Emotion 2: Representing character emotion

Dialogue as emotional behaviour

Dialogue can express character emotion in the same way as behaviour. (Really, dialogue is just a kind of behaviour—as we explore in the Narrative Basics dialogue lesson.)

Here's a snippet from Little Women: how do you think Jo feels?

"I burned it up."

"What! My little book I was so fond of, and worked over, and meant to finish before Father got home? Have you really burned it?" said Jo, turning very pale, while her eyes kindled and her hands clutched Amy nervously.

Little Women(1868)
How does Jo feel? What about her dialogue tells you that?

Jo feels nervous. 

One reason we know this is because Lousia May Alcott tells us Jo clutched Amy nervously.

But we also know this through her behaviour and expressive dialogue: her exclamations, repetition, and questions show us that the burned book was important to Jo, and losing it is a disaster.

What's the emotional loop?

  • Trigger: Amy says she burned the book.
  • Emotions: Nervous, distressed.
  • Feelings: Turning pale, eyes kindling.
  • Behaviour: Ask questions, confirm if it's true, clutch Amy's hands.

"That was the last train," said the old man.

"Oh no! Henry! What are we going to do? There are no buses, we don't have enough money for a car ride all the way back to the city," said Thaddeus, his cheek feathers prickling while his flippers drummed the bucket in distress.

"Poison!" shouted one of the villagers.

"It can't be," Mizune said breathlessly. "Nobody here would dare to use poison in a duel. Not even Carlo. It's just… It's something I ate… Surely… It must have been the breakfast eggs…" She collapsed onto her hip, touching the nick on her ankle from Carlo's spear, and feeling her neck slick with sweat.

For Thaddeus, the trigger is missing their train, his emotion is distress, and his action is to describe the problem.

For Mizune, the trigger is the prospect of being poisoned, her emotion is disbelief, and her action is to come up with alternative explanations.

To write your own variation:

  • Choose a trigger.
  • Imagine how your character would feel.
  • Imagine what that feeling would drive them to say to another character.
  • When you write the dialogue, experiment with phrasing and pacing to see if you can convey the underlying emotion without explicitly stating it.
  • Reinforce the dialogue with behaviour.
Write some dialogue, using phrasing and pacing to convey a character's underlying emotions without explicitly saying what they are.
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