How can Creative Media sadden us fickle humans
We’ve all felt sadness for a fictional character and their circumstances before. If you haven’t then frankly you’re either a toddler with impressive literary skills or you aren’t human, and I’m not writing this blog post for aliens’ benefit. If you are an alien then welcome to my blog.
Ahem.
Being able to elicit sorrow and despair in my audience is something I absolutely strive for, and out of context that may sound quite dark; but it’s successfully creating these experiences that can make one’s creative content truly masterful, memorable, and unique. In reflection, I’m finding it’s a bit of a weird goal to have; I want people to cry over my work. No, not because I like upsetting people, though my friends may cry foul on that one. It’s because such a strong emotional response to me represents a deep connection with my work, it means I’ve created humanistic and relatable characters that my consumers can connect and empathise with. Surely that’s the goal of any writer creating a character or situation of significance?
So, what is sadness per se? This is by no means a basic question; there are many types of sadness, and I believe all emotional feelings and reactions are the result of complex chemical interactions with the psyche. Sadness is one of the six fundamental emotions; accompanying anger, disgust, fear, happiness and surprise (Doré & Kirouac, 1985). It can manifest in many forms, be it sorrow, anguish, resignation, or disappointment, to name just a few. Sadness can be mild or intense; something I find interesting is that the English language facilitates this scale with appropriate words for the levels of sadness we are experiencing. Do I feel upset or miserable, or am I in despair? Am I feeling such an intense sadness that I’m in anguish?
To me this ‘scale’ represents opportunity in storytelling, targeting a very specific emotion and aiming to elicit that response from readers can result in very interesting changes to a narrative. I also find having that clear objective, of wanting ones audience to feel a very particular way, can also provide clarity in the direction I want my story to take.
So how would I do it? I’d start by reading Writing for emotional impact by K. Iglesias (2005), he has much to teach about how audiences respond to certain qualities in characters. If I need my readers to feel for a character, then that character must be made human — though not in a literal sense. Wall-E (Stanton, 2008); a film released by Pixar is one example of how we are made to feel an emotional response for an inhuman character — in this case a small trash collecting robot — that is displaying human-like behaviour. Wall-E spends time with another robot that is portrayed as female, he likes to collect small keepsakes for his hovel, and he appears to feel happiness, sadness, even concern for others. Even my referring to Wall-E as ‘he’ just now is another point of how we are manipulated to identify this robot with human traits — that a ‘male’ robot is infatuated with a ‘female’ one.
The truths above define what I’d wager are the most important factors in creating a characters intended to evoke emotion, but to get sadness just right requires context, setting, colour, and symbolism. To touch on what I mean by that — emotional scenes in film often take place in the rain for a reason. D’Aloia (2012) writes about how rain diminishes sunlight which creates a disparity, and that differential is used to create emotions of depression. Just to reiterate, I don’t believe I’m teaching any readers here anything groundbreaking; I’m more looking to foster the awareness that everything you see on screen is deliberate. A scruff on a piece of clothing, or sewn on patch to remind of a characters past misfortune, a character’s brief acknowledgement of the weather, it’s all there. I’ll be continuing down this trove of information in time, on my quest to create real characters.
Bibliography
Bruno, G. (2018). Atlas of emotion: Journeys in art, architecture, and film. Verso Books.
D’Aloia, A. (2012). Film in Depth. Water and Immersivity in the Contemporary Film Experience. Acta Universitatis Sapientiae, Film and Media Studies, (05), 87–106.
Docter, P. (2015). Inside Out [Film]. United States of America: Pixar Animation Studios.
Doré, F. Y., & Kirouac, G. (1985). Identifying the eliciting situations of six fundamental emotions. The Journal of psychology, 119(5), 423–440.
Iglesias, K. (2005). Writing for emotional impact: Advanced dramatic techniques to attract, engage, and fascinate the reader from beginning to end. WingSpan Press.
Rognoli, V., & Levi, M. (2004). Emotions in Design through Materials. An expressive-sensorial atlas as a project tool for design of materials. In Fourth International Conference on Design & Emotion (pp. 1–11). Middle East Technical University.
Stanton, A. (2019). Wall-E [Film]. United States of America: Pixar Animation Studios.
