The Write Practice

How to Write With Emotion and Make Your Readers Feel

by The Magic Violinist | 35 comments

As writers, no matter what our goals are, there is something we should all strive to do: make our readers feel. Whether that feeling be hope, happiness, fear, or any number of other emotions, it can be achieved through masterful writing . That's how to write with emotion and make readers feel.

How to Write With Emotion and Make Your Readers Feel

How to Write With Emotion

That is easier said than done, though, right? How can we turn our words into something so real, it gives the reader a punch to the gut or brings a smile to their face?

There are endless possibilities, but the seven easiest and most effective ways are:

  • Write about what scares you.
  • Write about what excites you.
  • Write about what disgusts you.
  • Write about what saddens you.
  • Write about what fuels you.
  • Write about what angers you.
  • Write about what fills you with love.

Simple as that. When we write about something honest and real, our readers will feel what we’ve felt, so long as we conveyed that emotion in the most truthful way we know how. You don’t even have to be a non-fiction writer to use these techniques. Your fictional character can experience the same emotions in different ways.

Actors pull from their realities all the time to portray their characters accurately. Do the same thing in your writing.

3 Keys to Capture Emotion in Writing

There are a few additional tips you can keep in mind to help you with this.

1. Intense emotions come through the most.

In other words, the stronger the better. A little disappointment will not be felt as much as rage or grief. Amusement is not the same as glee or absolute joy. The most important things make us feel the most.

2. Don’t pour it on too thick.

While it’s true that deep emotions are felt the most by readers, you don’t want to go overboard. If your character constantly swings from despair to falling madly in love to shock, it will get old really fast. A little goes a long way. Give your characters a break to just be normal for a while so when a bombshell does hit, it hits hard.

3. Write a journal.

On the spot, it might be difficult to come up with memories or feelings to write about. Every emotion is most powerful in the moment. If you’re able to, anytime something intense happens that causes you to feel an extreme emotion, write it down as soon as possible . What triggered the sensation and how did it affect you? You can draw on those journal entries later.

One Final Thought: Keep It Real

Readers will be able to tell when you’re forcing something onto them. Don’t try to make a character’s reaction to an event bigger than it has to be. Nine times out of ten, the simplest way is the best way.

All in all, if you want readers to respond to your writing, remember to be simple, be honest, and be emotional.

What causes you to be moved by writing? Do you have other tips for how to write with emotion?  Let us know in the comments .

Write for fifteen minutes about someone who feels intensely. It can be in the form of a journal entry or it can be a character going through these emotions. Draw on memories to help you along the way.

When you’re finished, share your work in the comments , if you’d like. Don’t forget to give your fellow writers some love, too.

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The Magic Violinist

The Magic Violinist is a young author who writes mostly fantasy stories. She loves to play with her dog and spend time with her family. Oh, and she's homeschooled. You can visit her blog at themagicviolinist.blogspot.com . You can also follow The Magic Violinist on Twitter (@Magic_Violinist).

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Writing Powerful Emotion Beats in Fiction

An emotion beat is what makes the novel or short story distinctive—we can be inside a character, experiencing the emotion with her, and that makes the reading experience powerful. For it to work, the right emotion beats must be used in the right spots.

In Part 1 of my series 10 Keys to Writing Story Beats in Novels , I discussed the story beat, the beat sheet, and the pause or inaction beat. In Part 2 I discussed the action beat, the dialogue beat, and beat variation. In this post, with keys 7 through 10, I will discuss the emotion beat in depth.

Key 7: Use Emotion Beats to Connect Readers to the Characters

I heard someone say that we can’t really understand any of the people around us, and that is why we love reading. Only through reading can we can truly grasp the emotions, desires and perspective of someone other than ourselves. The emotion beat is what creates this connection between reader and character.

There are four basic types of emotional beats:

1. Internal Physical Sensations

“I didn’t get the job,” said Russ. Irene felt sick to her stomach. It was their last chance—they had needed that job desperately.

2. External Physical Sensations

“I didn’t get the job,” said Russ. Suddenly, the warm air blowing from the heater felt too hot, stifling even. Irene opened the window, letting in the cold of winter.

3. Physical Actions (including hand gestures, facial expressions, and larger physical movements)

“I didn’t get the job,” said Russ. Irene pressed her lips firmly together, trying not to say something she would regret later.

4. State the Emotion

“I didn’t get the job,” said Russ. Irene was frustrated. He could’ve at least visited the company’s website before going into an interview. But as always, he insisted on doing it blind.

A great resource for physical sensations and actions that show emotions is the book The Emotion Thesaurus . You’ll notice that there is overlap between emotion beats and action beats; I’d categorize something as an emotional beat if conveying emotion is the most important function. Stating the character’s emotion should always be the last resort, though it can be used effectively.

Key 8: Use Emotion Beats that are Distinctive to your Story World or Character

The four basic types of emotional beats start to feel repetitive if that’s all you use in your story. Another type of emotional beat that’s extremely effective is using actions or thought patterns that are distinctive to your character or story world. A wizard in Harry Potter might reach for a wand or use magic in certain emotional states. A motorcycle rider may convey his emotions through how he rides his bike.

All sorts of things can become an emotional beat that is carried throughout your story: habits or tics or possessions. How you vary them will then create a powerful emotional reaction for you reader.

“Maisie, you haven’t been… contenta lately.” She used the Spanish word for content or happy, as if it were too stark, too uncomfortable to say it in English. I hadn’t realized that she’d noticed. “Are you now? How do you feel?”

This emotional beat is distinctive to Maisie, her relationship with her mother, and her cultural heritage.

One of the other characters in Dangerous , GT, often chews gum. The way he unwraps it or the way he chews it is a point of emotional control for GT, and so the description of his gum (or other taste metaphors) it is often used as an emotional beat in connection with his character.

At one point in the novel, GT is holding another Maisie’s father hostage. He has set demands for Maisie, and a time for when her father will be killed if she doesn’t agree. Maisie asks how she can know if GT will keep his word.

“You don’t know,” GT said, snapping on his gum as if we were chitchatting about the weather. “But you have no other choice. Two minutes, ten seconds.”

If at all possible, use emotional beats that are distinctive to your character and storyworld. It will make all the difference in your storytelling.

Key 9: Use Advanced Emotional Beats to Better Convey Your Character’s Feelings

In addition to beat distinctive to your character and story world, there are a handful of other advanced emotional beats that can powerfully convey feelings:

1. Setting:  Use what your character notices about the setting to convey emotion.

Example of using a setting that parallels emotion:

“I didn’t get the job,” said Russ. Irene forced her eyes away from him, out the window. The last leaf that had hung onto the tree all winter long fluttered to the ground.

2. Metaphor or Simile

Example of using a setting that contrasts emotion + a simile:

“I didn’t get the job,” said Russ. Irene forced her eyes away from Russ, out the window. The green on the tree was oversaturated, like a poorly-made Technicolor film, mocking her with its cheeriness.

3. Mini Flashback

“I didn’t get the job,” said Russ. Irene had known this could happen, yet his words still shook her, the way the doctor’s words had shook her when IVF had failed for the third time. She knew what would happen now—the sinking despair, the gradual recovery, and all the while the knowledge that this had been the last chance.

4. Mini Flashforward

“I didn’t get the job,” said Russ. Irene looked at the floor. One of these days she would leave him, take her terry coat and walk right out the front door.

5. Surreal Images

“I didn’t get the job,” said Russ. She had expected this, but that did not stop the rush of despair. The couch swallowed Irene whole.

Using these techniques well will create a distinctive style and voice, in addition to conveying emotion. Of course if you overuse any one of these types it will probably backfire.

Here’s a passage from Darkness at Noon by Arthur Koestler that uses almost of almost all of these emotional beats. The main character has spent his life working for a totalitarian regime. Now he is a political prisoner for that same regime. Here is his emotional reaction when he finds out that one of the other prisoners has been tortured by steambath:

He lit his last cigarette and with a clear head began to work out the line to take when he would be brought up for cross-examination. He was filled by the same quiet and serene self-confidence as he had felt as a student before a particularly difficult examination. He called to memory every particular he knew about the subject “steambath.” He imagined the situation in detail and tried to analyse the physical sensations to be expected, in order to rid them of their uncanniness. The important thing was not to let oneself be caught unprepared. He now knew for certain that they would not succeed in doing so, any more than had the others over there; he knew he would not say anything he did not want to say. He only wished they would start soon. His dream came to his mind: Richard and the old taxi-driver pursuing him, because they felt themselves cheated and betrayed by him. I will pay my fare, he thought with an awkward smile.

Note: credit for coming up with these categories of emotion beats needs to go to author Janci Patterson , whose new book Everything’s Fine is an excellent example of emotion beats.

Key 10: When Something Important or Shocking Happens, Use a Complex Reaction Beat to Show the POV Character’s Interpretation of Events

Most of the time you can follow an action beat with another action beat, or a line of dialogue with another line of dialogue. Yet that’s not always enough.

If there’s an action beat or a dialogue beat that is shocking to the viewpoint character, then to take advantage of the moment we have to follow this with a fleshed out reaction beat, that includes a feeling/thought, a physical action, and speech. Otherwise something like this happens:

“I quit my job,” said Russ. “I’m sure it will all work out,” said Irene.

We have no idea how Russ or Irene feel about the situation. This could be devastating to them. This could be an everyday thing. This could be the breaking point for Irene, yet she’s trying to put on a hopeful face. We have no idea, and because there aren’t any emotional beats, we feel disconnected from the characters. And if the dialogue or the action is truly shocking or important to the characters, a one sentence emotion beat is probably not enough.

Shocking action or dialogue must be followed by a series of beats that create the reaction—a standard way to do this is use a physical reaction beat, an emotion/thought reaction beat, and then a dialogue reaction beat.

“I quit my job,” said Russ. Irene coughed her coffee out of her mouth, sending flecks of brown liquid across the table. She sucked in a deep breath, stood, and wiped off the table. Worry gripped her. This could not have happened at a worse time. Finally she found the courage to speak. “I’m sure it will all work out,” said Irene, putting on a brave face.

We now understand this dialogue and what it means to the characters because a fleshed-out, complex reaction beat has been used.

Authors Janci Patterson and Heather Clark provide this formula for complex reaction beats:

In describing what he calls “ Motivation-Reaction Units ” Dwight V. Swain thinks the order should be reversed, with the feeling or thought coming before the physical reaction. (Also see Heather Clark ’s and Janci Patterson ’s posts on the subject.) Regardless of the order, if it’s a key emotional reaction, you probably need thought/feeling, action, dialogue, and potentially another powerful emotion beat.

In the classic novel Howards End by E. M. Forster, a character named Helen becomes engaged to a man, Mr. Wilcox, that she has only known for a few days. Her Aunt Juley goes to try to break off the engagement. Unfortunately she broaches the subject with the wrong Mr. Wilcox.

