Nocturnal

the beauty of life

"I can only note that the past is beautiful because one never realises an emotion at the time. It expands later, and thus we don't have complete emotions about the present, only about the past."

"There are such things as ghosts. People everywhere have always known that. And we believe in them every bit as much as Homer did. Only now, we call them by different names. Memory. The unconscious."

"Thus, a strain of gentle music, or the rippling of water in a silent place, or the odour of a flower, or the mention of a familiar word, will sometimes call up sudden dim remembrances of scenes that never were, in this life; which vanish like a breath; which some brief memory of a happier existence, long gone by, would seem to have awakened; which no voluntary exertion of the mind can ever recall."

“I want to gather all of my memories and hook them up to a lie detector test. Only then can I know what is true. Only then, can I recognize that everything I forget does not stop me from remembering.”

i mean, do you have any tips on how to stop overusing body language and incorporating more flavorful writing? i’ve found that a lot of my works overuse emotion based movement to the point where i might as well be writing a meant-to-be-watched film instead of a meant-to-be-read story. (for example: i recently read a story where the author compared a character’s first kiss to the coming of autumn. it was beautiful. whereas i think if i were to describe the scene, i’d just focus on the softness of wandering hands and the warmth of exchanged breaths. which is nice, yeah, but isn’t really as thought provoking).

i’ve tried googling advice on this but a lot of the sources i’ve found basically said “just stop overusing body language” without offering other suggestions. any advice you can offer would be greatly appreciated. this blog has been really helpful with my writing so far.

There's a few ways to do this, and the first one is - sorry - to read more books. Not to chuck a library card at you and be done with it, but seeing how other authors express emotions can help you pin down a) why they use the imagery they use and b) why it's effective.

Now, I wish I could say this is an easy thing to do once you figure it out, but, well, it isn't. It takes thought and practice, and your first, second, and even third drafts are probably going to focus on what's physically happening. But the goal you're looking for here is to convey emotion, and to do that by association, we're going to take a look at the senses.

Sight

So we have the example of comparing a kiss to the coming of autumn, but why? Because it evokes the same feeling in the protagonist. A grieving person might stare at a tree and think of how its roots consume the dead, a pregnant person might compare the coming of a child to the brightness of new green leaves. We know the core of these emotions - despair, happiness - but we're able to feel them through descriptions.

Taste/Scent

A girl's first crush gave her an apple, so she might compare a latter kiss to the sweetness of biting into an apple. Someone describes the smell of cigarette smoke on the bus, but what they're really thinking of is their father's death. Memory is a powerful key to emotion, and through that key we get our richer descriptions. How can you reach into your character's past to bring a stronger present?

Hearing

Music is admittedly hard to convey via text, but it's a vital part of the human experience. Innocuous sounds can trigger extreme emotional swings, like a firework being mistaken for a gunshot. The local news station uses a tone that sounds exactly like my wake-up alarm and it drives me crazy to hear it. You can't make us hear Beethoven's Midnight Sonata, but it can play a vital part of triggering a flashback or an emotion in its rising and falling tones.

Ultimately, you'll find the right way to mix and match how one thing can trigger another, such as how the sight and sound of a distant flock of birds and bring us into a flashback about someone leaving.

3x01

3x02

1. “Keep flowers around, always. They may eventually fade and wither, but their beauty remains intact, and their faltered presence may always be replaced with the bloom of another season.

2. Tune in to your senses. There are five of them, five blessed gifts; just as there are elements. Breathe deeper. Touch more. Watch, taste and listen… Closer.