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Joined: 2/11/2013
Posts: 1
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so working on my story i have come across things, such as the death of a parent, that i have never (thankfully) experienced. i can try to pretend i know how that would feel and how my character should react but i don't want it to seem fake. i tried thinking of friends who have gone through such things and their emotions when i sat listening/comforting them. so i guess i was wondering if there is any thing any of you do when you come across some emotion, event, or anything that you haven't experinced but want to do justice when writing about it.
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One of the reasons for getting deeply into the character's head, and presenting their POV, as against a transcription of the storyteller speaking the story, is that as we write we're forced to look at the scene as the character, using the character's knowledge, needs, and expectations.
Remember, the idea isn't to tell the reader how the character feels, because that's a report, and inherently dispassionate. We want to entertain, which means placing the reader on the scene, and giving them reason to feel exactly as the character does.
Make it so real that the reader is moved to want to pat the protagonist on the shoulder and say, "I know exactly how you feel," because they've experienced the scene in real-time, and actually did feel it.
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I can't do it. Best I can do is to extrapolate what I know to imagine something I don't know. Writing feels true or it doesn't.
Jay is exactly right, I want the reader to feel that my characters are real.
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Joined: 6/28/2011
Posts: 188
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Good writing lives because it touches on the universal. But it is brought to life by the specific.
When you're dealing with something like grief, that's a universal that everyone has experienced. Maybe you haven't lost a parent, but you've lost a favorite pet, or had a best friend move far away. Draw on the emotion that you have experienced and extrapolate to the emotion you haven't experienced. If you've really just had a remarkable life free from worries and cares, then get a book on the grieving process and read it. Do a Google search on blogs with the phrases "my father died" and "my mother passed away." Use what you know and what you can research to get a general feel for common elements of the thing you're trying to write about.
Once you have that, your next step is to recognize that it doesn't matter how you would react to the death of your parent, or how your readers would react to the death of theirs. It matters how your character reacts as an individual.
My dad has had some health issues over the last several years, and I've had to think about the fact that he may not be around that much longer. As a result, I have some ideas about how I'm likely to react when he dies. And I guarantee you, although the sadness and sense of loss will echo that felt by millions of other people in similar situations, the details of what I feel will include things that are going to be very different from what "most people" would expect. That's because the specifics of my relationship with my dad are unique to the two of us, and how I feel when he is gone will be greatly influenced by the general progress of our relationship over time and the exact state of our relationship at the time of his death.
Consider two individuals: Bob was raised by his father because his mother died in a car accident, while Leo was raised by his mother because his father was a violent alcoholic who disappeared when he was three. Bob's father devoted his entire life to making sure Bob had the best life possible. He worked very hard during the day, and then spent almost all of his free time with his son, teaching him how to play ball, how to use woodworking tools, how to make friends, what to look for in a romantic partner. When it turned out that Bob was gay, his father was completely accepting and supportive, treating his boyfriends with friendship and respect, and eventually welcoming his life-partner into the family just as he would have a daughter-in-law. Leo has very few childhood memories of his father -- just vague images of a huge man screaming at his mother, making her cry. When he was a toddler, his father slapped him because he was making noise during a TV show, and a ring on the father's hand cut Leo across the cheek, leaving a scar that he has had to look at in the mirror his entire life, knowing that it was the only thing his father had ever really given him to keep. When Leo was in high school, his mother came into a small inheritance, and his father showed back up, demanding part of the money because the two of them were still legally married, since his mother had been too cash-strapped to ever bother with getting an official divorce. Leo came home from school to find the two of them in a confrontation, his father drunk and his mother's lip busted and bleeding from a punch. When he told his father to get out or he was calling the cops, the man just swore incoherently and then shouldered past him, calling him a worthless little punk. Both of these fathers died in a head-on car collision when Leo's dad passed out at the wheel and swerved across a highway median. Leo was seventeen. Bob was thirty-six and had just found out he and his partner were approved to adopt a child, so that his dad was about to become a grandfather.
Both of these men are going to be upset to learn that their fathers are dead. Both will be filled with regrets, anger at lost opportunities, and a hollow void of knowing that they will never again have a chance to speak to the person they have lost. But Bob's reaction is going to be a world apart from Leo's, and both of them are going to have completely different reactions from what I end up feeling when one of my parents dies.
