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Helen Marshall – Landing the Gut Punch: Emotional Effect in Short Stories
I was fortunate enough to get into one of Clarion West’s Online Workshops with Helen Marshall, who writes horror/magical realism short fiction.
First I wanted to report on my general experience, in case other Apexers are considering this specific workshop (she mentioned that she’s taught it before) or others from Clarion West’s online courses, a format I really hope they continue. She is currently teaching at a college and this felt a lot like a college class. It was two hours long and held over Zoom. It included a lecture and two brief writing exercises. We edited our own work and did not read it aloud.
She read a piece of her flash fiction aloud, and then we jointly annotated it with our individual emotional responses by adding comments to the text of the story in Google Docs. This was a very interesting group project because it both revealed where the story changed emotions and showed places where readers had different reactions. It might be a structure worth borrowing for our online writing groups because this would be a good method for providing feedback on a work in progress.
Second, here’s a brief overview of the big ideas:
Changing emotions increases story tension. We humans read in part because we’re fascinated by emotions, and we find it especially interesting when something doesn’t match, like when we know that a character’s external behavior does not match their internal state. Look for opportunities to provide characterization this way by giving characters a complex emotional state. Oscillate between opposing emotions to increase story tension or to sneak up on readers with an emotion they are on guard against.
She uses Freud’s Eros and Thanatos as a model for categorizing the emotions that an author evokes into “Life” (procreation, cooperation, survival – the parts of the story where you keep turning pages because you want to stay there) and “Death” (aggression, risky behavior, trauma – the parts of the story where you keep turning pages because you want the anxiety and conflict relieved). Shifting between the two categories is important for characterization, pacing, and emphasizing the emotional payoff, and as an author you should be aware of where you make these shifts and make them consciously with your goal in mind.
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