Emotion 2: Representing character emotion

• The snippet doesn't tell us the trigger. (It is Jam's mother saying she's not going to go into their art studio tonight, which is good because Jam has a terrible secret in there.)
• The feeling is a loosening knot in her chest.
• The emotion is labelled as relief.
• The behaviours are exhaling, and then later waiting in bed until her parents are asleep so she can go to the studio.

Do you notice that the first behaviour is out of order?

Jam sighs in relief and feels a loosening knot, but if you think about the precise order of events, it would probably be loosening knot in chest > relief > exhale.

Instead of presenting events in their experienced order, Emezi chooses to focus first on action, and then expands the action with more details about Jam's emotions and feelings, and then continues with further action.

It all works in this case because the events are all close enough together, in the same sentence, so they read as one "package" of experiences. (It's not like Jam exhales and then two pages later Emezi says she feels a knot loosening in her stomach.)

That's a really good question!

It could go either way, because when you think about it any feeling is actually an action of some kind: your stomach sinks, your heart races.

So when is an action a feeling and when is it a behaviour?

There's no precise answer, but we can consider whether an action is internal or external, and whether or not we have any direct control over it.

• Internal and no control: Our stomach churning or our heart thumping are actions inside ourselves, and we have no direct control over them, so they sound more like feelings than behaviours.
• External and some control: Exhaling or laughing or crying are external and we have direct control over whether we do them, so we might lean towards calling them behaviours.
• In between: Trembling is in-between; it's external but we don't have any control over it. So is it a behaviour or a feeling? 

There's no right or wrong answer—it's a continuum!

What you should take from this discussion is the idea that feelings are both bodily sensations and experiences, but these are caused by actions within our bodies, and at some point they can become so big and explicit that we can start to think of them as behaviours. 

Where you draw the line is up to you!