Describing feelings in writing thread

I'm trying to get more 'Show don't tell' into my writing and I'm having trouble describing feelings. You know like that knot in your stomach when you are angry followed by that burning sensation. Or that tingling on your skin shortly followed by a creeping heat that covers your whole body when you get embarrassed.

I've done some research into the different physiological responses of emotions and what they are supposed to feel like, but personally I've never experienced some of them so I don't really know how to describe them physically.

So, I'm wondering if anyone is willing to indulge in a little writing exercise. Taking one of the emotions below that you experienced recently very strongly, describe how it felt in detail, focusing on physical changes and reactions to those changes.

Optimism, Serenity, Joy, Ecstasy, love, acceptance, trust, admiration, submission, apprehension, fear, terror, awe, distraction, surprise, amazement, disapproval, pensiveness, sadness, grief, remorse, boredom, disgust, loathing, contempt, annoyance, anger, rage, aggressiveness, interest, anticipation, vigilance, anger, calmness, friendship, enmity, fear, courage, shame, confidence, kindness, cruelty, pity, indignation, envy, jealousy, love, expectation, wonder, happiness, amusement, cowardice, pride, modesty, shame, closeness, detachment, distance, pain (different kinds of pain), pleasure, caution, boldness, rashness, patience, tolerance, relaxation, composure, stress, goodwill, nervousness, respect, disrespect, appreciation, hatred, hope, despair, confusion, melancholy.

(If you have another complex emotion that is not on the list, please feel free to write about and describe it)

For example:

The other day I had left out some mince pies and they were covered in ants. Instead of trying to get rid of them I just put all the mince pies in the freezer. When I took it out later all the ants had huddled together under the mince pies, holding on to each other trying to preserve heat to survive.

At that moment, when I saw them all in the bottom of the plastic tray trying so hard to survive I was assaulted by this overwhelming feeling of melancholy. My body became a little bit colder and I had this slight discomfort in my stomach. Not a knot, rather a little bit of heaviness, like I had eaten to much. My skin didn't tingle, but there was this perceptible discomfort, like my clothes were too clingy. I felt a bit heavy as well, maybe a little bit of a release of tension in my muscles and posture.

Like that.

feelings are for women and liberals. Real men use rationality

Instead of posting on Veeky Forums, read more Chekhov

>She glanced at him and turned pale, then glanced again with horror, unable to believe her eyes, and tightly gripped the fan and the lorgnette in her hands, evidently struggling with herself not to faint. Both were silent. She was sitting, he was standing, frightened by her confusion and not venturing to sit down beside her. The violins and the flute began tuning up. He felt suddenly frightened; it seemed as though all the people in the boxes were looking at them. She got up and went quickly to the door; he followed her, and both walked senselessly along passages, and up and down stairs, and figures in legal, scholastic, and civil service uniforms, all wearing badges, flitted before their eyes. They caught glimpses of ladies, of fur coats hanging on pegs; the draughts blew on them, bringing a smell of stale tobacco.

The main thing is that you have to make the descriptive environment cave in to the emotion itself. This, Chekhov excels at. He can turn the landscape surrounding the narrator into a fountain of joy or a mire of depression depending on his descriptions. He chooses the best images for the most effective conveyance.

Your example spends too much time on the person's body feeling, but you have to vary it up with many other descriptions that show the perception tainted by that feeling.

But if you write, you need to write for your audience who include women and liberals. Isn't it rational to understand how other people function to more accurately communicate with them?

That was a lovely piece of writing. Though I want to get deeper.

"He felt suddenly frightened" could be written as "His heart suddenly began to race and his eyes flitted from one box to another"

Instead of explicitly telling the audience that 'he felt suddenly frightened', you can demonstrate physiological reactions of fright, elevated pulse and increased vigilance to let the audience put the dots together as they see fit.

One person reading 'He got frightened' will understand as much as another. But by writing "His heart suddenly began to race and his eyes flitted from one box to another" different people will understand the reaction differently.

Though, I like what you are saying. Using the environment like a mirror to show emotion in a literary way.

My example was less about literary writing and more about learning how people feel. I have a condition where I can't identify emotions, I don't know what any of those emotions I listed feel like. I do however feel the physiological effects and can link those effects to the emotions after the fact.

