For all the many emotions we have felt and displayed from birth to now, somehow we get stuck writing conflict with the emotional vocabulary of teenagers—and not much else.

I credit the abstract nature of our English language and modern thought for this problem. We teach students, as they grow, to think with abstract concepts and abstract words, to adapt to a world that values the internal workings of the mind. Other languages, such as Hebrew, conceptualize in physical ways. For example, in Malachi 2:5, where God speaks of Levi’s faithfulness to honor his name (meaning his reputation and authority), the Hebrew text says—in a raw, literal translation—that “before my face, my name, [Levi] was broken to pieces.”[1] In English, we wouldn’t say those words because we don’t think like that. We take the power of that physical manifestation—being shattered by God’s very presence and reputation—and funnel it though a mental abstraction: “stood in awe.” But the Hebrew version gives us a much better sense than the English of the line, power, and movement involved in awe.

The Hebrew physical manifestation of emotion has such power that I can even use its psychosomatic composition to create a character’s emotion through an inanimate object:

Michael kneeled on the ottoman and lined up his building-brick tanks for battle. He had never met the colonel, at least, not that he remembered. His mother said the colonel had loved them both, but loved war better. Michael’s B-25 bomber jumped the line and strafed the enemy as it passed over the ottoman.

“Michael,” a deep voice said behind him.

The boy stood and turned. The bomber lost altitude and broke into pieces on the tile.

The colonel had come home.

Now reread that small passage but with this ending:

“Michael,” a deep voice said behind him.

The boy turned and stood in awe. The colonel had come home.

See how the emotional power of the scene and character slips away?

Figure Drawing

Before you can re-create and manipulate psychosomatic composition, you must observe it. You must observe it, seeking to sketch its edges and shadows and impressions rather than the definition you have registered in your head. Learning to see properly is the first step of learning to compose.

My daughter liked to paint at a young age and had some talent. But to enroll in an art program, she had to submit a portfolio that included drawings. She told me she couldn’t draw. I sat her down with a tablet and pencil and placed some elephant figurines on the table. “Draw the elephants,” I said. She began to outline the shape of an elephant she had already registered in her head. It looked like refrigerator art. “No,” I said, “forget the elephants. Draw the shapes and shadows you see in front of you.” After some work and time, a momma elephant and her baby rose out of the shadings and white space on the page.

Any beginning art class worth anything teaches this lesson: drawing is about learning to see. Make it your mantra for writing as well. Writers need to see, hear, smell, taste, and feel how emotions affect the body and soul in terms of posture, tone, facial expression, actions, words, and body functions.

Through Visual Art

What shadows does sadness add to a face? What twist of line does jealousy add to a spine? What dotted colors does anxiety add to a voice and movement? When you know the answers to these questions, your character will come alive and do more than glance at her brother or bite her lip or shrug.

Go to museums and look through art books or online collections. Study how the artists develop emotion through space, texture, line, and color. First look at classic art with human figures—Caravaggio, Renoir, Rembrandt, for example—then move through Impressionism to Abstract Expressionism. How do these artists suggest emotion with a swipe of color, a pattern of lines, a weighty shape? Translate what you discover into character elements. Does a man have low self-esteem? What weight will you create to drag him down as he moves across the room? What trail does he leave? Is he always sitting, always having to look up to others?

Observe nature and technology—what elements, animals, or mechanisms reflect the body postures, actions, sounds, and shadows of your characters and the emotions you are writing?

As you create your characters and pick the details for your illustrations, consider the power of triangle composition in visual art. The triangle encompasses the main subject and draws the eye to its points, creating movement and emphasis. It holds the composition together. Study the perspective lines, for instance, in Leonardo DaVinci’s The Last Supper. See how they all point to the face of Christ, who is himself formed in his own triangle. Are you composing your characters and scenes so that you are drawing the reader’s attention to what you want them to notice emotionally? Perhaps a character has a nervous habit, a deformity, a way of holding her head to the side. Do the traits you write depict the line, color, space, and texture of the primary feeling you want to connect to that character? Do the details hold together, creating a boundary that highlights the persona? Or have you picked the details you give the reader haphazardly?

Through Music

Listen to a variety of music. If possible, choose music without words so you can listen to the cadence, the melody line, the counterpoint. Is there conflict, joy, sorrow? How does the music achieve these moods? What is the rhythm of the phrases, the pace, the smoothness or disconnectedness of the notes?

Write these cadences, these textures into your descriptions, your dialogue, your character’s thoughts and actions. Make word choices based on euphony as well as connotation. What happens, for instance, if you give your lowly character simple words but elegant phrasing, and your wealthy power broker an elitist vocabulary punctuated by crass words? How does their speech make you feel about each?

Through Cinema

Watch movies like The Mission, Last of the Mohicans, and Silence—there are enough emotionally charged dramas out there that you can find ones to your taste—and analyze the composition of the actors on the screen. How are they connected or disconnected from one another? Does the camera zoom in or zoom out or cut away? From what angle does the camera place the viewer? How does this change the emotional tension and content?

Look for ways directors, actors, and screenwriters communicate internal character through external means, through music, dialogue, physical tics and postures, movement, or visual cues. How might you re-create that sight, sound, and movement in your scenes to communicate truth about your characters?

“we have to know how to affect the emotions, to open people up to see inside themselves with a different light”

To communicate well through art, to pierce the soul, we have to know how to affect the emotions, to open people up to see inside themselves with a different light, to see the world and the “other” in a different light, and connect their emotional responses to truth standards they have believed and ask, “Does everything match up?” Not every form of art can take a person all the way from emotion to a truth statement, but certainly many can, and certainly the novel and short story and poetry, and all other dramatic forms, should. I’m speaking not about an agenda or a sermon, but a universal truth about beauty, justice, and the human condition.

Emotions are emotions. Some are pleasant; some are not; all have power. Let’s make sure what we write with them matters.

[1] Translation mine, with help from The Hebrew and Aramaic Lexicon of the Old Testament (2000), s.v. “ḥtt.”