Writing Exercises

Complex Reaction Beats Exercise

Here’s a passage of dialogue without any emotional reactions to accompany some rather big statements:

“I’m having a baby,” said Tessa. “You should’ve told me earlier,” said Mark. “Would it have made a difference?” asked Tessa.

Now rewrite this dialogue from Mark’s POV, with physical reactions and internal reactions.

“I’m having a baby,” said Tessa. (non-POV character)

[Write Mark’s physical reaction] [Write Mark’s internal feeling/reaction]

“You should’ve told me earlier,” said Mark. (POV character)

[Write Tessa’s physical reaction] [Write Mark’s interpretation of her reaction]

“Would it have made a difference?” Tessa asked.

If you need to, you can switch the order of the beats, sub out an emotional beat, or add additional emotional beats. My writing group did this exercise and came up with a wide variety of reactions for the characters.

Beat Mania Exercise

Take the line of dialogue “It won’t be ready in time.” (Or you can choose a sentence from one of your stories.)

Now write ten different possible emotional beats, using each type of emotion beat discussed in this post:

  • Internal Physical Sensations
  • External Physical Sensations
  • Physical Action
  • State the Emotion
  • Emotion Beat Particular to Character/Story World
  • Setting-related Emotion Beat
  • Metaphor or Simile
  • Mini-Flashback
  • Mini-Flashforward
  • Surreal Imagery

(This should turn out like the “I didn’t get the job” example used throughout this blog post.)

Of your results, which emotion beat do you like best and why?

Print out several pages from your novel. Highlight and label each of your beats (physical sensation, setting, flashback, stating the emotion, internal sensation, physical action, etc). Are you doing all one type? Ignoring one type altogether? Skipping places that need beats? Now that you’ve analyzed, revise!

Check out my new novel!

If you enjoyed this post, please consider learning about my new spy novel, The Secret Life of Miss Mary Bennet , coming in April 2021 from Tule Publishing.

Original drumming at the beach image by  Jason Turgeon , Creative Commons license

Jim

My god in heaven, you have single-handedly cleared up ALL my confusion about what beats are. The precision of your comparison to shots in a movie rings truer than anything else I have ever heard about beats. Thanks you. Thank you with every fiber of gratitude I can muster.

Katherine Cowley

I’m glad it was helpful!

Dianne Joyce

A HUGE THANK YOU!

Nikki

This is one of the most helpful articles I’ve stumbled across so far. A million thank-you’s, Katherine. I thoroughly enjoyed this blog post.

Andrew

This series has been immensely helpful. Thank you for writing it with such detailed examples!

Valerie Harbolovic

Brilliant series on beats! I have been struggling with the rewrite of my first novel, and you have set me on the right track and restored sanity to my writing.

Nell Barnett

I finally feel I have an excellent chance at doing a decent job at rewriting my first screenplay and more importantly to understanding fully how beats should/can be used and their role in all writing. I have read, I am ashamed to say, about action/reaction; and then; and what if– so many times without understanding fully how to incorporate them into writing until stumbling today onto your blog. I truly thank you for taking the time to share this information with all who may be trapped in the prison of writers’ block, etc. You, Katherine, have surely given us a vital key to the pathway of freedom!

Monique

This is one of the best pieces of advice that I ever read. It really helps me to finish my books. Thanks!

Vromme

If words are the atoms of fiction, then story beats are the molecules, the building blocks that create a narrative. There are five main types of story beats–action beats, description beats, pause inaction beats, dialogue beats, and emotion beats.

Kyle

This 3-part series on beats was fantastic. I’d always just assumed a beat was a “moment.” I like how you laid out the basic types of beats and then detailed variants of each kind. The examples were clear, and the exercises were extremely helpful. This gives me great insight into improving my dialogue-heavy scenes as well as pacing in general. Thank you!

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writing fiction emotion

Emotions in Writing: The Author’s Guide to Stirring Up Big Feels

writing fiction emotion

If you know how to convey emotions in writing, you know how to draw your reader in, hold them captive, and make them remember you forever.

And if you think that sounds manipulative, my brother/writing partner once referred to this skill as the art of “jerking people’s emotions around.”

But he’s right, and we writers might as well own it. The only reason anyone picks up a novel is because they want to feel something.

Thrilled. Terrified. Soothed. Devastated. Anxious. Intoxicated.

Sure, fiction makes us smarter and more insightful. But let’s be real: the only reason it succeeds in making us think is because it first succeeds in making us feel . 

So how do you become an all-powerful emotion wizard?

It’s all right here. You’re about to learn how to plot a story built for emotional resonance and draft scenes that speak to your reader’s soul. So… big stuff.

Let’s start feeling those feels.

Lay the Emotional Groundwork

The first rule of emotions in writing:

Set up your story to elicit big feels.

New writers especially tend to think building emotion is a matter of heartbreaking dialogue or shocking cliffhangers. And sure, that’s part of it. 

But the fact is, it won’t matter how well you nail those micro details if the story itself doesn’t feel authentic and resonate with your reader.

So before we dive into the matter of bringing out emotions in your writing, let’s lay the groundwork for a powerful story.

Know How You Want Your Readers to Feel

A person with long dark hair smiles while reading a book.

What specific emotional experience are you trying to create for your readers?

Or to put it another way:

If you were going to read a book in your chosen genre, what would you want to feel?

Be specific, because specificity is your mightiest tool when it comes to conveying emotions in writing.

For example, you’d probably want the romantic subplot in an adventure novel to charm and delight you. Maybe even dizzy you up a bit. 

But if you pick up a romance , you’re looking for a full-on swoon. Those love scenes had better make your heart race, make you breathless, make you believe in love again no matter what broken dreams lie in your past.

Revisit some of the books that made you want to write in your genre in the first place. Make notes about how you feel, when you feel it, and what the author did to spark those emotions. 

Then, as you draft each new scene, go into it knowing exactly what you want your readers to feel so you can make it happen.

Establish Relatability

How are you going to get your reader to emotionally invest in your protagonist?

You’ve got to offer at least a glimmer of relatability, and you’ve got to do it early. 

Fortunately, this is way easier than you might think. Your reader doesn’t need to see their actual life reflected in your story. They also don’t even need to see their personality reflected in your character. All they really need in order to relate is a glimpse of vulnerability. That’s it.

In White Ivy , Ivy Lin is a young Chinese immigrant trying to carve out a path to status and power in a cold new world. She’s a protagonist with a shockingly negative character arc , and I definitely do not recognize my life in hers.

But on page one, I learn two important pieces of information.

She feels invisible and she wishes she could trade her face for someone else’s.

These are near-universal vulnerabilities. Even though Ivy’s feelings are connected to the very specific experience of being an Asian immigrant in the U.S.—an experience I couldn’t claim to understand intimately—I can at least say there have been times in my life when I’ve felt invisible and unappealing.

This is why literature is such a powerful tool for empathy. Great books start with an emotional entry point. They show a character’s insecurities, fears, failings, or wounds, inviting the reader to say, “Oof. Yeah, I know that one.” Suddenly, the unfamiliar becomes the understandable. 

Flesh Out Characters

Once you’ve hooked your reader’s heart by dropping some relatable vulnerabilities, follow through by making sure your characters are multi-dimensional creations.

This includes side characters and antagonists . You want your players to feel human (even if they’re not). This means they’ve got to have:

  • Compelling motivation

Also remember that your characters do not exist in a vacuum. They’re influenced by their upbringing, culture, economic class, race, gender, sexuality, ability, physical and mental health , and about a million other things. Let your reader see how your characters’ influences shape who they are.

On that note, backstory helps a lot as you build emotion into your story. What has your character been through? How has it shaped their perception of the world? What old wounds are they carrying? 

This stuff can get pretty dense, but it’s worth putting in the work. I recommend checking out these two Dabble articles to get started:

  • How to Write Compelling Characters From the Inside Out
  • No Pain, No Gain: Giving Your Characters a Compelling (and Traumatic) Backstory

Get Readers Invested in the Outcome

A person bites a pencil while nervously reading a computer screen.

So how does the actual plot factor into the process of jerking people’s emotions around?

The good news is that you’ve already done a lot of the heavy lifting in your character development. If your readers care about your protagonist, they’ll care what happens to your protagonist.

But you still need a plot that supports all your hard character work. This means:

‍ Your major characters should face both external conflicts and internal conflicts. As the external conflict intensifies, it should heighten the internal conflict (and vice versa). You can learn more about how to do this here .

‍ You continuously raise the stakes for your protagonist. With each new twist and turn, your hero(ine) has even more to lose.

‍ The protagonist’s choices drive the plot. Don’t make your main character a constant victim of their circumstances. At best, a passive character will only elicit pity, which is the most boring of all emotions. Allow your very human protagonist to make choices that make the conflict worse.

‍ It all makes sense. Logic has an important role to play when it comes to emotions in writing. A gaping plot hole or unsupported character decision will break the spell you’ve worked so hard to cast. For a great guide to plotting an airtight story, download our free ebook , Let’s Write a Book .

Now that you’ve designed your story to stir the soul, let’s get down to the details.

How to Convey Character Emotions in Writing

You’ve laid your foundation. Time to wipe the sweat off your brow and get into the nitty gritty.

Here’s how to bring your character’s emotions to life when you actually get down to drafting.

Use Sensory Details to Set the Mood

Conveying character emotions in your writing isn't just about telling the reader what your character feels.

It’s also about reflecting those feelings in the scene itself. This is especially true when it comes to your point-of-view (POV) character . 

See, even if you write in third person, you still write through the lens of your character’s perception.

You might write in third-person limited , where you only show one character’s perspective at a time. Or you might write in third-person omniscient , which allows you to hop from one character’s POV to another’s. Either way, the character’s emotional state should be reflected in the scene you set.

For example:

“I just can’t marry you,” Daniel had said in the suffocating heat of his car.

So simple, right? One quick scene detail—”suffocating heat”—immediately puts us in Ivy’s shoes. We know what kind of hurt this break-up brings: the kind that makes it hard to think, hard to breathe, hard to stay calm. It's a hot, suffocating kind of heartbreak.

Now, the reason “suffocating heat” works so well to establish an emotional experience is because it’s a sensory detail. It’s concrete. Believe it or not, that’s the key to sliding your reader’s feet into your character’s emotional shoes.

We tend to think of “feelings” as abstract, but when it really comes down to it, we experience everything through physical bodies. We’ve built associations between what we feel in our hearts and what we see, hear, taste, smell, and feel on our skin.

That’s why, if you want to give your reader the heebie-jeebies, your best bet is not to tell them it was really scary in the alleyway, but to show them the long shadow of the broken fire escape ladder. The old advice “show, don’t tell” is really about giving your audience all the feels.

Get Into Your Own Body

A person sits on the edge of a bed, holding their head in their hand.

