THE MONSTER'S TECHNIQUE
This is certainly one of my most popular and effective techniques for describing feelings.
There is nothing more wasteful than telling a reader how you feel. When a child starts my course, they invariably write something like ‘I was scared’. It lacks empathy. The reader acknowledges it, but they don’t feel it, and our primary goal as an author is to create empathy (I’ll discuss this more in one of my upcoming pieces). Luckily, I have an easy fix: THE MONSTER’S TECHNIQUE.
But don’t be scared, this is not about a monster; this is about feelings. The monster’s technique is just a fantastic way to build a metaphorical description of feelings into your writing. Today we will use it for fear, but it can be applied to any other feeling as well.
STEP 1:
Imagine fear as a monster. Fear is grim, nasty and cruel, so we need to imagine something like this:
STEP 2:
Think about what this monster does to us, or rather, the parts of us where we feel fear: guts, soul, heart, spine, etc. As horror-terrific…horror-ific…horrific as this next part is, most kids will love writing these descriptions.
The monster ripped and slashed at my guts with its sharp claws.
The monster lashed at my soul.
The monster bared its teeth and savagely bit through my heart.
The monster chewed through my spine with its jagged teeth.
STEP 3:
We can turn this into a metaphor by replacing ‘The monster’ with ‘Fear’, ‘Terror’, ‘Angst’ or ‘Panic’.
Fear ripped and slashed at my guts with its sharp claws.
Terror lashed at my soul.
Angst bared its spiky teeth and savagely bit through my heart.
Panic chewed through my spine with its jagged teeth.
STEP 4:
Introduce some adverbs and make a few edits to our adjectives; this is because fear does not have ‘sharp claws’ or ‘jagged teeth’. It’s a good idea to use adjectives that mean ‘evil’, such as ‘malevolent’, ‘malignant’, or ‘maleficent’ (notice how they all start with ‘mal’ which in french can mean something ‘morally wrong’); alternatively, you could use two of my favourite words: ‘heinous’ and ‘iniquitous’.
Fear ripped and slashed at my guts with its malevolent claws.
Terror lashed at my soul malignantly.
A malevolent angst bared its maleficent teeth and savagely bit through my heart.
A malignant panic chewed through my spine with its heinous teeth.
And that’s it. We’ve gone from ‘I was scared’ to descriptions like ‘An iniquitous horror devoured my heart with one bite from its heinous teeth.’
Try this out with different feelings. You can begin with the feelings from Inside Out: Joy, Sadness, Fear, Anger and Disgust.