In a post on Writers in the Storm, Margie Lawson says there’s a lot more going on behind a laugh than mere sound. “When people laugh, we almost always pick up what’s behind their laughter. We pick up nuances that add interest and depth and power,” she writes. “We can usually tell if their laughter is genuine. Or if they’re laughing, but uncomfortable. We can usually tell if they’re upset about something, but they’re laughing to cover up their real reaction.”
Laughter hides a lot of emotions – hurt feelings, embarrassment, shame, guilt, and anger. People laugh when they feel insecure or when they want to change a subject. “But if you write what I call a Basic — she laughed or he chuckled — the reader doesn’t pick up those emotions,” Lawsom writes. “They miss the subtext. They miss the psychological message behind that laugh.”
Conveying that subtext isn’t easy, but it’s worth the time, because it provides your reader with more information about your character and their situation, as well as a deeper emotional experience. Lawson shares some examples of writers who successfully portray what’s really going on behind their characters’ smiles. She also identifies the lessons you can take away:
- Amplify the emotion. Don’t write a simple “she laughed” or “she smiled.” Dig into what’s going on inside your character’s head.
- Put yourself in the scene to feel what the laugh means and what’s behind it.
- Go deep. Identify what’s behind the laugh and then look behind that for the deeper emotion.
- Share what the laugh isn’t about, and what it is about.
- Use rhetorical devices like similes, alliteration, structural parallelism, and polysyndeton to add interest and clue the reader in to the importance of the moment.