Here’s another reason why sensory details are so essential to communicating emotions in writing:

We experience emotions physically. We know what we feel because our body tells us what we feel.

If you’ve never thought about this before, now is the time to start noticing.

What physical sensations arise when you feel angry? Anxious? Amorous? Try to notice. Write it down. Remember it when you’re trying to convey your character’s emotions.

This is honestly one of my favorite things about being a writer—the phenomenon of feeling and observing at the exact same time. I’ve had full-blown panic attacks where my inner writer was still there watching and murmuring, “Oh, interesting.” as she scribbled in her little notebook.

In addition to observing yourself, you can find great examples of how to convey the physical experience of emotion in any book that’s successfully sparked emotion in you . 

But if you want the masterclass, check out The Sign for Home . Part of this novel is told through the POV of Arlo, a young DeafBlind man who experiences the world through physical sensation. The result is a lot of passages like these:

‍ Electricity ignites all over your brain, causing the hair follicles on your arms and the back of your neck to vibrate. 
‍ You had never met the principal before, but his power was legendary. Your face felt hot. Your stomach tightened. You wanted to pee.

When our brains read passages like this, they register these physical experiences as if they were our own. We feel the vibration and, therefore, the excitement. We don’t put ourselves in the character’s shoes as easily when all we know is that the character was “psyched.” 

Master the Art of Subtext

This is another skill that takes some real-world observation and a lot of novel-reading to master.

You probably know you can’t have your characters running around saying exactly what they feel all the time unless it’s an actual character trait. Real people don’t do that, so if your characters do it, your reader’s going to remember that this is all make-believe. 

Pssheww! That’s the sound of your reader’s emotional connection exploding.

So then how do you help your readers hear what your characters aren’t saying?

One helpful fact about human beings is that we’ve developed a sort of subtext shorthand. We already have phrases that we know will signal our feelings without requiring us to do the dirty business of actually stating those feelings outright. 

For example, here’s a line of dialogue from Seven Days in June with zero context.

‍ “Fine. Go explain to Audre why you’re scared to try new things.”

You don’t need me to tell you anything about the scene in order to understand that the speaker is tired of the listener’s crap. Right?

So, as a writer, all you have to do is start noticing our universal shorthand for “I’m pissed” and “I’m jealous.”

You can also use the descriptions between lines of dialogue to clarify your characters’ states of mind. Here’s another passage from the same novel:

‍ “What’s he like?” Shane knew he was going too far.
‍ “Travis Scott?”
‍ “Audre’s dad.”
‍ Eva sat back in the booth, hard. She grimaced and massaged a temple with her knuckles. “He’s stable .”
‍ Shane went further. “Where is he?”
‍ “You tell me. Where do men go when they’re done?”

You can feel the tension, right? To create it, the author taps into Shane’s thoughts (as he’s the POV character in this scene) and Eva’s actions. (Not to mention that stinging line at the end.)

It also helps that the author has written vivid characters. By this point in the story, we know these people well enough to understand how they’re likely to feel in this conversation. 

Incorporate Body Language

Three teenagers stand by a fence looking at a phone.

In the last example, Eva’s body language served as a clue that there were big feelings bubbling behind her measured words.

But body language and facial expressions aren’t just a subtext tool. They provide a window into a character’s state of mind in any given moment. Here’s Eva just standing around at a prestigious event right after unexpectedly running into Shane:

‍ [The dress] had gotten tighter somehow, sucking at her like Saran Wrap. She kept shifting it around her hips.

In other words, she can’t get comfortable… physically or emotionally.

Now, there’s one big challenge when it comes to using body language to convey emotions in writing. Most of us end up falling back on the same all-too-obvious body language cues.

‍ She wiped away a tear. He grinned. They shrugged.

My first drafts are positively riddled with shrugs and quiet smiles. A big part of polishing later drafts is going back over these boring descriptions and coming up with more specific, less repetitive details.

‍ The Emotion Thesaurus is an extremely helpful tool for this. So is good ol’ fashioned real-life observation.

Banish Clichés

As long as you’re searching that first draft for overused body language and facial expressions, you might as well look for clichés , too.

Because when we’re trying to get the reader to experience an emotion, we start loading up the clichés. 

‍ A single tear fell from his eye. She glared daggers. Their heart shattered into a million pieces.

These phrases are so common they’re almost meaningless. We’re numb to them. Unfortunately, their prevalence also makes them the first thing that comes to mind when we’re trying to describe emotions in writing.

Keep pushing past the first thought. Maybe even the second and third, too. Play with metaphor and (once again) use the physical to make the emotional come alive. 

When you do that, you can replace “They were meant to be” with passages more like:

‍ With him, she was at ease: her skin felt as though it were her right size.

(That’s from Americanah , by the way.)

Trust Your Reader

Finally, be aware that it is possible to overdo emotions in writing. 

Sometimes writers are so eager to make sure the reader connects with the character’s experience that they overload every page with feelings.

Emotional manipulation requires light touch. When a reader sees a lot of feelings talk, they stop seeing the story and start seeing the author frantically trying to tug at their heart.

Trust them to be smart enough to follow your subtext and the emotional logic of your story. When in doubt, invite your beta readers to tell you about their emotional experience of your novel.

Also allow your genre to inform how thick you want to lay it on. A noir mystery novel will probably take on a more cold and objective tone that only stirs curiosity and the occasional chill. 

Romances, on the other hand, tend to do a lot of emotional check-ins.

Know your readers. This is all for them, after all.

Let Dabble Help You Become a Master Manipulator

Now you know how to build a story that resonates and bring it home with powerful prose.

You’ve probably also figured out that this can be a messy process. Dabble can help.

Dabble’s Plot Grid allows you to plan, review, and edit your entire plot in one glimpse so you can see your characters’ emotional journey clearly. Plus, handy features like Comments and Stickies help you stay on top of pesky clichés and excessive shrugging.

A screenshot of a Dabble manuscript with a comment reminding the writer to revise the way they depict emotions in writing.

The best part? You can try all these features and more for free for fourteen days. No credit card required. How does that make you feel? Click here to get started.

Abi Wurdeman is the author of Cross-Section of a Human Heart: A Memoir of Early Adulthood, as well as the novella, Holiday Gifts for Insufferable People. She also writes for film and television with her brother and writing partner, Phil Wurdeman. On occasion, Abi pretends to be a poet. One of her poems is (legally) stamped into a sidewalk in Santa Clarita, California. When she’s not writing, Abi is most likely hiking, reading, or texting her mother pictures of her houseplants to ask why they look like that.

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How to Show Emotion in Writing and Make Readers Feel It

C. S. Lakin

C. S. Lakin

Using Music To Help Your Characters

It’s really amazing, if you stop to think about it. Readers will willingly suspend disbelief and subject themselves to the gamut of emotion, making themselves vulnerable to intense feelings.

Some readers read for the suspenseful ride. Like my husband and kids, who eagerly climb into seats on real roller coasters—they’ll even wait two hours to experience a two-minute ride just to get scared out of their wits.

Some readers are perfectly fine crying, feeling miserable, or aching in commiseration as they go on a difficult journey with a fictional character they love.

Fictional, not real.

Why do so many people love to do this? I don’t know. I can only speak for myself. There is something wonderful, magical, and sublime about being made to feel deeply about something outside my normal life.

Stories that remind me of what being human is all about, what love is, what loyalty is, what hope is, what being victorious looks like, lift me up, confirm my humanity, bring deeper meaning to my own life.

Seeing that we have readers willing to experience emotion when they turn the pages of our novels—no, not willing … expecting, hoping, and longing for an emotional experience—we writers need to become masterful wielders of emotion.

Writers Have to Dig Deep

Don’t try to name emotions, but what if you’re not the emotional type.

That’s not an easy thing to do. It takes thousands of hours of study, practice, and honing to become a master of emotion. And often that means we have to mine our own emotions.

We have to dig deep to reflect on how we react, respond, and feel emotionally to events, people, and situations so that we can try to capture those feelings and transfer them onto the page.

That’s the advice Hemingway gave, and it’s the best advice I’ve seen on the emotional craft of fiction: “Find what gave you the emotion . . . Then write it down, making it clear so the reader will see it too and have the same feeling as you had.”

Hemingway’s advice gives us the first step to learning how to manipulate readers’ emotions. In addition to examining how you emotionally react to things you see around you or on TV, pay attention to those moments when you feel strongly while reading a novel.

Instead of thinking, “I want my reader to feel sad,” how much more masterful would it be to dig deep into the many emotional nuances we experience when any given event occurs.

Do what Hemingway instructed. When you feel something, write down what action took place that made you emote. Then dig into the emotions and learn not just why you feel this way but what exactly you are feeling. What thoughts led you to those feelings?

If you can nail the thoughts, which are words, you can put similar thoughts (words) into your narrative and character’s voice.

That’s the first step toward evoking emotion in readers in a masterful way.

I usually can’t put a name to the composite emotion I feel in a given situation. I can toss around a whole lot of words. But, to me, trying to name complex emotions is like trying to catch the wind with chopsticks.

Think of it this way. You might not know what to name a particular color shade, but if you have a few tubes of paint and play around with the quantities, you just might be able to re-create the color perfectly.

That’s what you need to do with words on your palette to create the same emotion.

If you consider yourself an unemotional person, not used to examining into your feelings, this aspiration to become an emotional master is going to kick your butt.

I’ve had numerous editing clients tell me they really struggle with this. They say, “I’m just not the emotional, introspective type. I rarely get in touch with my feelings.”

Let’s face the facts: since readers read to care, to be moved, if you want to write the kind of novel that will move them, you must find those emotions within you.

Here’s one thing that might help: music.

I don’t know about you, but music is very powerful to me. It can evoke tremendous emotion in me. That’s why movies can move us in such emotional ways—they not only show (rather than tell) scenes in which characters are emoting, there is a soundtrack that overlays, designed to stir emotion.

Who can explain why certain musical scores make some people weep? Or want to cry out in joy? We can feel nostalgia, poignancy, love, peace, awe when we listen to music. It’s hard to name the emotions we feel when we listen.

Certain instruments might move us a certain way. Some are moved by opera. Or a sweet folk song.

The first time I heard Pharrell Williams’s song “Happy” on YouTube , I got so happy I started dancing around the house just like all those people in the music video. That song was so powerful that people all over the world got hooked on it.

Even Oprah had Pharrell on her show to talk about that one song. If you haven’t seen it, take a minute and watch. It shows ordinary people of all ages, races, classes, stature dancing to the song in locations around the world.

Music is powerful. Music and dancing are universal. Joy is something everyone wants to feel. Emotion is powerful, infectious.

Pharrell’s music and lyrics, along with showing people dancing and moving to his song, gets people in touch with that place inside that feels joy in life. And that’s magical.

We also bring our past to our response to music. What are your favorite songs from when you were a teen? Music sparks intense memories.

