Black Swan Down

I went to see the film Black Swan last weekend and if you haven't already, let me save you the trouble. Natalie Portman has been nominated for an Oscar for best actress and I can only conclude that the Academy has completely lost its marbles - she doesn't act: she looks beautiful and she over-emotes, which is a very different thing.

The only thing I could salvage from an afternoon of empty melodrama was the following little homily: showing emotion is not the same as evoking it in your audience, or indeed in your reader, because I am certain the same thing applies when writing fiction. If your character is awash with feeling it can easily look either self-indulgent, or sentimental, or superficial. To engage your reader, they must be feeling the emotion on your character's behalf.  If your character is doing all work for them, the reader has no stake in the situation. Generally speaking, it is more affecting to see somebody fighting back tears than giving way to them. A reader wants to see a character struggling to overcome a problem rather than succumbing to it.
The inestimable Margaret Atwood put it this way :

"If you want to express emotion, scream. If you want to evoke emotion it's more complicated. Listening to someone scream doesn't necessarily make you want to scream, it makes you want to shut the window..." 

Or in the case of Black Swan, it makes you want to leave the cinema...