"Between STIMULUS & RESPONSE, there is a SPACE. In that SPACE lies our FREEDOM & POWER to choose our RESPONSE. In our RESPONSE lies our GROWTH & FREEDOM."
—Viktor E. Frankl
Many creatives struggle to define how they give their work emotional depth. It’s something readers feel inherently, but it can be difficult to put our fingers on what exactly a story is doing that really speaks to us. When it comes to creating emotionally dynamic characters, however, there are a few tricks to keep in mind that will help your characters feel like living, breathing people, making it easier for readers to emotionally connect to the story.
Let’s talk about primary vs. secondary emotional responses.
Writing Emotions
Writing Characters with Emotional Depth
We writers love to ruin our characters’ lives. It’s half the fun of writing. But simple tragedy is not all it takes to garner your readers’ empathetic investment. Characters need to have emotional depth.
Emotional depth doesn’t just mean feeling things deeply, it means having complex emotions that are informed and influenced by an individual’s unique lived experiences. It means that, when a character is feeling sad, we understand that there are various factors contributing to why they feel that way. It goes beyond actions and reactions to encompass the broader context of the character’s life.
Before you think it’s asking too much that you have every experience a character has ever had in mind at all times, let me clarify that not every emotional moment, reaction, or action warrants this sort of breakdown. Besides, you get to know your characters in the same way you get to know the flesh and blood people in your real life. The context for every emotion they share with you doesn’t necessarily flash through your mind in quick succession, you simply know them, and your brain contextualizes for you automatically. When you know your characters as well as you surely will by the time you finish a first draft, this is a natural process, but one that does require some thought and care especially in revision stages to ensure that your understanding of the character and their emotional journey is clear on the page.
Writing Emotions
Primary
Responses
Primary emotions are the core emotions we experience in immediate response to external stimuli.
They’re instinctive and reactive; we feel them without thinking. In creative writing, these initial emotions are often used to create dramatic or action-focused scenes, or to otherwise reveal some sort of emotional truth. After all, our snap reactions are often quite revealing.
While primary responses like these tend to be predictable, they’re still informed by a character’s lived experiences and the environment they grew up in. For example, if a character’s mother always responded with anger when they made a mistake, it’s likely that when mistakes happen later in life, their reaction will be reflective of that anger. It does not encapsulate the full range of a person’s complex emotions about what happened, it’s simply the first emotion that spills out before they’ve had a chance to rationalize or think things through.
The key to emotional depth is understanding that this initial reaction is not necessarily true to how the character really feels, but it does provide valuable insight into their psychology. We’ll call it a “lizard brain” reaction. The instinct to fight before the character comes to terms with the fact that all they can do is fly (fly, you fools!). A toddler throwing themself to the floor in blind rage because you stopped them from sticking their jam-covered finger into the nearest electrical socket. It might not be a logical reaction, but that doesn’t invalidate the emotion behind it.
Writing Emotions
Secondary
Responses
Secondary emotions are the more complex, logical feelings we experience after our initial reaction.
More accurately, they’re a reaction to our reaction. They’re often habitual or learned. They show the reader how a character’s experiences have shaped the way they internalize their feelings, and how they feel about themselves.
Using the same example as above, if a character’s initial reaction to making a mistake is anger at themselves, their secondary emotion – once they’ve had a moment to breathe and think critically – might be one of guilt or regret for having been so hard on themselves because they know they never deserved that anger. The secondary emotion is still informed by their mother’s anger, but is much more reflective of the way they have internalized it and learned to rationalize it over the course of their life.
Secondary emotions are often highlighted in moments of self reflection, and encourage character growth and development. Where primary emotions are snap reactions from our “lizard brains”, secondary ones are more accurate to how we truly feel in our “human brains” – the side of us that’s capable of contextualizing and thinking things through. That does not mean that secondary emotions are always “correct” or even appropriate, just that they stem from our vastly more complicated feelings about ourselves, our upbringings, and the world around us.
In order to write realistic characters with emotional depth and sufficient room to grow, we consider the entire broad range of emotions that a human being (or elf, or dwarf) is capable of feeling and the personal context that affects them. If a stranger walked up to your character on the street and punched them square in the face for no apparent reason, they wouldn’t only feel confused. They would likely feel a myriad of complex emotions – anger, fear, embarrassment, shame – but the emotions that spill out initially versus the ones they choose to express after the fact say a lot about who they really are and how they feel about themself. They give meaning and validation to the backstory and personality you’ve created for them.
In every scene, your characters will have reactions to whatever is going on around them. Not every primary emotion has, or requires, a secondary one, but for those that do, the reader needs to understand both to see the full picture – the instinct and the rationalization. The primary and the secondary.
If you made it to the end of this article, thank you! I hope you found it helpful. If you have any questions at all about primary and secondary emotional responses, or how to give your characters emotional depth, please do not hesitate to reach out or leave a comment below. Thanks again, and happy writing!