When I hear certain songs, I’m instantly transported to specific times and places in my life. Not only that, I can almost taste and feel as if I were back there, thinking and feeling the way I did when I was fifteen or twenty.

Music sparks memory. Memories spark emotion. Emotions lead to more thoughts and memories, and more emotion.

If you know you need your character to feel something and you’re not sure how to tap into that feeling, try to find some music that will take you there.

I have a playlist of hours of soundtrack music. And I often choose a particular piece to listen to when I’m writing or plotting a scene in which I need to feel something specific. I may not be able to name the emotions, but I know what feeling I’m searching for.

Music can free you up; bypass your resistance or writer’s block. If you need to write an exciting high-action scene and you put on music that is exciting and stimulating, it can get your creative juices flowing and drown out your inner editor.

Emotional mastery is one of the hardest skills for a fiction writer. While there are many techniques to help you get there, music is one tool that will help you mine your emotions.

Special Offer for ProWritingAid Readers:

Want to learn how to become a masterful wielder of emotion in your fiction enroll in lakin’s new online video course, emotional mastery for fiction writers , before september 1st , and get 50% off using this link .

Did you know ProWritingAid can help you show emotion in your writing? The Style Report will point out emotion tells, so you can turn those into more poignant descriptions.

Are you prepared to write your novel? Download this free book now:

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C. S. Lakin is an editor, award-winning blogger, and author of twenty novels and the Writer’s Toolbox series of instructional books for novelists. She edits and critiques more than 200 manuscripts a year and teaches workshops and boot camps to help writers craft masterful novels.

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How to Write Emotion: An Experimental Study

writing fiction emotion

As Angela Ackerman and Becca Puglisi explain in The Emotion Thesaurus: A Writer’s Guide to Character Expression , we must take our innate skills of observation and transfer them to the page, by both verbal (dialogue) and nonverbal means (physical signals, mental responses, and internal sensations).

Award-winning author and writing coach C. S. Lakin later warned me of the failure to explicitly convey emotion:

You don’t want your protagonist to seem like an unfeeling robot. Readers will hate him if you do.

To avoid this, she suggested I buy a paperback thriller and highlight every explicit emotional sentence until I learned how emotion occupies nearly every page. I decided to make a bigger project out of it.

The Emotional Deep Dive: A By-the-Numbers Experiment

Angels and Demons Dan Brown

Angels & Demons by Dan Brown (affiliate link)

On the 477 pages of my favorite thriller, Dan Brown’s Angels & Demons , I highlighted all 1,988 (by my count) sentences with explicit emotional content. That’s an average of over four per page! For each, I populated three spreadsheet columns:

1.  The page number.

2.  The emotion (from the seventy-five listed in  The Emotion Thesaurus ).

3. The sentence itself.

As much as I learned from doing this, the real lessons took place when I began sorting the entries in different ways.

Discovering the Emotional Story

Leaving the spreadsheet sorted by page number, I found I could follow the story by emotional content alone.

Plotting the number of emotional sentences per page showed the nice emotional pacing you’d expect from a bestselling author, with peaks near the plot points and pinch points .

Kristen Kieffer writes about such cadence in her post “ How to Create Strong Pacing For Your Story “:

After dealing with the physical consequences of an instance of conflict, your character should address—or possibly repress—the emotional ramifications of the conflict, which can range from joy at a victory to intense grief, fear, or anxiety surrounding a loss.

And what was seen near the ninety-five percent mark around page 452? You guessed it—the maximum emotional sentences per page density of the novel’s climax .

Identifying the Emotion “Buckets”

The Emotion Thesaurus Cover SMALL WEB

The Emotion Thesaurus by Angela Ackerman and Becca Puglisi (affiliate link)

Sorting the 1,988 rows by emotion (as listed in The Emotion Thesaurus ) produced tightly grouped examples of how a master writer portrays each emotion.

Since the emotional labels themselves are subjective—the dividing lines between anger and rage or surprise and astonishment will differ for each reader–your and my emotional labels won’t always match.

Some unique scenes can evoke opposite reactions from different readers. After a short story reading during one of my writer’s group meetings, a Stephen King-inspired author had each of us feeling vastly differing emotions:

1.  Amazement, at how such a scene could unfold.

2.  Disgust, for the setting described.

3.  Happiness, for the darkly humorous sequence of events.

The character’s emotions, however, should always be clear and truthful. As Martha Alderson points out in her post “ Connecting with Audiences Through Character Emotions “:

Thoughts can lie. Dialogue can lie, too. However, emotions are universal, relatable and humanizing. Emotions always tell the truth.

Portraying Emotion

Sorting the entries by sentence provided perhaps the most interesting learning experience. It showed how much repetitive emotional content is directly told instead of shown (e.g., “Langdon was amazed” on pages 21 and 22).

In his 2017 post “ How to Produce an Emotional Response in Readers ,” Donald Maass calls this the “ inner mode , the telling of emotions.”

It also works with repetitive actions  (e.g., “The camerlengo smiled” on pages 304 and 305), what Maass calls the “ outer mode , the showing of emotions.”

So why don’t these repetitions immediately distract readers from the story, as repetitive setting descriptions surely would? I believe that, similarly to why dialogue tags being more perceived than read , emotional content is more felt than read.

Sorting the emotional content this way also displayed identical snippets of dialogue that evoked drastically different emotions, due to their context. Two such sentences seem to convey annoyance and pride, respectively:

1.  “Correct,” Kohler said, his voice edgy. (Page 59)

2.  “Correct,” Langdon said, allowing himself a rare moment of pride in his work. (Page 165)

You've Got a Book in You Elizabeth Sims

You’ve Got a Book in You by Elizabeth Sims (affiliate link)

As just one example, Elizabeth Sims, in her 2013 guide You’ve Got a Book in You , demonstrates how the word “Oh” is endlessly flexible:

1.  “Oh,” he grunted.

2.  “Oh!” Cassie couldn’t believe her luck. “Oh!”

3.  All at once he understood. “ Ohh .”

Despite the time this experiment took to complete, I recommend writers repeat this project with a copy of their own favorite novel. You may never see written emotional content the same way again!

Wordplayers, tell me your opinion! On what novel would you like to try this experiment? Do you think it would help you learn how to write emotion? Tell me in the comments!

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Matt Gianni is the author of Lever Templar , the first in his Castellum One series of dual timeline historical fiction/contemporary thriller novels. When not writing, he enjoys salsa dancing on Seattle's east side. Besides his website , you can connect with him on Facebook , Instagram , or Twitter .

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Maybe I can do this with Nancy Drew or a sci-fi book.

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Hi Carly, A Nancy Drew novel should work well for this.

I do like Nancy Drew and have plenty of them. I should start reading.

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Thanks so much for sharing with us today, Matt!

My pleasure – thanks!

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I am wondering if you are going to do an article on Captain Marvel movie released this Friday and Avenger: Endgame April 26?

Planning to! I’m sick right now, but hoping to get to the theater for Captain Marvel next week.

thanks for telling. What specific writing subject are you going talk about using the movie as an example?

Don’t know. Have to see it first. 🙂

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Thanks for sharing the results of your project. That’s pretty darned interesting. I particularly liked this insight: “I believe that, similarly to why dialogue tags being more perceived than read, emotional content is more felt than read.”

Hi Eric, Yes, I would not have realized that without highlighting sentences like “Langdon was amazed” on adjacent pages, then flipping back and asking myself “Hey – how’s he getting away with this? . . .”

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It is fascinating to see the show and tell in actual successful use! Katie did a lot of work for us to benefit from.

Not me. This is actually a guest post. 🙂 Matt’s the one who did all the work for us!

But we’ve all learned so much from all your other posts!

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Thanks, Matt. I generally know all this as a writer, but every now and then, someone puts it across in way that totally connects the dots. And you did just that. I would love to try this with one of Nalini Singh’s paranormal romance books.

Thanks Rayka – very nice of you to say. I come from an unemotional non-fiction technical writing background, so writing emotional content is something I really had to work at. And I’m still working on it . . .

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Me too. Quite a struggle . Thanks for this exercise! I may try it on chapters from books in different genres.

Thanks, Tracie. Some have suggested the romance genre rather than thriller – I’m sure that would be a target-rich environment also!

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I hate replies that say “I really needed to hear/read/etc this” because they usually are spam comments with a link to a gambling site or whatever. But … I really needed to read this today. I just read book one in a widely popular thriller series that included several movie and series adaptations. Everything we fledgling writers are told not to do was done. (Side note, I read books 8 & 9 before 1.)

I have long felt that, for much of the population, emotional keywords summon the feeling. As with object-oriented programming languages, the word opens up the reader’s own content library. Like men hearing the word “erection.” 😀 Sproing!

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What a great learning project! I”d like to try it with one of Susan Wiggs’ women’s fiction.

Thanks, Jen. Yes, I had a lot to learn about writing emotional content (and still do!). This project really helped open my eyes.

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Such a great post, thanks. I’m planning to do this with a romance novel, since that is what I’m trying to write. Romance is really emotion driven, so it should be a revealing experiment.

Thanks, Sally. Romance isn’t my genre, but I’d imagine it would work just as well as thrillers (and maybe better!) for such a project.

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I’d like to try this experiment with Eudora Welty’s The Optimist’s Daughter. The novel is all about emotion without it being a soap opera. How did Welty pull that off? Plus it’s a short book.:-)

Thanks for the comment, Priscilla. There were times during this project when I wished Angels & Demons was a shorter book . . .

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The insight on the repetitive emotions is especially interesting. In my manuscript, I’ve been wondering if I’ve said that people smile far too often. Since it’s one of those frequent emotional indicators (and can mean different things) maybe it’s not so bad. I hope (cringing in insecurity, not smiling).

Thanks, Lisa. “Smiling” is pretty general so I would think you could probably get away with it quite often. But I got dinged by my editor by expressing nervousness with “Sweat pebbled his forehead” twice. Even though the two were separated by hundreds of pages, there was something about “pebbled” that took her out of the story enough to tell me “Hey, you used that before.”

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Writing emotions is so difficult. I’m going to pick a book and follow Matt’s suggestions although I do have a problem making marks in books, I’m already doing that to some extent. Thank you.

Hi Mary, I’m the same way usually, but just decided to by a trade paperback copy that I knew I wasn’t going to do anything else with but this project.

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Another layer of complexity added to writing a novel. “Oh,” she sighed.

Thanks for a great idea!

Thanks, Febe. I learned a lot from it.

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So, if I understand this correctly, you’re saying an emotional tell can work when done correctly? Wow, this makes the task of working emotions into our writing so much easier. I am definitely going to take my favorite book and analyze it. Thank you!

Hi Diane, I would not have thought so before seeing the exact three words “Langdon was amazed” repeated on pages 21 and 22. I would not have even noticed if I wasn’t highlighting emotional content. Emotional showing might still be preferable, but I think we can get away with repetitive emotional tells more than other repetition, like repeated setting descriptions that could really turn off readers.

