We’re finally back from summer vacation and ready for a new (academic) year. This summer, after attending the When Words Collide Conference in Calgary, my family and I headed out to Ontario, for some end-of-summer fun in cottage country. This is a trip we always look forward too. I get to see my parents, siblings and old friends. My kids get to have fun with their cousins. And we get to enjoy some quality down time that’s an all too precious commodity these days.

What we didn’t know when we set out was that we were on a collision course for one of life’s major emotional moments. And not a good one.

When Words Collide

At the conference, I had the pleasure of attending a talk by Angela Ackerman from the popular Writers Helping Writers team. When the previous session ended, I happened to be in the same room. I stood up to stretch my legs, but the tsunami of incoming people quickly forced me to sit back down and preserve my precious four-legged real-estate. Before the talk even began, all the floor space was spoke for. People were lined up out the door! This was all to hear about a concept called Emotional Amplifiers.

Angela and her co-author Becca Puglisi are well known for their Emotional Thesaurus series of books. These are bibles for many authors and I don’t think I’ve been to a “show don’t tell” workshop yet that doesn’t mention them with high praise. While putting together the original book, Angela spoke about terms collected through their process that weren’t quite emotions, but seemed like they should fit in somewhere. Examples were: stress, pain, hunger, confinement, attraction, illness, and scrutiny. Specifically these are states and conditions that affect a person’s mindset, mood, and ultimately… their emotions. They termed these emotional amplifiers.

One of the jobs of a writer is to expose characters to a relentless sequence of these emotional amplifiers because they ratchet up conflict and drama in a story. Any parent familiar with the term “hangry” knows exactly what I’m talking about. So if a scene is dragging–add in some conditions that crank up the emotional intensity and see what happens.

Of course sometimes fate does the same thing in real life.

Vacation

Fast forward to Ontario. About half way through the vacation we got a call from our friend and pet-sitter. One of the Guinea pigs wasn’t doing well. I’ll spare you the details, but after the uncertainty of trying to make her comfortable over the phone, J-Pig quietly passed.

Talk about an emotional amplifier. Telling your kids that a family pet has died sucks.

And the timing could have been better. Here we were, half way across the country, and we had just showed up at my Mom’s cottage. All year our kids look forward to having fun swimming, jumping off the dock, tubing, hiking, making S’mores by the campfire. And now this.

As tough as it was to go through that, it made me realize something quite profound though.

You can experience more than one emotion at a time.

Maybe that’s obvious to people who are a little more in tune with their emotional sides, but to me it was a eureka moment.

You see my kids were worried that the loss of our pet would ruin the vacation. After all, how could we be happy when J-Pig was gone? How guilty would we feel having fun without her?

I think too often we think of emotion as a single state. How are you feeling today? Usually that comes with a one word answer.

But it’s possible to experience joy and happiness, even while you’re mourning. My wife and I explained that it’s okay to give yourself permission to experience those positive emotions, and that it’s not disrespectful to do so, because you can feel both joy and sadness together. We know J-Pig wouldn’t want us to lock out those good feelings, or force ourselves to feel guilt afterward.

I don’t mean to imply this is easy. As a human… you feel what you feel. But understanding it a little more can make it easier to deal with those emotional amplifiers.

And as a writer, this is an important lesson too. If you want to add dimensions to your characters, allow them to experience more than one emotional state at a time.