The Mystery Starts Here

Well, I had a tough choice to make last Tuesday. Watch “Fringe” which I really like, or check out the new show, “The Mentalists.” I opted for the new show. I wanted to get to know the characters, figure out which one did what, etc. Long story short, I wasn’t impressed. The main character was interesting but inconsistent. At the start, the camera showed you what he was seeing to determine specific facts. For instance, a girl had been murdered. Patrick Jane, the mentalist, noticed several things (which we, the audience saw) and solved the case in a matter of minutes.

Then Jane and a team when to Palm Springs to help solve the murder of two people. Now, we are never introduced to the team and have no clue what each of their roles are. By the end of the show, Jane has once again pulled a rabbit out of a hat and solved the crime but….we are never privy to what he saw or how he came to those conclusion. That was irritating and so was the fact that they got some of the forensics wrong. The police hauled a man in for questioning because one of his hairs was found at the crime scene. Now, we all know that no one can tell conclusively that a hair found belongs to a certain individual. It may be consistent with hair from that individual, but not a match. The ONLY way to match a hair would be if it had the root and one could do DNA on it and that would take a while.

So, bottom line – I won’t bother next week. I’ll be watching “Fringe” and probably eating ice cream.

I wandered through Barnes and Noble the other day, perusing the bargain books, always a dangerous thing to do, when I came upon, “Creating Character Emotions, Writing compelling, fresh approaches that express your characters’ true feelings,” by Ann Hood. Well, gee, a writing book and on sale? I had to buy it, of course.

At home, I sat down and started reading. There are things I liked about the book, some not so much. The beginning of the book explores Hood’s background and explains some of the reasons she wrote the book. The bulk of the text is taken up by 36 chapters, each highlighting an emotion: Anger, Fear, Irritation, Longing. With each chapter, the author gives both good and bad examples, and at the end of the chapter, exercises to help write better emotions.

I liked the idea of individual chapters. That way when I’m writing and get stuck, I can simply pick up the book and turn to the emotion I need help with to get some ideas. I really don’t think the bad examples were necessary. For instance in the chapter on Excitement: “Stephanie felt the proverbial butterflies in her stomach as the train huffed to a stop.” Yup, pretty bad. I think just showing examples of good use of emotions would have been enough. So far I haven’t done any of the writing exercises – I’m too busy working on my own writing.

So, like most writing books I have on my shelf, “Creating Character Emotions” is a good tool. I’ve read it thorugh and can now refer to it whenever I need help putting emotions into my writing. The book was written in 1998, so if you are interested in the subject, you might want to try and find a more up-to-date volumn.