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should experience a variety of emotions appropriate to the circumstances. Ann Hood notes that "Characters should have a range of emotion to give them depth and complexity. Otherwise, we end up with fiction filled with stereotypes, flat characters moving through an unbelievable world."

INTENSITY
Even within the context of a single emotion, or a set of related emotions, there is a range of intensity. For example,

* Mild annoyance to uncontrollable rage, or

* Amusement to hysterical laughter.

Which range of intensity is most useful? Orson Scott Card notes that "The most powerful uses of physical and emotional pain are somewhere between the trivial and the unbearable."

MELODRAMA/SENTAMEN TALITY According to an old adage, writers should "open a vein" and let the emotion flow. But there can be too much of a good thing. The opposite of unemotional portrayal of characters is the melodramatic or sentimental portrayal of characters.

The words melodramatic and sentimental mean different things to different people, but dictionary definitions include exaggerated, overdramatic, excessive, and indulgent. The common ground refers not so much to intensity but to appropriateness within context.

EMOTIONAL COMPLEXITY
According to Ann Hood, "Perhaps the most important thing to remember when searching for emotional honesty is that emotion is not one-dimensional. Emotions are complex and often mixed together. Think of a bride on her wedding day. It would be too easy and too flat to describe her as simply happy. Instead, she is excited, apprehensive, worried, fearful, anxious, joyful, smug-so many emotions!"

In Writers Digest (August 2004), Nancy Kress echoes this thought: "Frustration isn't a pure' emotion." It can come mixed with many others: anger, hurt, fear, self-blame, resignation, bitterness, and more.

Sometimes these emotions feed off one another in an emotional swarm.

An example of mixed emotions:
Cisco paused at the door. If he stepped into the street and faced Black Bart, he might be able to stop Bart from hurting innocent people. But Cisco also realized that his chances of surviving the fight were slim. Bart was fast with a six shooter-very fast.

EMOTIONAL CONSISTENCY Characters are a representation of humans, and that means they are both consistent and inconsistent in their emotions. Ann Hood reminds writers that Aristotle observed that a character should be "consistently inconsistent," which does not mean characters jump from emotion to emotion recklessly but rather that they move believably from one emotion to the next.

Nancy Kress, in Writers Digest (August 2004), puts it a different way, "Not only do different people experience different mixes of emotions when frustrated, but also the same person may experience different mixes at different times."

EMOTIONAL JOURNEY Coincident with a story's physical journey is the character's emotional journey, which may appear as an emotional rollercoaster that, in turn, provides the character with internal growth.

James N. Frey in How to Write a Damn Good Novel says, ". . . look at your character's emotional level at the beginning of the scene and at the end of the scene. There should be a step-by-step change in the character from, say, cool to fearful, spiteful to forgiving, cruel to passionate, or the like, in every scene." Regarding the story as a whole, he observes, "By the climax . . . the character is fully revealed because the reader has seen him acting and reacting at each emotional level."

CONCLUSION Emotion may be conveyed with six basic techniques, but numerous other issues and opportunities exist for an effective transfer of emotion to characters and ultimately to the reader.

Learn more about this author, Mike Klaassen.
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