Our emotions aren’t black and white or even shades of grey. If they had a color it would probably look more like a tie-dyed tee shirt or an explosion in a paint factory than any form of controlled design.

In reality, we often have conflicting emotions. We can be angry at someone, even come close to hating them and still love them. These emotions are layered. The foundation is love, the immediate passion is anger, and the fleeting feeling of hate is often a result of unresolved issues or temporary frustration. It is not something that should be taken lightly, because overtime, these feelings can overwhelm the foundation and destroy those feelings of love. But just as we have these feelings in our real life, we should also experience this chaos of emotion in our fiction.

Intense emotions should not be all there is to a character. Anger, love, passion, frustration, fear, disappointment, grief… are all the big ones but they didn’t happen all at once. Most of us don’t lose are $hit over one incident. We don’t fall in love just because a guy is cute or has a great smile. Real emotion builds layer upon layer. Anger, especially the explosive kind begins with something small that we shove aside, ignore or don’t feel is worth fighting about, but then the next thing comes. Maybe it too is small and gets ignored but it clings to the one before. Add in several life incidents, problems, and we might explode on an innocent bystander instead of the one who has been angering us all along, or we might finally let loose on the one who deserves it.

While we might blowup at the person who angered us, we might also want their love and respect. We might have a whole stew of emotions stirred up together. When a parent and child fight over curfew, the parent might be worried the child is getting into trouble, becoming friends with the wrong crowd. Fear adds to the anger. The child, growing up wants to prove themselves, maybe they need their parent to trust them. We can all remember a time when we were so angry we thought we might explode, but anger was more the result not the whole equation.

As we build our characters and their emotions think about all the factors that go into layering their actions and reactions, remember emotions aren’t black and white.