Dios Mío, pen and ink and pencil, November 2007, doodle © 2007 by ybonesy. All rights reserved.
Here is a test. For the next five minutes, list every emotion you can think of. Write as fast as you can. Don’t stop to think.
How many did you come up with? Ten? Twenty?
I could make something up and say, 30 and over means you have a rich emotional vocabulary and, thus, deep emotional intelligence. Ten and under means you need help.
Ah, but this isn’t really a test. This is an exercise to bring light to the richness of human emotion.
Happiness and sadness and anger are like green and blue and red. Primary colors. A writer needs a broad palette.
So, after you’ve made your list of emotions (and grown it a bit as you remember all the emotions you forgot the first time you made the list), pick one. Use it as a prompt for a fifteen-minute writing practice.
Write everything you know about that emotion — when you’ve owned it, when it has owned you, how you’ve used it, why you gravitate toward it or avoid it, where you got it from. If your 15 minutes are up yet you still have more to say, keep writing. Go as deep as you can with that emotion.
Emotion. In motion. Go.
Great topic. Lately I do feel like some of my emotions have been owning me. I wonder if it’s always going to be that way for a Cancer, ruled by the Moon.
I love the image, ybonesy. It’s got so much energy, color, expression. Your drawings add so much life to red Ravine. I could do a writing practice on a wide range of emotions just staring at that drawing.
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I can’t remember who — was it Sinclair or maybe even skyWire? — who once suggested I draw my mother right before she has the huge fit and starts to call me, in Spanish, “PIG!” (as she used to do when we were both much younger). Anyway, this is the doodle I started on the plane, not having a pencil and so doing it with only pen.
I would have changed a few things to look more like her, but since I am trying to finish everything I start and not worry so much about getting it perfect, I just plodded on, and wa-la. I appreciate you telling me you love the image. That helps me to know, just keep the pen moving.
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First thought in my head…what a Mother would look like just after seeing her child spill fingernail polish on the carpet…. of course… the mouth may be slightly more open 😉
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Yeah. She’s definitely not at the moment where all hell breaks loose. Mouth open, teeth bared, fist and arm wound back behind head…I should make one of those booklets where you flip through the pages super quickly and it becomes animated.
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LOL, Heather, yes, you got it. The mouth would be a LOT more open on the fingernail polish.
ybonesy, I remember that comment, oh, so long ago. So am I to understand, this is the essence of your mother right before that moment? 8)
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Yes. This is her right before the dam breaks. (Well, not any more. Now she’s a regular saint ; – ).
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Thanks for sharing the sketch, as well as the process. I am proud of you that you kept going even though it was in ink. Same with our emotions sometimes… I would erase that one, or maybe smudge it a bit so it isn’t so harsh… but we don’t get to do that. So we learn to accept whatever comes.
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Hmm. A rich emotional life? Or a powerful command of vocabulary? Maybe the two go hand-in-hand. The more labels we own, the more precise our perception can be. In any case, it was heaps of fun!
I obsess about things like this, mostly while I’m cleaning the kitchen, or in the shower. There’s something about running water that evokes my Write Brain: “Okay, now, am I feeling irked, peeved, or disgusted about that? How does my tummy feel? Shoulders? Breathing? How could I describe these sensations?” I collect these observations the way quilters collect scraps.
I really like those spiky things behind Mom. What energy!
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I have a little book of excerpts from F. Scott Fitzgerald on the craft called On Writing. In 1 of the excerpts he encourages someone to explore emotional alloys. He writes something along the lines of: you think you are the 1st to experience this mix of emotions, but maybe your readers will identify with it, too.
I’ve thought about that down through the years, that there is richness in looking for emotional alloys, as much as a single strong feeling.
I even charted it once. I think the top of the chart may have been intense feelings, with one side those we often consider positive and the other negative, and as I worked down the chart I looked for emotive words that expressed alloyed emotions.
And since have kept an eye out or an ear cocked looking for admixtures of emotion that rang true to an experience, and were vivid enough to work into prose.
Not just happiness but happiness with a little concern behind it, or not just anger without touches of guilt and vengefulness, too.
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I took a workshop with a UCLA professor who specializes in Emotional Intelligence, Ritergal, and he seemed to be in the camp that the richer our emotional vocabulary, the more capable we are emotionally. He seemed to say the two do go hand-in-hand.