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Thanks for the post, Matt. I particularly liked the note about emotions being felt more than read. Also, what an inspired experiment! I’m keen to get started. 🙂

Thanks so much, Joan. Yes, I learned a lot by doing it!

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Certainly going to do this with one of my favorite books. Speaking of analyzing, when looking for problems in a story,(according to Dramatica), how can you tell if, say, the overall story problem is manipulation?

Hi Casandra, Are you familiar with K.M. Weiland’s Story Structure Database? I think a lot can be learned about overall story structure there. I also found her “Structuring Your Novel” book very useful as well as the graphic by Matt Gemmell.

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Ah, ha! I’ve been making MRUs and having nothing to put in most of the emotion part of the MRU, and vaguely tempted to post around the internet begging for a clue.

Well, this mostly because of avoiding telling…

And now, all I have to do is find a book that I can do this with. Well, that and organize myself enough to do it. But, one problem at a time!

Hi James, Yes it does take a lot of time. Priscilla Bettis left a comment about using a shorter book or novella – that sounded like a good idea!

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I’m a slacker. I’m going to try doing this using a few chapters out of a Dan Brown novel and a Fiona McIntosh novel. I’ll make sure I include a highly emotive chapter and a non-emotional chapter.

Good idea, Kale. Getting through the entire Angels & Demons took a lot of time!

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This was a really awesome post. Thank you so much. I’m currently working on my first draft of a YA contemporary, and my book coach recommended I read Story Genius because I wasn’t writing enough of the emotional story in my pages. I added more emotion to my pages but I feel like I’m being *dramatic* by emoting so much (although I’m sure some people would suggest there can never be too much emoting in a YA novel!) Anyway, pointing out nearly four emotional sentences per page is astounding, especially in light of how much you said telling emotion. I think that might have been why I’m feeling too dramatic. There was too much showing the emotion, which feels hyperbolic to me. I’m going to try telling more and see how that reads.

Also, I think I’m going to try your exercise with a few John Green favorites or Eleanor & Park by Rainbow Rowell.

Thanks so much, Sara. I learned a lot from it. But fair warning: it takes a lot of time.

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Matt! This is not your grandfather’s deep dive. A deep dive would be a few lectures from your psychology professor and a follow-on homework assignment. What you have here is more along the lines of a Captain Nemo exploratory venture through the Marianas Trench.

I can’t wait to give it a try. If you don’t hear from me in about a month, notify the DSRV (Deep Sea Rescue Vehicle) Service of my last known location. 🙂

Hi Richard, I’m glad you’re going to try it. You’re right – it did take a lot of time, but it was so educational.

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I have thought putting adverbs in to an action was the best way to communicate emotion but his has made me realize there’s more to it.

Hmm . . . I never thought about categorizing by sentence type (direct, indirect, verbal, facial, body language, internal, etc.) – that would’ve made an interesting extension to this project.

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Hi Matt, What a great idea. This is synchronicity because I’m at that point in my current wip with editing and wondering how far to go with emotion. I think I’ll try it with one of my favorite Nora Robert’s books or perhaps Louise Penny’s Beautiful Mystery because that particular story has stuck with me a long time. Thank you!

Thanks, Robin! I did learn quite a bit from it, but it sure took a long time.

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I feel like I should try this with one of the LOTR books…

Hi Icy, That sounds ambitious – those are huge books!

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Thanks for the informative post, Matt. It made me cry. What? No. It made me laugh. Did I say that? I’m kidding. I enjoyed the post very much.

Ha – thanks, Dennis!

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Thank you for this amazing assignment. I’m going to try this exercise with an ebook version to make it easy to transfer highlighted sentences to a database. I have not done this for a while, but there’s a way to export all highlights from a Kindle book, perhaps via the Amazon website. Pocketbook reader, an Android app, lets you export also. Much, much easier than retyping!

Great point, Sharon – I probably should have put that suggestion in the post. I was originally going to do this for less than half of the book, so when I decided to make the big project out of it using the whole book, I already had ~200 pages of the trade paperback highlighted. So I just slogged on.

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I’m curious to know if you found some sentences with strong emotional content but which didn’t use any of the key emotion words from the dictionary. Sometimes the most powerful stuff has to be approached sideways. Were you able to find such context based emotions?

Hi J.A., Yes – in fact the vast majority were showing instead of telling. Like “The Aussie’s eyes went wide” for surprise, and “Langdon pounded his fist on the banister” for frustration. I also noticed Dan Brown uses a lot of POV character internal thoughts, italicized and ending with an explanation point, to convey internal emotion.

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Good points. Try Ursula LeGuin’s “The Other Wind.” Masterful.

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I love the “Oh” example. YouTube has a Key & Peele sketch called “OK,” where a character only says “OK” in response to all of her friend’s complaints about her boyfriend. Except the character’s tone varies with each “OK” that she says, and it’s enough to make her friend perceive her as having “spouted wisdom all night tonight.”

“OK!” “OK.” “OK?” “OK …” “O! K!”

Thanks for this post; you’ve reminded me to look into the “X thesaurus” series. I’ve been wanting to vary the facial expressions and gestures I have characters use with various emotions, e.g., furrowed brow, clenched jaw, etc. Your insight about the repetition of emotional displays is very reassuring; I’d been wondering about issues along those lines.

Thanks, Jamie – I’m glad you liked it. Yes, The Emotional Thesaurus is a great resource.

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My first thought was “Outlander” or one of Gabaldon’s books. But “no way” am I going to spend that much time. I need to write, write, write. I will take a short peak, though . . . Thanks for the suggestions!

Oops. . . “peek”. . . or maybe “peak” expresses the emotion?

Aye, Sassanach – it is indeed time-consuming. Maybe you could try it on the first few chapters of Outlander? That was my intent with Angels & Demons until deciding to make such a big project out of it. An eBook would also make the copy/paste into a spreadsheet easier.

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I want to try this on “the Girl with All the Gifts.” I love that book, and I saw it today at a local oppshop/thrift shop for $3 🙂

Sounds good, Aaron. Some commenters have mentioned copying and pasting from an eBook would be easier and take less time than highlighting and retyping from a physical copy.

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I would never have thought of doing this. I think it would be very instructive although time consuming. I know I’d just get side tracked with the novel and forget I’m supposed to be logging the emotions!

Great point, Mel. But I’d read the book before, so I knew what was around every corner. Still, I had to remind myself “highlight emotion!” I still probably missed some.

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Love it; super intriguing post. This should be a series of posts, as one just barely skims the surface.

Thanks so much Matt. Yes, I’m working on some other “experimental” projects that may reveal other writing insights from well-known authors. K.M. Weiland sounds receptive to more such posts in the future so, like a bad penny, I may be back.

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What a great post! I’ve heard of a similar highlighting exercise, only with dialogue – so the writer learns how much dialogue to use – has to be from a well-written book they love.

Looking forward to hearing more from you, Matt!

Thanks, Sassy Brit. I hope to post again later this year.

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What a very cool experiment, Matt. Interesting that so much is told (I bet this varies). It would be really interesting to graph out the percentages within the three act structure to see if the usage of emotions increased at turning points, etc. as it does at the climax. Good on you for thinking to do such a thing. 🙂

Thanks, Angela. Yes, that would be very interesting – I can guess where the peak emotional densities should be. Thank you so much for writing The Emotion Thesaurus with Becca Puglisi – what a great resource!

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The main part of this that sticks with me is the idea that a certain amount of repetitive “he smiled” or “she frowned” might be okay, just the way “he said” can appear lots of times. Did I get that right?

Hi Thea, For Dan Brown, that seems to be the case. When I read Angels & Demons for pleasure years ago I didn’t notice anything repeating – it was just like watching a movie inside my brain. But when I sorted the spreadsheet by sentence, I saw all these repeated “tells” of emotion. Maybe when we read “he smiled” all we remember is “he’s happy.”

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What do you mean by ‘repetitive emotional content? We’re forever being TOLD not to TELL. Show the emotion on the face, body language, etc. Is the TELL used more in certain genres? But “Langdon was amazed’ is a straight TELL. His eyes widened is SHOWING but doesn’t delineate the exact emotion. What sorts of instances on the page of are you including as EMOTIONS? Tell, show? Maass’s OTHER mode, seems to me, to suggest that elements such as scene, weather, gestures, etc are indicative of emotion.

Hi Annette, Yes, there were a few other cases of the “Langdon was amazed.” sentence – I just mentioned the two that were on adjacent pages. When reading for pleasure, I never noticed – I just felt the emotion as I took in the scene. I only noticed the repetition of tells when I started highlighting for this project. I just sorted my spreadsheet by sentence again, and there are no fewer than eleven “Kohler looked X.” sentences, with X = angry, astonished, incredulous, nonplussed, ready, startled, stunned, surprised, thunderstruck, uneasy, and unsettled. To me, these are all tells, but again I never noticed until highlighting for this project. So for me, I must just be remembering the feel of the emotion, not the words describing it. I hope that makes sense.

Yes, actually I do have Structuring Your Novel. It’s very useful and I would recommend it to anyone.

Hi Casandra, Yes, isn’t that a fantastic resource – it’s how I place all my plot/pinch points as I outline. Have you seen the visual chart that Matt Gemmell made from it?

https://www.helpingwritersbecomeauthors.com/resources/structuring-your-novel-visual-chart/

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This is a literary hand-grenade! A veritable revolution in thought! We’re always told ‘show don’t tell’, but really the masters should be teaching we acolyte authors ‘show don’t tell setting, but tell don’t show emotions’.

Hi Don, Looking through my spreadsheet again, I see over half of the emotional content is actually shown (i.e. Langdon lay wide-eyed on the pile of books.), but there sure is a lot of telling also (i.e. Langdon was stunned). In retrospect, it would have been nice to use one more column to label as either “shown” or “told” so I’d know the exact percentages.

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I love the idea of doing this research and thank you for this insightful exercise. But I would be careful to note whether Dan Brown specifically has a prose style any writer really wants to emulate. Dan Brown is known for masterful plotting, not works of gut-wrenching emotional gravitas. I’m worried people are going to walk away from this believing that redundant writing, clumsy dialog attributions and repetitive actions are the key to writing emotion. What you at studying here is bad writing.

Probably the best piece of writing advice I’ve read is from Stephen King, who admits to his own literary sins by explaining “I do it for the same reason any other writer does… Because I am afraid the reader won’t understand me if I don’t. I’m convinced that fear [of being misunderstood] is at the root of most bad writing.”

When you see a writer both telling and showing a character’s emotion, they are living in that fear. It’s totally possible to write compelling characters without relying on these verbal crutches. We learn this by studying the true masters of emotion, the ones who can tear you apart with a single line of dialog or (in the case of my favorite author, Ray Bradbury) a single description of a green trolley. I’d urge us all to dig deeper on this one. What book did you read that absolutely wrecked you? Study that one.