So you have to know your characters in order to know what their emotional responses are going to be. In a way, it's not even a bad thing that you've never had that experience yourself, because you're not locked into the specifics that you know from your own experience, and you're more free to apply generalities that you can glean from research, then make them come to life by showing the reader how your character's response is unique to his or her own situation.
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Joined: 3/17/2011
Posts: 88
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I dunno Herb,
I don't think it's accurate to say the reactions of your two sons are necessarily going to be worlds apart. Why should they be? Beware of surface differences. As a writer, beware of making the obvious choices. When someone dies, someone as centrally important as the one man in the universe who contributed half your DNA, the reaction is going to be pretty primal. And it's absolutely never going to be just one thing.
Be careful not to traffic in cliches. The boy with the rotten drunken father may, when his father finally leaves this world, feel profound loss and all the love for his father that the man's actions forbade the boy to feel in his life might come pouring out in anquished revelation upon his death. And the boy whose father was so accepting and so attentive might erupt with overwhelming rage and fury at his father for abandoning him now. And of course, both boys may feel these feelings and be so ashamed of them that they bury them deep inside until something later in the story triggers their release.
What's key is to understand that the reaction to something so primal is going to have many, many levels and unspool over the course of a person's life time. So how a character in a book you're writing responds to such a loss within the pages of your narrative is largely up to you.
I think it's important and sometimes liberating as artists for us to keep in mind that these characters are just that: fictional characters. Their feelings and actions either serve the story or they do not. What would be the most interesting reaction? What would be the most surprising reaction? What kind of story about a man grieving his father's death do you want to tell?
One thing I know about losing a parent is that when they die, your relationship with them becomes much simpler all of a sudden. Your relationship with them has a completeness that it could never have while they lived. The older we are when this happens, the more past experiences we have to review and wonder what might have happened had we done things differently.
-Kevin
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Joined: 6/28/2011
Posts: 188
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I don't think we're disagreeing, Kevin. I think you've just accurately pointed out that my phrase "is going to be a world apart" was an unnecessary and potentially misleading hyperbole. It would have been better phrased as, "is likely to feature some significant differences..."
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Joined: 12/22/2011
Posts: 6
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This may sound strange, but I sit on my own where it is quiet enough to think. Then remember what I have heard from others about similar situations and not just how they said it made them feel, but how I saw them react with my own eyes. I usually start to feel bad for them, or tense as I remember their hands tightening up. I try my best to link up similar experiences in my life (your example of a lost parent could be linked to losing a loved pet as a child, only the feeling would be amplified.) and then I close my eyes and imagine that the experience in my life was the one I am trying to write. It works for me, although I'm sure it sounds strange. After a few minutes I find that I honestly am sad, angry, or tense when I focus on just that concept. Then I can write it out. It works on the other side of the emotion spectrum too. I think in a way, I'm meditating. I just choose which emotion I will play to during each session.
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Joined: 6/26/2013
Posts: 3
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I never dealt with a relationship, but I have my characters falling in love and exploring the world of a relationship with being together. I tend to write scenes and everything that deal with violence and sexual content that have never happened to me before. This is what tends to bother me, and I'm afraid that a reader will not take my material seriously. This novel that I had just finished deals with violence, profanity, sexual, and relationship (family and personal problems). I have had a few family issues in my life that are the main reason why I wrote this story in the first place. The other stuff is just thrown in there, and I haven't experienced those at all. Does this sound awkward to anyone?
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Joined: 4/30/2011
Posts: 662
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It isn't unusual for people to write about things they know nothing about. In fact, many writers are nothing like their characters and they've never lived in that character's world, but they manage to put something to the page that resonates with people. When Stephen Crane wrote The Red Badge of Courage, he was too young to have been in the Civil War, but vets of the war thought he had served. He had touched a part of them and they thought they had found a kindred spirit. (The the found out he wasn't, and were often very angry at him. You don't need to worry about that now.)
