The Inside Out of Writing Emotional Characters

FROM YOUR HEART TO THE PAGE

At my most recent book signing, someone asked me why I write so much about teenagers. I told them because my teenage years were so tumultuous that when I close my eyes today, I can feel the intensity of those emotions that defined my life. 

Those emotions have been the basis of all of my novels, and emotions should be the basis of your books, too.  

Think about the movie Inside Out. Part two is out now and has become the fastest animated film ever to reach the $1 billion mark. The movie has been such a hit that its first ten days of earning outpaced the Barbie movie. And we know the type of mania that Barbie caused.

Inside Out is quite literally a film about emotions. And though it’s created for children, most adults can also relate to Riley, who is the main character. We’ve all felt some confusion about our emotions growing up. How to express them, which ones to act on and which ones to keep at bay, which ones we need to get better at controlling and so on.

I read an article where Meg LeFauve, the screenwriter for Inside Out, said she reached back to her childhood to connect the main character with the emotions she struggled with growing up. 

It’s not an accident that this film is breaking records.

So when I say that emotions have been the basis of my novels, I mean that quite literally. I used the emotion of feeling like a complete failure to write my first novel. That feeling came from a very real place.

Most of you know by now that I became a father at 18 years of age. That led me to make some difficult and drastic decisions, including dropping out of high school during my final semester and leaving my mother’s house. My daughter’s mother and I moved in together and that became my family.

To keep food in our refrigerator, I worked the night shift at a local grocery store. When I couldn’t stay awake for the entire shift, I quit and got a job as a bag checker at an electronics store. Each of those jobs paid about $8/hour and for someone who was previously one of the most highly recruited basketball players in all of Canada with a promising future, yeah, I felt like a failure. 

Near the end of Inside Out two when anxiety has completely taken over Riley, she has what becomes her most debilitating thought. She thinks “I’m not good enough.” During those two years on my own, trying to take care of my family, that was the exact thought that plagued my mind daily. I felt like I wasn’t a capable parent or a competent partner. Complete. Failure. Which is why my first novel is called Thoughts of a Fractured Soul. 

For my next novel, Boys and Girls Screaming, I tapped into a different emotion. My friend told me a story about a foster child who had just come into his care. When the child first got to the foster home, he asked if he could call his mother one last time.

On the phone, the child pleaded with his mother to come pick him up.

“I don’t wanna be here, Mom. If you come get me now, I won’t have to stay here. Can you please come pick me up?”

My friend told me the phone went silent for a brief second and then he heard the mother through the receiver:

“No. Stay there.”

That was it for me. 

That single moment of harsh abandonment became the foundation for the main character in Boys and Girls Screaming. It didn’t take me long to identify a similar moment in my own life; a time when I felt abandoned by a parent.

Moving from Trinidad to Canada as a six-year-old was the end of my relationship with my father. It would take a decade before I saw him again and a decade after that before we crossed paths yet another time. It’s been over 20 years since we’ve been in the same room and that feeling of abandonment has never left me.

Again, I could close my eyes and feel like my six-year-old self. That emotional transport made it easy for me to write the opening scene of Boys and Girls Screaming; a scene where the mentally ill mother literally walks out of the home of her five-year-old daughter, Candace.

When you give your main character this type of emotional baggage, you allow readers to connect deeply with their journey. This type of emotional connection also justifies the reasons main characters make the decisions they do, even when those decisions might seem a bit illogical. As a reader, you know their “why” and that makes all the difference in how invested a reader becomes.

When building your main character’s emotional foundation, maybe it’s outside of something you’ve experienced personally. That’s fine. For my most recent novel, And Then There Was Us, I drew on the emotions of my daughter to build the MC.

In many ways, Riley was a lot like my daughter. And even though I didn’t experience all the emotions my daughter went through in the relationship with her mother, I observed it.

In part two of Inside Out, Riley has become a teenager and is going through puberty. Instead of the more simple emotions like joy, anger, and fear, Riley is now dealing with the complexity of envy, embarrassment, and most strongly of all, anxiety. With anxiety defining Riley’s entry into puberty, she struggles to understand who she is and how to manage all of her new emotions.  

My daughter was the same age as Riley when I gained full custody. And just like in And Then There Was Us, it would be another five years before my daughter spoke to her mother again. Witnessing my daughter deal with this trauma, while also figuring out who she was as a person, made it possible for me to write the fictional main character in my novel. 

And yes, having complete access to my daughter made it easier for me to tap into her emotional reactions, but my point still remains. If you haven’t experienced something, you’ve witnessed or observed it. If you haven’t witnessed or observed it, then do some research.

Even though I had front-row seats to what my daughter was experiencing, I still sat her down and asked her questions. I didn’t want to assume that I understood completely what she went through. During those conversations, she revealed things to me that I never would’ve guessed. 

And I’m her father.

As writers, or rather as authors specifically, our characters must connect emotionally with the reader. Backstory is one way to accomplish this. At the beginning of Inside Out 2, they reintroduce Riley’s original emotions and summarize what was essentially part one of the film. It was a passive way to begin informing the viewer of Riley’s “why.”  

Dialogue is another way and probably one of the most effective. You learn about the character’s why from their own perspective. Inside Out has a unique situation because not only do we get dialogue from Riley the person, but we mostly hear how Riley thinks and feels from her emotions themselves. This dynamic dialogue is what makes Inside Out so special, but even in more formal storytelling my point still stands; any dialogue from the MC can be an effective tool for communicating their why. 

Plot is similar. If the MC’s ‘why’ is connected to the arc of the story, then you reduce the need for back story. 

The opening scene for Boys and Girls Screaming I described earlier is an example of this. The reader observes the mother walking out on five-year-old Candace, who is left alone for two days, and can instantly relate to Candace’s feeling of abandonment. It’s part of the plot and the remainder of the story in one way or another comes back to that moment.

There’s also another way to help readers connect emotionally with your main character. You can have another character build the event or series of events that binds the reader to your MC.

Sticking with Boys and Girls Screaming, Candace was one of three main characters. Yet the way I designed the story, we only hear from the perspective of two characters, including Candace. We only know the third MC through the perspective of the other two. It’s a technique that adds a bit of tension for the reader because they are constantly wondering if they could fully trust those perspectives.

In the end, the thing that connects us all is our ability to feel. And observing the success of a movie like Inside Out two, we can see that feelings are the key to connecting with your readers. So while we all don’t have nine-figure budgets, what we do have is our gift for writing and storytelling and the ability to use that gift to connect. Whatever approach you take, if you aren’t creating circumstances for readers to emotionally connect with your MC, then you aren’t storytelling effectively enough for them to keep turning the pages. 

But when you do strike that chord, you have a billion-dollar story ready for the world to enjoy.