Thanks, Christy. Critics have said a lot about how Dan Brown’s writing could be improved, but he’s still one of my favorites. My intent here was to describe the experimental method, what it revealed in the case of this one book, and recommend others repeat the process with a copy of their own favorite novel, thus revealing how its author presents emotion on the page. Thanks for the Stephen King advice also – is that from his book ON WRITING? I’ve read it but don’t remember that bit. But I understand that fear he describes – in the first few pages of THE SHINING, I see the sentence “Jack felt a slow, hot grin.” Telling instead of showing. Perhaps we can get away with a few cases of telling, rather than showing, emotional content more easily than we can with the telling of other aspects of our writing.

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Excellent! I read a book last fall, “Where the Crawdads Sing,” that was emotional at every turn. I would be highlighting often…author Delia Owens is a master of emotion.

Your post encourages me to delve deeper into writing emotions that the readers feel. Thank you!

Thanks, Mary J. You could repeat the process for a few chapters of WHERE THE CRAWDADS SING. The real interesting thing is sorting the columns first by page number, then by emotion name, then by the actual sentence – and even a small sample will probably show you things about how Delia Owens treats emotional writing.

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I think everyone is into conveying emotion effectively I always write for ’emotional effect.’ An analog is when people tell jokes. Do they know how to get a laugh!! The concept of selecting words statistically that convey different aspects of narrative, telling, showing, etc. goes back to the Pulp Fiction era, and before. Pulp Era Writing Tips, this is not a link, in Amazon, contains one article reprint that expands on the underlining technique. The first Tip from Elvis Joberg, who is a female, Is to take four pencils with different colored leads and underline: action, description, narration, and conversation. Some words are underlined twice…!!! This is just one of her ‘tips.’ And the book contains too many more gems to mention….

Thanks for that Rick – that sounds like a good resource! I’m not as familiar with the Pulp Fiction Era as I should be.

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Matt, this is endlessly fascinating! Madeline Miller’s The Song of Achilles was the first book to make me weep in a good, long while—which I think would make it a prime subject for this experiment. Now to find the time…

Also, a big thank you for pulling a quote from my Well-Storied article on pacing. That was a lovely surprise!

Thanks, Kristen. Yes, this experiment does take time, but some have suggested copying and pasting from eBooks to speed up the process. Those Well-Storied articles are great – thanks for posting them!

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I think it is important not to tell the very emotions of non-POV characters. An edgy voice – external evidence – is fine, but being amazed – looking into one’s head – is only OP for a POV character.

Thanks, Biep – I agree 100% I don’t remember Dan Brown being guilty of that during this experiment. All cases of “Langdon was amazed” and similar were in his POV. For telling, rather than showing, or other character’s emotions, it was always “Kohler looked X” or “Vitoria seemed Y.”

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Thanks for a great post I can use right now. Who did the stunning art work at the beginning?

I’m not sure. I got it off the free image site Pixabay.com.

Thank you Kerry and The Author Chronicles.

Thank you Loleta Abi and Five Links.

[…] monumental task. Peter Mountford analyzes the 3rd person limited point of view, Matt Gianni studies how to write emotion, Sacha Black tackles writing villains and heroes, Bonnie Randall explores what type of violent […]

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writing fiction emotion

How Fiction Writers Can Show Emotions in Their Characters in Effective Ways

Editor Robin Patchen wraps up our examination of Fatal Flaw: # 6 Show, Don’t Tell. Writers often succumb to this fatal flaw of fiction writing, explaining and telling and summarizing instead of showing action as it’s happening. Robin gives some great tips on how writers can show by action and thoughts rather than by relying on describing bodily sensations. Be sure to pay attention to this one! (If you missed this month’s post on this fatal flaw, start with this one here .)

This month, we’ve been studying that famous axiom for fiction writers: show, don’t tell. Today, I’m going to tackle what I think is the most difficult thing to show in our novels—emotions.

If you’ve been writing for a while, no doubt you’ve heard it’s not acceptable to name emotions. Don’t tell us Mary is sad. Show us she’s sad.

Many writers lean on a clever trick to show emotions—they describe a character’s physical reactions to emotions. So characters are often crying, yelling, and slamming doors. Their stomachs are twisting, their hands are trembling, and their cheeks are burning. We hear exasperated breaths and soft sighs. Don’t even get me started on heartbeats. Some characters’ hearts are so erratic, I fear they’re going into cardiac arrest.

So What’s a Fluttering Heart to Do?

I’m poking fun, because I do it too. It’s an easy way to show emotions. But I have a few problems with this old standby. First, these things are so overused, they’ve become cliché. (I know your stomach is twisting at the very thought.) Second, having a character clenching his fists might show us he’s angry, but it doesn’t show us the impetus for that anger. Is he feeling frustrated, slighted, or jealous?

All those—and a host of other primary emotions—can lead to anger. Finally—and to me, this is the most important—showing me your characters’ physical responses provokes no emotional response from me. Your hero might clench his fists, but I promise, mine will remain perfectly relaxed. So you might have shown an emotion, but you haven’t made your reader feel anything. And that, my friends, is the point of fiction—to elicit an emotional response.

Let’s take a look at some effective and not-so-effective ways to show emotion.

Mary opened her eyes and looked at the clock. Her heart nearly leapt out of her chest. The baby had slept nearly eight hours. But little Jane never slept more than four hours at a time. Something must be wrong.

Not again. Her stomach rolled over when she remembered the last time a child of hers had slept too long.

Mary flipped the covers back and stood on weak knees, forcing herself to her feet despite the fear overwhelming her. She shoved her arms in her bathrobe, slipped into her warm slippers, and rushed for the door. Her hands were shaking so badly she could hardly turn the doorknob. Finally, she got the door open and ran down the hallway toward the nursery.

She threw open the door and lunged at the crib. She peered inside and saw the beautiful pink cheeks of her newborn daughter. She placed her trembling hand on Jane’s back, felt the even breaths, and let out a long sigh. Tears of gratitude filled her eyes as she realized her baby was alive.

Our character is definitely feeling emotions. Do you think I can get the reader to experience a few of them? I’ll give it a try.

Mary opened her eyes and squinted in the sunshine streaming in through the open window. She stretched, feeling more relaxed than she had since . . .

She sat up and looked at the clock. It was after eight. Little Jane had slept through the night. For the first time.

Just like Billy.

Mary flipped the covers back and stood. She snatched her robe from the back of the chair and slipped it on. She wouldn’t think about Billy. The doctor said it wouldn’t happen again. The odds against it were astronomical.

Billy had been nearly six weeks old. Jane was almost two months. It was different this time. It had to be.

She slipped her feet into her fuzzy slippers, ticking off all the ways the situations were different. Billy had been sick. Jane had never even had a sniffle. Billy had been fussy. Jane was nearly the perfect baby, only crying when she was hungry or wet.

She must be both hungry and wet right now, but little Jane was silent.

No, God wouldn’t do that to her again. She couldn’t bury another child. She wouldn’t.

She stepped toward her bedroom door, remembering Billy’s skin, how gray and cold it had been. At first, she’d thought maybe someone was playing a mean trick on her. But then she’d lifted him. Seen his face. Those gray lips and lifeless eyes.

Maybe it would have been different if she hadn’t been alone when she’d found his tiny body. Maybe if John had been there. But John had been gone on a business trip.

Mary turned and looked at the empty bed. Her side was a jumble of blankets. John’s side was untouched. He was on a business trip. Again.

He’d rushed home that day two years earlier, assured her it wasn’t her fault. How could she have known?

How indeed? How did a good mother sleep through her own child’s death? How did she dream of beaches and butterflies while her son passed into eternity?

If Jane was dead, Mary would join her. Somehow. She couldn’t live through this again.

She stepped into the hallway and took a first step. A good mother would run, but she could hardly force herself to walk. She inched her way down the hall.

She glanced at the stairs. What if she went to the kitchen, made some coffee? Never found out the truth?

She pushed the thought away and continued past the staircase, paused at the nursery door, and laid her hand on the cold metal doorknob. The clock ticked loudly in the hallway, like a steady heartbeat.

She stepped into the room and approached the crib. And there, sprawled on her back, lay the most beautiful sight she’d ever seen.

Jane’s eyes opened at the sound of Mary’s approach, and she smiled.

I hope you had at least a twinge of emotional reaction to that. I know I did. Please notice, there’s not a single beating heart or trembling hand in that example. Her stomach doesn’t clench, and her eyes don’t fill with tears. Yet she felt a lot of emotions. Did you?

Slow It Down

Counselors tell us that thoughts lead to emotions, and emotions lead to actions. As a writer, you can easily show your character’s thoughts and actions. Readers are smart enough to deduce the emotions based on what the characters think and do. So often it seems writers are in a hurry.

When you have a very emotional scene, slow it down. Let us hear your character’s every thought. Highlight a few details. Show the actions.

Why don’t we write like this? For one thing, it takes a lot longer. My first example is fewer than two hundred words and took me about five minutes to write. The second is closer to five hundred and took nearly half an hour.

Writers have to dig a lot deeper to write selections like the second one. I had to remember what it was like to be a new mother, put myself in the shoes of a woman who’d already buried one child, and try to feel what she would feel. Not comfortable, let me tell you.

And you see a bit into my soul, don’t you? What kind of mother would even consider going downstairs and making a pot of coffee? Yet as I put myself in that scene, I looked at the stairs, and I thought about it. Showing emotions means baring your soul.

Sure, it’s fine to have some lines showing emotions by way of bodily response. But don’t limit yourself to that technique. I hope this example helps you see ways you can elicit emotion in your reader through thoughts and actions.

But showing emotions can pull your reader in and get them to feel right along with your hero and heroine. And isn’t that the goal?

What stood out to you as you read the After example? What lines gave emotional impact?

Want to master the emotional craft of fiction?

Dive into the online course emotional mastery for fiction writers .

In this course, you’ll be given tools to  show  emotions in your characters. You’ll be given techniques to help  spark  emotional response in your readers. What is going to bring it all together for you is practice. Study and practice. And you’ll have exercises in this course to help you put into practice what you learn.

writing fiction emotion

Emotional mastery requires writers to set up the dynamics of a scene in such a visual, textural way that readers can’t help but feel what they are meant to feel. Understanding that emotional mastery requires  a twofold approach — the emotional landscape of both the character and the reader —is the first step.

Want to learn how to become a masterful wielder of emotion in your fiction? Enroll in my new online video course, Emotional Mastery for Fiction Writers.

You’ll get lifetime access to all the videos and more than three dozen downloadable assignments. And with a 30-day money-back guarantee, you have NOTHING to lose by jumping in. Sign up NOW.

This course will challenge you to become an “emotion master.”  Are you ready and willing to go on this journey deep into emotional territory? If you want your characters to move your readers, take the plunge!