So, it is entirely possible to emulate the feeling you need. First, contemplate how you would feel if you were in the same situation. I've cried writing scenes because I know that is how I would feel. Then try to embody all your character's thoughts and emotions. How would they react? That is one of the basics of writing fiction. I know this sounds silly, but we're really method acting on paper.
Second, as stated by others, do your research. Look up blogs about that situation or those in it. Need a character to display certain traits? Look up the typical behavior for that emotion or disorder. I have a character who is attempting to recover from his PTSD, but is thrown back into the worst of it when another horrible thing happens to him. I've done some research on basic forms and have even spoken to others. It's interesting how effective speaking to others about their experiences helps to life the weight, but there will still be scars. There are even those who call it post-traumatic stress injury, which is a more accurate description. If my experience with research has taught me anything, first hand accounts are the best, but sometimes you have to take what you can get.
I don't know if that helps. Hope it does. --edited by LeeAnna Holt on 7/1/2013, 5:52 PM--
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I write vampires. Who really knows about vampires? That's something that goes into the "write what you know" bag. 
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I agree with Trey on using visualization, meditative techniques. Focusing on the way others have responded to
such situations, as well as linking closely associated experiences you’ve had with
these same emotions. I also agree with LeeAnna on pretending you are in the
same situation, and like, she said, research is always helpful. I have a psychology
book that discusses sociopaths, womanizers, child abusers, etc. and their
personality traits. This could help you develop your character’s backstory as
well as figure out how they will react to the events in your story.
When I come to a point in a story where I need to invoke a
certain emotional reaction, I will stop to meditate on the emotions I need to
describe. If a character is watching their mother die, I will picture my own
mother dying in my arms after having gone through some horrific accident. I
picture the entire accident—my mother’s tears as she realizes she is about to
die. I speak out loud the last words I would tell her, and what she might say
to me. Just visualizing something likes this starts to make me cry. Once I’m
engrossed in this made up memory, I take notice of how my body is reacting. The
weakness of my limbs, the suffocating tightness in my chest, the burning of the
tears behind my eyes. I think if you meditate hard enough on an image, your
body will naturally react.
Of course, I have experienced many of these types of
emotions in my life, so I may be able to tap into them easier. I’ve watched
people die. I’ve had PTSD, so I know what it is like to have images engrained
within your mind that haunt you and keep you awake at night. But, there are
many things I haven’t experienced that my characters will, so I take those
emotions I am familiar with and use them to translate onto the page what I need
to convey.
I agree with Herb, you also have to know how your character
will react to such a situation, because we all deal with our emotions
differently. For example, I easily cry when I see someone else suffering. My
sister will walk away and ignore it. It doesn’t mean she doesn’t care any less;
it is just how she deals with her emotions.
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LeeAnna Holt's reference to Stephan Crane writing authentically about war without ever having served should be taken to heart by every writer who overvalues experience vis-a-vis imagination. Don Juan and Dante never spent a day in hell. Jules Verne went around the world in eighty days without ever leaving his writing room. Whatever a writer conjures can wear the vestments of reality when imagination rules the day. And always remember that startling prophecy incubates in the realm of sound imagination. Writing without imagination is called journalism.
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Write what you know. That's what I tell people. Yet there are ways to know things without actually experiencing them. My mother died when I was a very young child and I grew up without one. That's a very rare circumstance, but it also means I don't know what it's like to have a mother. Yet I have many characters who do. How do I know how to write this? I ask around. I do research. I'm on my computer almost ten hours a day reading articles, picking through Wikipedia and blogs to try and figure out what I don't know. I ask my friends who have experienced it. I write what I think is right then ask others what they think. Eventually I start to learn and I can imagine what it's like.
Overall, if you have a situation that you don't know, it's possible to write it. You just have to put a lot more effort into it. That's why I go out and I do things that I normally wouldn't. So I can experience them and write them well. I've gotten into fights, I've gone on last minute road trips with friends, I've jumped off cliffs into lakes and oceans, leaned an instrument, read about astrophysics so that I can understand what my characters go through. Being a writer gives you an excuse to do stupid or crazy things. So don't be afraid to do them.
Of course there's always a measure of safety. Just have to be careful and use discretion. But the more you do, the less you can say you can't write it because you don't know it.
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