Night at the carnival. The girl grabbed her mother’s hand, and ventured past the gate, pulling. The other guests had dark heads that bobbed up and down as they walked, and the colourful rides formed the neon backdrop for these shadows. She was, herself, the phantom of a smile, flitting through the booths like a mayfly. Ecstasy, but a slight over-reaching for it. At the bottom of that joy, was a draconic hunger. In other words, the feeling you sometimes get when you ate too fast, because you were keen with the feeling of the activity itself. Her mother was too slow. Her delight had burnt away to a calm, due to age, and thus she did not have that hunger. So, it was inevitable. One pulling, the other unwilling. The fingers eventually relinquished. She fell into the world. Neon-dazzled. Only to have an arm pull her back, this time, the mother, pulling. She looked up. An honest smile. But behind that honesty was a dishonesty born from childish unrestraint. The mother, arm around her child’s neck, feeling the warmth of the morning within this evening spell. Warmth that she wanted, but could not keep. There was the trust. It had to be born. She let go. The child, one turn back, one turn forward, as those that ecstasy was premised with responsibility. For once, fell into the world again, and vanished.

That wasn't my writing, but Chekhov's by the way.

>Instead of explicitly telling the audience that 'he felt suddenly frightened', you can demonstrate physiological reactions of fright, elevated pulse and increased vigilance to let the audience put the dots together as they see fit.

Actually, this is wrong, because elevated pulse and all that have become horror cliches, so it doesn't really matter if you describe them that way or not. The most powerful writing comes from novelty of image.

In the above part, Chekhov described the fright emotion first, and then he linked it to the "people in the boxes looking at them". Show not Tell doesn't mean extinguish all emotion, but root them into environmental or descriptive correlates. By the end of the paragraph, Chekhov has shifted the description from emotional to a clutter of activity, creating a crowd of uniformed men and various ladies. This nicely creates an emotional ending beat for the above fright.

>Real men use rationality
t. Karl Marx

What is rationality?

>it is that "libertarian" user again
Kill yourself please, I will deliver a long winded, 90 page, rambling eulogy at your funeral, laying out your case against emotions to your beloveds and implore them to use their rationality because you were such a worthless cunt you do not deserve mourning.
Fear not, your treasured fedora will accompany you in your casket.

I don't like this at all, this prose bothers me so much I feel sick. Terrible, terrible passage.

Fear leads to anger, anger leads to hate, hate....leads to suffering.

The OP image is bullshit right?

No, it's real.

Emotions cause physiological changes in the body, most evident as heat flushes or cold spots across the body. For someone like me who can't identify emotions, I use these heat signatures to understand what I am feeling.

There are many other symptoms of emotional reactions, including increased/decreased heart rate, cutaneous blood flow (blushing/turning pale - this is where the expression for someone being 'cold' comes from. Lack of emotion was usually accompanied by paleness), piloerection (goosebumps or raised hairs), sweating, pheromones and so on. Higher emotional reactions can also include tingling in different parts of the brain.

These are all autonomous reactions. Facial expressions and body language are all voluntary. These physiological reactions are often used in lie detection, negotiations, interrogations and so on.

Personally I think these are fascinating from a writing perspective, because you can identify very complex emotional feelings without having to rely on broad terms. For instance, envy is a very broad description, but there are many nuanced types of envy, identified by a range of physiological symptoms. In fact, we don't even have terms for all these different kind of emotions.

Ironically, my loss of emotions has lead to a much deeper understanding of how they work, because without it I wouldn't be able to function in society.

Emotions are spooks

Fascinating.

When you say facial expressions and body language are voluntary, what do you mean?

I'm confused as to how things that can be either voluntary or involuntary are categorized. Breathing is probably the simplest examply; it can be controlled consciously without extraordinary effort, but if you get distracted you quickly revert to involuntary breathing.

spot the autists

t. Hemingway

Facial expressions and body language are conscious decisions. Smiling, laughing, etc. are habits formed over time by social instruction. It is possible to train yourself not to smile. Body language is the same, they are social cues which we imitate from our social circles. Different cultures have different body language and even, in some cases, different facial expressions.

These actions are formed by the brain and reinforced by muscle memory developed over time.

