Emotional Rollercoaster: Writing Anger Print
By Apryl Duncan   


Emotions are hard enough to deal with. Now try writing about them. Many people feel they're running straight into a wall when they have to tackle their character's emotions.

Get out your tissues. Clench your fists. Engage in a passionate kiss. All this month, we're exploring your character's emotions and how you can put those feelings in writing.

It's time to toy with your character's emotions. Ready to get them riled? Our emotional journey begins with Anger.

But just like you, our characters feel various degrees of anger. Your dog's been sifting through the garbage and now last week's leftovers are all over the kitchen floor.

Okay, you're peeved. You roll your eyes, scold the dog and call the kids in from the other room to clean up the mess their dog that you've been taking care of made.

But say you walk in on your spouse and he/she has a new friend. You're enraged. Your face feels hot. That's when you start to throw things, yell obscenities and land a few punches on the spouse in question.

So just how do you capture those moments and put them into words? Let's take a look at how not to do it:

Elaine was mad as hell. She punched Tony in the stomach.
"I hate you," she yelled.
"You're so stupid," Tony gasped for breath.
Elaine kicked him in the shin as she screamed, "Go to hell."

Another bad example:

Carrie felt her blood boil. Her fingers tightened into a fist.
She threw a punch at Andrea. And then another.
Andrea punched back as she fell backwards.
Then Carrie grabbed a chair and crashed it over Andrea's head.

Yikes! A female Arnold Schwarzenegger. But where's the emotion? Did you feel the punches Carrie landed? Did you feel the chair crashing over Andrea's head?

The scene merely described the action. There wasn't any emotion attached to the characters.

Another common mistake found in emotional writing is using clichés. For instance, in the first example above, Elaine was "mad as hell."

Sure, people say they're mad as hell but what does it mean really? How mad is hell?

 



Now that you know what to avoid, let's examine the right way to describe your character's anger:

J. F. Freedman's The Disappearance contains a pivotal scene where a mother finds out her 14-year-old daughter is having an affair with the same man she is. See if you can feel the anger radiating off the page:

Joe. It's Joe being my lover that has you so bent out of shape, isn't it? Not that I'm having sex, but who I'm having it with." She walked up to her mother, stuck her face right in her mother's face. "You're jealous, aren't you? That I'm having an affair with your lover." She taunted her deeper. "Did you think you could keep him all to yourself?"

"Emma..."

"He doesn't even like you. He just takes pity on you."

The rage took over. All-encompassing, all-overwhelming. She reached back and threw a punch at her daughter, threw it as hard as she could, and it caught Emma flush on the face, and she fell from the force of the blow, fell off the edge of the platform where they were standing next to the stairs, and she fell straight down, fifteen feet, her head hitting the ground below with a dull thud, like a sack of potatoes.

Another prime example of anger writing comes from Bentley Little's The House. In this selection, a woman comes home to find her boyfriend in a very compromising position:

There was no silent second of shock, no delay of any kind. She ran instantly into the bathroom and yanked Matt up by his hair. "Get out!" she screamed. "Get the hell out of my house!"

...She dug her fingers into Matt's upper arm and shoved him as hard as she could into the hall, picking his clothes up from the floor next to the tub and throwing them after him. She did not touch the woman but continued screaming all the while, anguished, angry invectives that included both of them.

Now it's time to turn what you've learned into some real anger-writing.

Try this exercise:

Choose one of your current characters or create a new one. Take this character through three levels of anger.

For instance, go back to the dog in the trash example. Maybe the kids don't come in the kitchen to clean up the dog's disaster area. So your character starts to clean up the trash.

You could move your character from the low boil of a minor annoyance (LEVEL I). But maybe your character discovers her own credit card bills in the trash. She realizes these high-ticket items must have been charged by her teenage son (LEVEL II). A little more research and she finds out that her teenage son bought lingerie for his girlfriend (LEVEL III).



Apryl Duncan is the founder of FictionAddiction.NET. She's also an author, freelance writer and workshop instructor with more than 15 years experience writing professionally. Her work has been published worldwide and has been translated into nine different languages.