Listen to my discussion on how to show emotion in characters. There is so much to this topic!

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102 Comments

I found this article very helpful. It’s a delicate balancing act to slow down the action enough to heighten the emotion but not so much as to cause the reader to skip through the scene because they want to get on with it. You’ve given some good examples for doing just that. As always, another great piece of advice, C.S.!

If you think the reader might skimp over the scene. You might want to re-write it. Every scene in a story has to build up emotion and anticipation to progress head on from scene to scene.

I absolutely loved this article, and I 100% AGREE with your logic. Thank you for sharing!

One of the best posts I have read on the subject. Thank you for the great example!

Great advice, Robin!

You’ve gotten to the ultimate solution here: the truly effective approach is to describe *why* the person is feeling what he or she is, rather than the exterior symptoms.

Thanks, Curtis. I definitely think that’s a big part of it–at least one element of showing emotions. Of course we couldn’t do this with every single emotion–imagine 500 words to replace every frown. But when the emotions really matter, I think they’re worth examining.

This is one of the best articles I’ve read on this subject. You really bring it to life with your example.

Thanks! I’m glad you think so.

I’ve been often critiqued that my characters must have more emotion by showing their facial expression and bodily response to situations of distress. I can fully understand from your example how much I have dismissed all these factors by summarizing their feelings. Thanks for such a vivid example of how to convey feelings without putting a label on them.

Glad it helped. I think sometimes, we believe that the physiological reactions are the only way to show feelings, but personally, I’d much rather know what’s going on in people’s heads. Ever look at someone and think, “What is he thinking?” What’s on their face doesn’t tell us what we really want to know.

“If Jane was dead, Mary would join her. Somehow. She couldn’t live through this again.”

This line stood out to me. It puts the reader in the state-of-mind the character is in at the moment. Thanks for the article.

Kind of depressing, though, isn’t it? I’m glad it stood out.

This is a great article! You’ve really “shown” the difference very effectively 🙂

Great article! I like the contrast between showing exterior vs interior. The other trick is doing this with Deep POV.

To answer your question…I felt every bit of what the mother was experiencing. You’re an extremely talented writer. Slowing it down is so important, yet since it’s time-consuming I find myself breezing over it, too. During my second drafts I’m often horrified at the heart-fluttering, weak knees, and shaky hands in my first draft. Using subtext instead of body cues is what I’m working on now before I send my ms back to the editor. Stellar post!

My first drafts have a lot of breathing–sighing, blowing out breaths, holding breath. I think my characters might suffocate if I don’t show them breathing. 🙂 The key is to leave that stuff in draft #1.

Thanks, Sue!

nicely shown

This is very helpful. Thank you for posting this.

I do have one question though. Do you ever feel like you can overdo the inner dialogue? For example, Kurt Vonnegut once said that every sentence should either reveal character or advance the plot. How do you decide how much inner dialogue is revealing character and how much is just killing your pacing?

Is it just experience and a good ear?

Genre plays a big part in determining this! I have read suspense thrillers that are hugely internal thought, packed full of worrisome thoughts to ramp up the emotional tension. Getting in close to what a character is thinking while afraid can make the reader feel that fear. For other genres, and personal author writing styles, such as Cormac McCarthy’s, you’ll see almost no internal thoughts at all. Internal dialog can both reveal character and advance the plot, so Vonnegut’s sage words apply here as well. Best is to study other great novels in the genre in which you are writing and note (highlight?) all the lines of internal dialog and their content to see just what that amount is.

That’s great advice. Thank you!

That’s a great question, Paul. Susanne’s advice to study other great works is great.

You certainly wouldn’t want to have this much internal dialog all the way through a book. It needs to serve a purpose. In this case, we want to get the reader emotionally invested in the scene, and the best way to do that is to let us see what the character is thinking. But if the hero is deciding between a bagel or a donut, you wouldn’t want to show us his calculating the calories of each. That would get old fast.

At first, it can feel unnatural, but I think the more you write, the more intuitive it becomes.

This is a great article. I know I’m certainly guilty of getting lazy and writing scenes as I see them instead of delving into the character. I’m about to begin revision, and I can already think of places I need to expand and deepen. Thanks for the insight!

So glad it helped, Victoria. Good luck with your revisions.

This is the best example I’ve seen on this subject! I’m so glad I found it. My stories end up being like the ‘before’ and I never really liked it. It felt like something was off. You’ve really opened my eyes. I tried this on a scene I was working on and now it sounds much better! Now I must look for more tips and keep on writing.

All I can say is thank you. Shalom aleichem, Patricia

In the ‘After’ example, it was her questions that showed her doubts and her fears. That gave me the emotional response.

A good observation, Mawr. Thanks for stopping by.

I like how you demonstrate internal thoughts in third person. Many writers want to switch to first person in italics. To me this loses the continuity of the story. So right, body movements and facial expressions keep the reader on the outside of the character. Your before and after is so helpful! Thank you!

Thanks! Glad you found it helpful.

Wow. This has helped a LOT! I’ve had more compliments on one scene that I did this with, but didn’t really know concrete what I was doing. The difference was I put myself there, slowed down, and actually physically moved the way the character would, felt what she would have felt. It was amazing. Thank you so so much for sharing!!

Glad this helped you! Being aware of this can really improve the emotional impact of your scenes.

So glad it helped, Kelly.

Excellent article. Always eager to collect knowledge like this. Thank you.

This is great, but it bothers me slightly. This “slow” method of writing matches the woman’s trepidation and reluctance to learn the truth. But often emotions are felt, and acted on in an instant, and I’m rather uncomfortably aware of the fact that describing something in detail can turn a couple of seconds into a page or more.

That’s true. Sometimes it’s appropriate to slow down a moment. Sometimes, it’s not. You have to use your best judgment.

This opened my eyes to why writers have to pace a story. Just earlier, I was editing and rewriting parts of my story. It took hours, but it was worth it in the end.

I think the line that stuck out to me was, ‘How did she dream of beaches and butterflies while her son passed into eternity?’

I don’t even know how to describe why I like this line so much. I just do.

Thank you for this wonderful article. Otherwise, I wouldn’t have completely understood why pacing and emotions are so important in writing.

Thank you, Mini, for your response. I’m so glad the article worked for you. I loved that line, too. I need to find a place to use it in a book!

Great article. This is what I need to improve my writing. In your example it might go too long and it gets repetitive with the woman’s fears. If it was a tad shorter might be better. Just a thought. P

You may be right. Thanks for the feedback.

Great article. Is it say that I thought the first version was good? The second version elicited a deeper emotional experience, but I thought it told a lot. I can’t seem to find that line. The first version was active, but it did have the typical overdone descriptions. Then I read other books, and I see all sorts of contradictions from what I learn on writing sites. Sighing, knees wobbling, lips curling, eyes narrowing, jumping back, staring. I thought relying on action was great! I thought I found it….back to the drawing board.

Susanne gives good advice. I don’t have an answer. First pass, my characters do a lot of breathing–sighing, heaving, inhaled frustrated breaths. It’s as if I fear they’ll suffocate if I don’t have them breathe a couple of time son every page. 🙂

My characters’ eyes are lighting up all the time, and I have character beaming. Subject verb direct object. How do I break from this tyranny? lol

Maybe pull the plug?

the best way! im thankful to u

Excellent article — successfully writing emotion is something I struggle the most with, this is a great help.

Excellent post. I want to write with more emotion. Thanks for the great example. gramswisewords.blogspot.com

Glad it helped, Maz!

As a young writer I constantly have the “show don’t tell” philosophy thrown at me and I have read countless posts telling me that “if you’re telling the emotion even just a little bit rather than just completely showing it, you’re doing it wrong” blah blah blah, you get the picture. So to read this post has definitely changed my perspective on the delicate handling of emotion. You have demonstrated, in my opinion, a perfect balance of show and tell, so that I haven’t just been informed of the character’s feelings, their responses to traumatic events, and their life-but rather I’ve been whisked right into the character’s life to watch it all unfold. So many books I’ve read have just informed me that “oh the character is sad” as if the author is just like, hint hint wink wink-this is the part where you, the reader, should be sad too. Preferably crying over my character. Or they just say, this person is so angry they’re gritting their teeth. Like be angry at the villain because my character is angry at the villain.

But I feel nothing, because they’ve shown me how the character is feeling but they haven’t grabbed the reins of my emotions and MADE me feel for the character. If you get what I mean haha Anyways, sorry for the long comment but yeah, I just wanted to say thank you for this article-it was incredibly helpful 🙂

Glad it helps! You might like to read more about that in our 12 Fatal Flaws book. I do a whole PowerPoint workshop on this topic. I think it’s so much more effective to show what a character is thinking to evoke emotion.

I’m so glad you found the article helpful, Hannah! I know what you mean. There’s a big difference between showing an emotion and evoking an emotion. It’s much harder to do the second.

Thank you so much!! I was really struggling with the concept and I tried some other articles but this one helped the most by far. Once again, thank you so much!!

I’m so glad you found it helpful!

“How did she dream of beaches and butterflies while her son passed into eternity?” This line really got to me. I think because I would think something similar. How could I not know? How could I laugh or dream and live while someone I love is dying?

When my mother died I was at work in the stock vault. I had forgotten my phone on my desk and when I got back to it my coworkers were looking at me and saying my phone had “blown up”. They all knew my mother was sick in the hospital dying and when I got back to my desk they all knew what I did not, that she had died while I was in the vault, chatting with my colleagues. So yeah that line got to me and brought back that memory.

Perri, what a difficult memory for you that must be. I’m sorry to have brought it back. On the other hand, if the goal is to elicit an emotional response, I suppose I did manage to do that. Thank you for the note.

No, I will never refrain from telling emotions directly, and I will not read fictions which shows emotions instead of telling. Showing is necessarily ambivalent and results inevitably in incomprehensible drivel.

Interesting take on it, Klaus. Thanks for the note.

This opened my eyes in so many ways. I am deeply grateful to you for the simple solution to a complex issue in writing… Making an old emotion sound fresh as though it is felt for the first time is simply not easy. This was easy to read, and it brought feeling immediately. Thank you

So glad you found it helpful, Charlotte!

I’m sorry but the first part was the right part for me. The second was way to long and I lost interest. I feel this is the problem often. To each their own offcourse, can’t please everyone 🙂

Damn, I was thinking the same! I enjoyed the first part so much better than the emotionless descriptions about how she had to bury Billy. The stomach rollover literally gave me a melancholic feeling which didn’t happen with “God wouldn’t do the same to her”

Thank you for this article. I would like to study some of the great novels for expression of emotion. Any recommendations?

Amazing advice! This is the toughest part of creating a flesh and blood character for me. How would u apply this to first person voice?

You can just change “she” to “I” and it’s the same thing, basically. There really is no difference between first person and third person when doing deep POV.