When I wrote my list of emotions, btw, I was stumped. I mean, it really brought to light how narrow my palette was (is).
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Ben, the little book of excerpts sounds like a good one. I’ll have to see if I can find it.
Yes, you (he) hit the nail on the head, I think. This idea that the emotion isn’t just plain happiness. Maybe it’s happiness with a tinge of envy that xyz happened to her and not to me. So that when it is pure happiness, you can distinguish that emotion as well.
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Ybonesy, my list continues to grow. It’s astonishingly long now. Richer emotional life? Who’s to say? I may be off-the-scale on emotionally literacy, but the relationship between literacy and intelligence seems tenuous.
Comment 11 reminds me of the RGB mixer in graphics programs. We have something like 11 or 16 million colors possible by selecting various combinations of the 255 hues of Red, Green, and Blue, but few people can perceive the difference between R185 G86 B205 and R185 G86 B204. What’s the difference between irked and peeved?
The words on my list blur together. It’s been fun! Thanks for kicking off this exercise!
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Yeah, I think it’s tenuous. Picture the highly articulate spouse who boasts a huge vocabulary yet has little to no capacity for empathy, compassion, kindness, love.
Yet, does that vocabulary help us home in on details in writing that connect emotionally to readers? Perhaps so. Perhaps not, not if our writing comes from the intellect and not the heart. (Same as example above.)
Even so, how fun to consider the differences between irked and peeved. And even if those differences are subtle, just that you can use one, then the other, when you write is expansive. I think so.
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BTW, I’d love to see your growing list, Ritergal. Will you post it on your blog? Or in comments here?
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Yes, ybonesy, the expansiveness of subtle differences. Details. That’s it. Irked, peeved, frustrated, miffed, po’ed, seeing red. Remember in The Synonym Finder, all the different words for brown or green? Ritergal, you bring up some thoughtful points. I’d love to see your list, too. I’d better get started on mine.
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I just posted a blog about it at http://snipr.com/1tac3, but haven’t posted the whole list anywhere yet. It’s still fermenting!
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ybonesy,
did you set this one up for me? Here is 3 minutes’ worth (scout’s honour – the test is: can you preface each word by I feel…)
curious, eager, frustrated, angry, sad, scared, terrified, hateful, furious, desperate, exhilarated, disppointed, anxious, annoyed, enraged, apoplectic, content, peaceful (at peace), disturbed, upset, frantic, disillusioned, distressed, dismayed, sympathetic, indifferent, alarmed, outraged, depressed, delighted…
maybe they don’t all count, some could be argued.
Your image is too much – I really love it. And I love your idea too – that emotional fluency is a vital ingredient for the writer: of course, for me that means emotional fluency with one’s being, not just with one’s pen. Perhaps the latter is capable of stimulating the former…
Anyhow: please give yourself a big pat on the back from me, but don’t pull a muscle doing it!
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stranger, great suggestion to preface with I feel….that will help with mine. Your list is lively and dynamic (especially for only 3 minutes!)
ritergal, your post is great. The fermentation is really paying off!
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Oh, I realized when I read ritergal’s post is that I feel a ton of subtle and intense emotions every day (and recognize that I’m feeling them in my body), but I don’t connect a word to them. This is a good excercise for me to be more connected between body and brain.
Does anyone have one of those smiley face lists (you get from workshops and therapists’ offices) that list every emotion in an Emoticon-style drawing? Heh, heh…I bet the word Emoticon was nowhere to be found 10 years ago.
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Ritergal listed *64* emotions in five minutes! Can you believe that? When I did the exercise in an Emotional Quotient (Intelligence) workshop, I think I came up with 28 or something. And the professor was offering a prize for the person who got the most! I was stumped. I mean, I had the worst case of writer’s block ever trying to figure out what other emotions I could think of besides the tried-and-true ones.
I think Ritergal is up to 230ish emotions now. I’m impressed!!
And stranger, your list is impressive. Apoplectic. Dismayed. Indifferent, I liked. That’s a particular emotion that I often forget about.
Glad this exercise spoke to you. In that way, yes, it was just for you ; – ).
