Quick recap: what have we learned in this section?
Before we started this section we had established that:
- Character emotions help us understand the meaning of events in a story.
- Different emotions imply different meanings, because each emotion has a different job.
- Emotions also help us understand what characters want and value.
With this latest section we've gone deeper:
- Emotions are not just reactions, they are also the cause of behaviour and events.
- Emotions and behaviour work in a continual loop.
- A basic version of the loop is trigger > emotion > behaviour.
- Given that emotions are composed of physical feelings and mental thoughts, an expanded version of the loop is trigger > feeling > thought > emotion > behaviour.
- One loop leads to another: behaviour creates a new trigger, which starts a new loop.
- One character's behaviour is often another character's trigger—so how you describe a loop depends on whose point of view you're taking.
