Those of you who have read this blog for any length of time know how enthusiastic we are about critique partners. While polishing my work-in-progress recently, I was reminded of how much wisdom my own CPs have to share. I was finishing the revisions on my manuscript when I realized that my main character spends a lot of time being afraid in the story. A lot of time. Which is fine. Except there are only so many times a writer can tell you that someone’s chest heaved, that their muscles tensed, that their breath caught in any given novel.
I could have studied the craft books I keep at hand to solve my problem. But I didn’t want a full course on writing emotion––I only needed a few flashes of inspiration. I reached out to some of my critique partners for their favorite tips, and the insights they shared were so great that we decided to pull them together to share with all of you.
Without further ado, here are some of our favorite tips for writing emotion:
Gita: How might I show a character struggling with anxiety so the reader can feel her suffering? I need to build up the character’s interior world so the reader can inhabit it. She might, for example, think about the anxiety in terms of a metaphor—like being pulled underwater, or stuck in a hole deep under the earth. Once you create that metaphor, you can come back to it again and again, drawing it out, extending it…you can evoke the darkness of being underground, the heavy weight on her limbs, not being able to cry out as stand-ins for her anxiety. A wonderful model for this is the way Leigh Bardugo develops Kaz’s anxiety about being touched in Six of Crows and Crooked Kingdom.
I think our first instinct—maybe because of the writing advice to “Show, not tell” or because we watch so many movies—is to depict emotion physically. The clench of a jaw, the tightening of a stomach. This works, but it doesn’t go very far. I hold with Donald Maass that describing the physical manifestations of an emotion doesn’t actually help the reader feel that emotion, something he discusses at length in his excellent Emotional Craft of Fiction. Instead he makes a convincing case that what helps the reader feel the emotion is to convey what the character is thinking.
Gabrielle: Yup…what these ladies are saying. Interiority! Another thing I think gets overlooked alot when writing emotion is the senses, and in particular, the senses as tied to memory and meaning. There is some potential cross-over here with the use of metaphor, but I think it’s useful to consider sensory memory on its own. For example, I have some really powerful associations that are tied to scent. The heavy smell of pine trees, especially in summer heat, instantly takes me to the long dirt roads of the Tall Pines campground in Virginia, where I spent summer days riding my bike and crabbing off the end of the dock. If I were to insert that memory or experience in a story (first) along with some interiority, then I can later use the scent of pines to call back all those emotions with just a few words.
Julie: I agree with Gita with regards to interiority helping convey emotion on the page. In Story Genius, Lisa Cron recommends using mini-flashbacks to help reinforce emotion on the page. So rather than a whole scene set in the past, it might just be a snippet that cues the reader—hey, this is an important emotional moment. I almost always couple an internal or mini-flashback with a physical reaction. So my MC might clench her fist (the physical sign of anger), but she will also have a memory or a thought that goes with it to reinforce what emotion the clenched fist represents.
Connecting an event or experience with a particular sensory recollection to evoke a particular emotion can be really powerful. It also works really well to tie specific emotions to objects, which Matt Bird writes about in his book, THE SECRETS OF STORY.
Jessica: I agree with Gita that extended metaphors are one of the most effective emotional tools writers have. Often called objective correlatives, these extended metaphors work to evoke a particular emotional response in your readers. For example, in my novel the characters wear protective pouches around their necks filled with lavender; the lavender keeps the demon-like creatures in their world at bay. Once readers know what the pouches are and how they function, my characters need only reach up and squeeze the pouch later in the story to show the reader that they are feeling frightened. In this way, the pouches serve as an important tool to show the readers how my characters are feeling, without me having to tell them.
Another of my favorite techniques is using setting to establish emotion. For example, a door is normally just a door. But if your character notices the cheerful yellow color and the bright sunshine catching crystals in the window and casting playful shadows, this evokes quite a different feeling than the character who sees the chipped, blood-red paint and the half-eaten fly trapped in a spider’s web spread across a splintered frame.
Additional Resources:
Here are some articles (from The Winged Pen and beyond!) that will help you learn even more about writing emotion:
- Writing With Emotion: The Objective Correlative (https://thinkingthroughourfingers.com/2015/06/05/writing-with-emotion-the-objective-correlative/)
- How and When to Write Emotion (https://thewingedpen.com/myc-how-and-when-to-write-emotion/)
- Interiority vs. Telling (https://kidlit.com/2011/05/18/interiority-vs-telling/)
So there you have it––some of our favorite tips and resources on writing emotion. Please feel free to share your favorite tips in the comments below! For more craft advice on writing middle grade or young adult fiction head to our Master Your Craft page where you’ll find dozens of more posts to choose from!