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How cool it would be to find to do a group share and shuffle them all together… I have an idea how to do this that will show how much overlap there is if others are willing to share. I’ll e-mail mine back to anyone who sends one to ritergal @ gmail.com, and follow-up with the end result, but let’s wait until, say, Friday or Saturday to give everyone a chance to mine our own lodes to depletion.
Anyone out there is welcome to participate.
I’m convinced that the greatest payoff comes from personal exploration, and the collaborative list will be glaze on the cake — more a matter of intellectual curiosity than anything.
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Oh, I like that idea, ritergal! Like a recipe exchange ; – ).
I’d love to see your list. I’ll zip you a note right now. Or, wait, should I wait until my list is ready? I think I will. I want to see how many I can come up with on my own. Not in the 200s or 300s, I know that for sure!
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[…] Challenge: Emotional Vocabulary Look here for the challenge, which is essentially to spend five minutes, no holds barred, listing every emotion nameable, […]
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yb, here’s a link to one decent description of the Fitzgerald book.
http://www.tomfolio.com/bookdetailsgg.asp?b=40139&m=1219
They also had one by Hemingway; not sure if Scribners did this with any other writers, but it was worthwhile. We’ve spoken about what feedback has value, and I enjoyed Fitzgerald writing about what worked and what doesn’t. The
“separator” is what he called his critical device for parsing good from bad, and how sometimes he would begin a story and realize no, this one is a false start.
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I wonder if that critical device is akin to a voice inside I sometimes hear that says, Yep, this is good. The voice doesn’t come out and tell me when something is bad. Instead, it says, “Well, maybe this is good…let’s see if someone else can verify.”
Thanks for the link. I clicked on it and sent a note to the dealer to see if I could get the book.
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I’ve officially declared my list of words closed (unless Sarabelle, my muse, starts kicking and screaming, which she promised not to do, but who ever knows for sure?). I’ll be happy to send it out by return e-mail to anyone who is willing to share their own list.
I’m not offering to send it without reciprocity right now, because there is enormous satisfaction in deriving your own list to the point of feeling finished with it, and I want to encourage others to do so. Besides, glancing at someone else’s list before completing your own muddies the water, and could divert you from words you may otherwise remember.
As additional lists come in, I promise to compile them into a comprehensive list that is certain to include way more than even the most verbose and inspired of us could ever do alone. Thus the request for “pure” input. Anyone who participates will get a copy of the finished list.
For the purposes of closure on the project, I’ll say anything not submitted by the time I get to my email on Monday morning, November 19, will not be included. That gives you two weekends.
Actually, it’s the sort of thing that will permeate your days. Words trickle in at the oddest moments, so be sure to have a scrap of paper and pencil with you at all times. Those words melt like snowflakes on a wet sidewalk if you don’t capture them immediately. I know!
Send the lists to ritergal @ gmail.com (remove spaces)
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[…] 11th, 2007 by ybonesy I did the emotional vocabulary exercise this weekend. The exercise is this: For five minutes, list every emotion you can think of. Write as […]
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Hmm the content in your site is far away from routein, the image is also very impressive which tends me to do a writing practice on a wide range of emotions just staring at that drawing.
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Ron, we do try hard to stay as far away from “routine” as we can get! And ybonesy’s drawing is fabulous, isn’t it? Her sketches add so much to our travels through red Ravine. Glad you stopped by. Hope you will visit again.
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[…] -related to Topic post, WRITING TOPIC – EMOTIONAL VOCABULARY […]
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[…] According to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, there is a widespread assumption that Envy is an emotion. Other posts that might help jog the memory when writing about tough or secretive emotions are Feelings, Nothing More Than Feelings and WRITING TOPIC – EMOTIONAL VOCABULARY. […]
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[…] According to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, there is a widespread assumption that Envy is an emotion. Other posts that might help jog the memory when writing about tough or secretive emotions are Feelings, Nothing More Than Feelings and WRITING TOPIC – EMOTIONAL VOCABULARY. […]
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[…] According to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, there is a widespread assumption that Envy is an emotion. Other posts that might help jog the memory when writing about tough or secretive emotions are Feelings, Nothing More Than Feelings and WRITING TOPIC – EMOTIONAL VOCABULARY. […]
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[…] for me, Fear is a universal emotion. There is not a person on Earth that has not experienced Fear. I read it in the Writing Practices […]
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