Autonomous responses are handled by specific organs with their own control mechanisms. Breathing is not an autonomous action, it is a conscious action that has become a habit. That feeling you get when you stop breathing, that makes you feel like you have to start breathing again, that is an autonomous response to make sure that your body gets enough air. Your lungs are telling your brain that something is wrong and that it should start up the breathing process again. The best example of this in action is brain death, when a patient suffers massive head trauma and their brain is damaged beyond repair. Brain dead patients can't breath by themselves, they need breathing apparatus to keep going.

Heart beat is a good example of an autonomous function. The heart is like a little engine that doesn't need input from the brain to keep going. Only issue is that if it is damaged or 'stalled' the brain can't tell it to start working again. That's why you need external physical pressure in a cardiac arrest, its not something the brain can control.

Blood clotting is another example of autonomous function. When blood vessel is ruptured the proteins in your blood plasma bind together and start coagulating to repair the damaged part of the body. It is a very ancient function that evolved well before the brain came along.

That is actually a good way to explain these functions. The human body is a collection of systems that were added over time. Autonomous systems like the heart, liver, pain responses and so on evolved before we had a central nervous system. These systems would keep on working, by themselves, in some cases until the end of time. Only when we evolved and started to develop more complex systems, like the brain, that some actions became conscious. This is why we talk about primal emotions and complex emotions. Fear is an ancient emotion that doesn't need input from the brain. Sensory stimulus will activate chemicals in our body that activate fear responses, which can't be controlled. Modern (relatively) complex emotions like jealousy only came later when we formed societies and social groups.

In fact, most modern emotions evolved from the olfactory (smell) centre of our brain. This is why ancient species like amphibians, fish and reptiles don't have complex emotions (it would also be inefficient because they can't control their body temperature). It's only when you get to birds, marsupials and mammals that you start to see complex emotions taking shape.

Show don't tell doesn't mean replace "she was embarrassed" with a dry physiological description of embarrassment, or even the idiot posting Chekhov with the pathetic fallacyesque reading (seriously wtf). It means describe compelling scenes by what you can actually see/sense. If someone reads the scene as so and so is embarrased and another as so and so is angry that's all part of it.

>My body became a little bit colder and I had this slight discomfort in my stomach. Not a knot, rather a little bit of heaviness, like I had eaten to much. My skin didn't tingle, but there was this perceptible discomfort, like my clothes were too clingy. I felt a bit heavy as well, maybe a little bit of a release of tension in my muscles and posture.

Your description of emotion is completely devoid of emotion. Tell me what you feel, not what your body feels.

shame is spiderman?

see that anxiety jigsaws right into depression snuggly

How'd you lose your emotions, senpai?

Took a seasickness medication called Stemetil, the main ingredient of which is Prochlorperazine, a dopamine antagoniser used for treating psychosis. Prochlorperazine is one of the most potent antipsychotic, though it isn't used for that purpose anymore.

When I started taking it my emotions went wild, huge highs and lows, laughing or crying for no reason. I would fly off the handle at the smallest thing and suspected everyone around me of trying to kill me. All of this while I was serving on a warship as an Officer.

I knew something was wrong so I told the medic immediately and got pulled off the ship. I stopped taking the stuff, but had to see a psych. That is how my military career ended. Over the course of the next two years my emotions started to get numb or dull and then my connection to them disappeared altogether. First complex emotions and then finally more primal ones.

Though I'm not emotionless. I can feel the physiological effects, I just can't connect them on a mental level. I'm trying to get back into writing, but I have no idea how to describe how anything feels emotionally, because I can't connect to it mentally. So all the chemicals in my body are still working, there just has to be some kind of malfunction or damage in the emotional centre of the brain.

So its really useful for me when people describe how they feel or explain how their emotions affect them, so that I can utilise it in my writing.

You appear to be doubling down on telling not showing. This isn't meant to be a slight but your writing exercise reads more like the kinds of thing you see from attempted first-person accounts of autism.

What you should be asking is what people do that is interesting when they feel complex emotions. Being able to do that is what makes writing smart and true.

What would ant man above actually do assuming this is an revelatory development that leads to something? I'd say he squashes the ants with the mince pies with a surprising amount of violence.

>All of this while I was serving on a warship as an Officer.
>JO taking bitchpills and anti-psychotics, followed by episodes
Jesus fucking christ you're lucky to be alive.