Emotion 2: Representing character emotion

When a character shows no emotion

Have you ever seen someone showing no emotion about something you know (or think) should affect them? 

Here’s an example of Naila's mother doing this in Written in the Stars:

His words stay with me the next day. They linger in my thoughts as I watch my mother in the kitchen. Her mouth remains set in a thin straight line, devoid of emotion. It’s as if I’m a stranger. I’ve tried apologizing, explaining, but my words are weightless, floating away unheard.

Written in the Stars(2015)
What do you think is going on with Naila's mother?

This lack of visible emotion is what psychologists might call flat affect, and it can mean many things on an emotional level:

  • Unaffected: The person isn’t emotionally affected by these specific events.
  • Overwhelmed: The person is so overwhelmed by emotion that their behaviour shuts down, like a computer that’s crashed.
  • Compensating: The person feels strong emotions on the inside but they try to hide it with their external behaviour.

Which one do you think is happening in this snippet?

Naila's mother is traumatised; she is so overwhelmed with emotion that she has shut down.

(What’s the trauma? Naila's parents have discovered she has a boyfriend and are extremely upset, to the extent they are going to take her back to their home country of Pakistan and put her into an arranged marriage with a man of their choosing. The novel is about the effect their actions have on Naila, who absolutely does not want to be married to a complete stranger on her parents’ command.)

This snippet is told from Naila's point of view, so we're seeing her mother's emotional behaviour through her eyes.

  • Context: General context setting for the scene, this is fallout from the previous scene.
  • Emotionless: We see mother's flat affect.
  • Expansion: Naila tries to get a response but to no avail.

Given we're seeing from Naila's point of view, we can't see inside her mother. But if we fill in some blanks then her mother's emotion-behaviour loop is something like: 

  • Trigger: Discovering Naila has a secret boyfriend.
  • Emotion: Anger, loss, heartbreak, determination—so overwhelming it leads to an emotional shutdown.
  • Behaviour: Mouth in a thin straight line, acting like a stranger towards Naila, distant, unhearing.

Here are a couple of examples that follow a similar pattern:

He had come to feed the gulls but they decided to feed themselves. As they yanked the bucket from his grasp and began to gorge on the fish, Thaddeus’ wings fell to his sides and he stood staring, his face empty. He was motionless as they squawked and screamed, tore at the glistening herring, and knocked the empty bucket over with a clang.

She reached across the square to Mrs Sakai, pleading. Surely she would talk some sense into these people? Before it all went too far? But Mrs Sakai looked at her without expression, then turned away to gaze over the rooftops at the silhouette of the temple. Mizune called out, but her voice was lost in crowd’s chant.

  • Think of a trigger.
  • Decide if your character should be genuinely unaffected, overwhelmed, or compensating.
  • Show what that lack of emotion looks like and how it affects the scene.

Either your main character can be emotionless, or someone else in the scene (with your main character observing them).

Write your variation, where a character responds to something emotionlessly.
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