If you sit and eavesdrop on an unsuspecting group of teens, you will quickly learn that their emotional response to everything is intense—sometimes melodramatic—but clear. They feel all the feels. Brain research has established that teens’ emotional development in the limbic system of their brains is well ahead of the development of executive functioning in their prefrontal cortexes. So what does this mean to us as writers of YA fiction? It means our primary job is to create powerful, emotionally relatable stories teens like and crave. It means our stories should be driven by characters’ emotional responses to what is happening to them. However, a story full of emotional internal dialogue—a constant stream of adolescent angst—may be a little too-tell-don’t-show. Using the literary technique of objective correlative can help writers create emotional content in tangible ways. The objective correlative allows readers to connect a character’s emotional arc to their own emotional response, thus creating a pathway to a more concrete understanding of how we feel and what to do with those feelings.
In its simplest form, the objective correlative is the literary technique of using a thing to represent or symbolize an emotion. “It was a dark, stormy night...” is perhaps the most well-known example of how a thing, in this case setting and weather, can reflect emotions or mood in a character or scene and create a clear emotional response in the reader. The night is unsettled, the darkness foreboding. A storm may erupt at any moment. A character in the midst of this environment may be anxious, fearful or worried. On the other hand, if your character is standing on the front porch marveling at the blackness of the clouds and thrilled by the lightning and thunder crashing all around them, that too creates a very tangible understanding of their emotional state. When juxtaposed beside the reader’s own feelings toward the approaching storm in the middle of the night, a unique emotional relationship between character and reader is created.
The objective correlative can also be employed through objects your character owns, covets, searches for or acquires. For many of us, the things we own, collect, or have been given have a powerful meaning and create a very deep emotional response when we look at them, talk about them or, perhaps most importantly, show them to others. A wand, a stuffed rabbit, a recipe written on a scrap of paper are really more than they appear when characters interact with them and when they represent characters’ emotional states or journeys.
As writers of YA fiction the use of the objective correlative literary technique can help us to write deeply emotional stories for an audience that feels emotions deeply. The emotional connection to a thing reveals a truth without telling the reader overtly what they should feel. This kind of pairing of the symbolic to the concrete can go a long way in the development of problem-solving skills and self-regulation in teens. It also makes our stories vibrant and relatable.
Emily De Angelis is a writer of fiction and poetry. She has short stories and poems published in various anthologies and periodicals. Her debut young adult novel, The Stones of Burren Bay, is coming out in May 2024 with Latitude 46 Publishing.
