Enter Bruce Lee
How, you may be wondering, did Bruce Lee pop up in an E3ink post? The obvious connection is through my martial arts training. Mr. Lee was, and is, a most iconic figure in movie and print. Early in the movie Enter The Dragon, Mr. Lee uses a phrase when teaching a student that resonated with me: “Emotional Content”. You’ll find no shortage online of interpretations, instructions and discussions of the meaning of the phrase. At the time, it was an important concept for a young man learning various techniques to dislocate joints, break bones and generally perpetrate mayhem. To me, that scene was about putting yourself into your actions: martial arts as expression, not as an outlet for anger.
That’s the connection, many years later, to my writing. I tend to build actions around characters and then see where the interaction leads. I have a general plan that I’m following, but it’s the characters that are at the core of what I do with words. A character without emotional content is a caricature (see, told you I’d get there eventually).
Character? Or Person?
A character with emotional content is a good character. A character that brings out emotional content in the reader is a better character. When a character has the ability to raise empathy, to show the emotional content of themselves and pull on those threads within the reader; that is when a character becomes a person. And if they are a person, they may just become a friend. I’ve had a lot of fictional, as distinct from imaginary, friends that authors created for me to enjoy. That’s the type of character I want to bring to life for the reader: a person. They might be a friend or they might be a villain that isn’t a friend, but either way they aren’t forgotten just because that particular story has ended. They raise questions, maybe attempt to answer one or two, but mostly they cling to memory because they became a person.
If a character or a plot or even just a phrase can stretch out and spark emotion… If they can resonate with the reader and let someone step out of their own skin and daily life for a short time… Then I’ve made the right decisions for the story. Then I’ve put “emotional content” into my art.
DDW