Yes, I cried. This is the most effective article I’ve ever read on the subject of “Showing” and I recommend it to writers often. Please, never take this post down!

I didn’t mean to make you cry, J.D.! 🙂 I’m glad you found it helpful. God bless!

Still taking this article in. Have printed it off for easy reference and example. Thank you for posting this.

Stephen King does it well, by getting the protagonist to get involved deeper and deeper into an emotional state which reach a tempo unbearable.

My pleasure, Virginia. I’m glad you found it helpful.

Some good points in the way you show emotions. “Her heart nearly leapt out of her chest.” This one looks too cartoony, and nearly is an adverb [use prohibited by good writers I am told.]

The occasional adverb is acceptable, but you’re right, the line is cartoonish. That’s one of my issues with all the physiological reactions to “show” emotions–they’re exaggerated, often to the point of becoming ridiculous.

Wow, this is good writing. Hair literally stood on its ends, as I read the second rendering, even though I knew baby Jane was safe from reading the first version.

Amazing bit of writing. Thanks for the article.

But isn’t this kinda too intense for a reader? I can read the occasional paragraph like this but as a reader, I would be a nervous wreck if I had to read an entire full length novel written in this style.

Sometimes, maybe the tell is much better than show – like those ‘implied’ scenes in movies, rather than an explicit scene.

Would you recommend that a writer sticks to this POV for the entire novel or only use this occasionally? And if the latter, what kind of scenes might call for this?

Hi Badri, of course you wouldn’t have this intense a moment in every single scene in a novel. Novels should have low-energy and high-energy scenes, low- and high-action scenes, low- and high-emotional scenes. As far as POV goes, that applies to the viewpoint: whether you are in first, second, or third person. I’m not sure what you are asking, but if you mean going into deep or intimate POV, that’s a style choice and would be consistent throughout the novel.

Like CS said, not all scenes are this intense. The point is to show emotions through thoughts and actions rather than through physiological responses. So if your character is feeling happy, show the happy thoughts. If she’s feeling angry, show angry thoughts. It wouldn’t be appropriate to get this deep into every emotion, though. That could be cumbersome.

I am a very later bloomer in writing (and reading as well, I’m embarrassed to say). When I would read anything that invoked emotions as a child or young adult, I could not handle it (due to many different things going on in my life). But I am now at a different place and I am finally discovering how much I enjoy reading, well, I really mostly enjoy reading that makes me feel the emotions like your posting did.

In your first take I was thinking, oh get over it already lady…I never really liked babies anyway, we all gotta die sometime…etc… (lol, exaggerating here of course). But in your revised version, I was on tears and on the edge of my seat, thinking, that poor mother…that poor little baby…no no no…nothing can happen to that beautiful little baby…

I was shocked at the difference of my own response.

I have contemplated trying to become a writer and this posting has inspired me so much. This is now my goal – to write something that makes a reader feel this much emotion. Thank you sooooo much for sharing this.

The author of the article did a magnificent job conveying her lesson. I would offer a little insight into child loss, however. A parent never gets over losing a child. It will not happen, as a part of their heart has been torn away, outside of the natural order. Even though you may not know the experience, please do not belittle it, or those going through it. Good luck with your writing, as you walk this path with us.

I understand the concept behind it the “after”, but I have woken up before worried my baby was dead because she slept through the night… and the last thing I would have done is slip on my cozy slippers. I definitely didn’t take 10 minutes to think about if she could be dead before checking on her. So in reality — the before felt a little closer to truth to me, it was just felt a little extreme on the visceral emotions. Maybe it is just me.

Thank you for the article, even though the example didn’t resonate with me, it was an excellent example to get the point across.

I’ve been writing novels for over a decade. Finally,I understand it is the process rather than the physical manifestations of an emotion, alone, that conveys emotion to the reader! Thank you for such an intriguing insight, and thank you to my editor Beth Terrell for steering me to your blog.

Glad you arrived here! Be sure to check out my online course, too, as it goes way deep with 40+ passages examined!

So glad you found the post helpful, Jennie!

What I was able to read of the AFTER piece was wonderful. Unfortunately, the situation hits far too close to home for me, and I couldn’t finish it. You absolutely nailed it, though. The first one did not bring forth the same emotion in me the second one did. Further, the emotion built as you advanced, thus my reaction. Yes, I shed a few tears before I was able to write this reply. Thank you for this article, the insight and the advice. I will take this to heart, as I continue learning the craft.

Thanks for sharing those sentiments. I’m sorry this was/is painful for you.

I’m sorry for raising these painful memories for you. Thanks for the comment. God bless you.

Please, don’t be sorry. It is a part of life for parents who have lost a child. However, the way you wrote the piece was marvelous. That it was so powerful is a testament to the example you built. Well done. It is a wonderful lesson.

To answer the question on what stood out the most, I would say it was the last sentence. It was the baby smiling that gave me the strongest emotional response. Starting to read the text, I didn’t really “plan” to get a tear in my eye, because I find it all too easy to shield myself from the sad stuff, even though I would like to feel more directly. But fortunately, the moment of beauty and joy in the end got to me. It took me by suprise and managed to break through my shield. I will try to incorporate this in my own writing.

Fantastic article and it helps me a lot. At the point when I write, I attempt to recollect what I feared or what was terrifying to me and attempt to place those sentiments into books.

Omg! I loved this, thank you so much for sharing.

The same old story, to show emotions with your characters. SHOW don’t TELL!!!

Excellent post. It is feasible to submit no mix-ups and still lose. That isn’t a shortcoming; such is reality. This article really helps me a lot. Thanks for posting.

This was a very engaging post. It has provided me with new information and now I have a better idea of how I can represent emotion within a fictional character. Also, the example that you provided was written so well! You have given me so much inspiration and I can tell that you are a very hard worker and are dedicated to what you do. Thank you so much.

You’re very welcome!

I’m so glad, Elise, that you found the post helpful! God bless you and your writing.

I think I’m missing something. Can anyone please clarify the differences between the two examples because they both use body language to indicate emotions. If anything, the before seems better because it includes body language *and* internal reaction. The after only uses body language.

The article explains what the differences are and why using thoughts is so much more emotionally effective than showing body language. The After version uses no body language (physical tells). The thoughts are what get readers to understand and empathize with characters.

Neither the Before or After work. As for the Before, who writes like that? Must be a really rank beginner. As for the After, I spent the whole time while reading it thinking, “Not only is this ridiculously long, but no panicked mother is going to take the time to slip into her robe, put on her slippers, and have a coherent thought-stream going through her head about what happened to her other child.” No. She’s going to dash to her baby. Time for these other thoughts–or rather, an abbreviated version of them– can come as she’s cuddling her child. Perhaps better yet, put these kinds of thoughts in an earlier chapter, as background material. Then she can just fly out of bed and run to her child, and some further reflection can come when she’s found the baby safe. This is a time to act, not reflect.

Thanks for your comments. Everyone is different, and depending on the kind of character we create, they will respond differently. I would be exactly like that second example. I did similarly when I woke and hadn’t heard my baby cry at night. I put off going in as long as I could. Of the hundreds of writers I’ve shared these examples with in workshops, 99% agree with the second one as the more moving, effective, and believable example. As I said, everyone is different. But it’s all about your character–her past, who she is, etc. You might try to write this scene and then run it by critique partners and see what their response is to the way you present the character. It might be enlightening!

As a fairly new writer, I have a question that might seem silly, but it’s one that I’ve often debated. I have a tendency to spend way too much time on the scenes as I write them. I’ll go back, and back again, until I feel like it’s perfect … until I don’t. At this point I am 15,000 words in and have probably spent enough time on the chapters that I have done to have completed two novels.

Experienced writers, keep telling me to just write, and finish the first draft. Do you feel it would be appropriate to draft scenes like example #1 and then come back to add emotion like example #2 during the second draft? After reading your article, I have found myself going back to my completed chapters once again, and looking for opportunities to add emotion. I don’t feel like this is productive. Any advice?

I hear you! I constantly rework and edit as I go along, and usually by the time I complete a draft, it’s finished except for proofreading. However, I always push to make progress. If you set a goal to write at least one scene, however rough, every time you sit down, you can give yourself permission to go back and noodle with whatever you’ve written–that scene or a prior one–to polish it more. But the point is to make progress. If the problem is you are “pantsing” and don’t have a strong outline such that you don’t know what your next scenes will be, that can cause a lot of procrastination. Work on a scene outline (with me!) and get it tight. Then it won’t create a barrier to you getting those next scenes written. Usually redoing scenes over and over is due to not feeling confident where the story is going 🙂

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Karen Hugg

The Best Book on Writing Emotion in Fiction

There are a lot of books that will teach you how to write fiction. And the best ones not only address the craft of storytelling but the issues beneath the story’s surface. A main character’s wound, the overarching theme, internal versus external conflicts. But the key to a really compelling novel is expression emotion in fiction. And that’s the hardest piece to put on the page.

The Trickiness of Putting Emotion on the Page

The reason it’s so difficult is because if you just flat out say what the character is feeling, it doesn’t seem earned. The reader may not respond. If you show it, the reader will respond viscerally. And if you can show it with complexity, the reader will be the character’s ally throughout the story. A while back, I wrote about how Neil Gaiman does this in his novel Neverwhere .

A Deep Book on an Even Deeper Subject

The best book I’ve come across for delving into the art of creating emotion in fiction is Donald Maass’s The Emotional Craft of Fiction . Maas, an experienced literary agent, felt he was experiencing too little emotion in too many manuscripts. He discovered the vital missing piece of these manuscripts was not great prose or an engaging world or lots of action. It was simply an inability to make the reader feel . So in his book, he set out to articulate some solutions.

In it, he explores the inner versus outer strategy or really telling versus showing. Showing, no surprise, is more powerful but telling in a clever way can be powerful too. He discusses the emotional world, how to create a world where a character’s deep sense of self is reflected in what they see and do and how they respond. It’s a complex subject but one worth pondering.

He also discusses the importance of examining not only your main character’s outer journey (plot) but their inner journey (emotional change). And he devotes a considerable amount of time on nailing an emotional opening, midpoint, and cathartic change to your character. It’s complicated and intense. I read that section more than once.

Too Into the Weeds to Be Useful?

Later, when he gets into issues of a reader’s journey and an author’s journey, I felt the book delved too far into the weeds for me. It’s already so difficult to write a compelling novel without thinking about what a reader may experience from moment to moment. Or the unconscious signals you may be sending to readers via character choices or world building. Worrying about it all in the end can be overwhelming.

An Effort to Help Writers

But I don’t think Maas wrote the book to confuse and overwhelm writers. He wrote it to help. In fact, the questions he asks at the end of each section are the most useful I’ve ever seen. They prompt exercises that will produce amazing results. I can attest to that. I took Maass’s three-day workshop on this topic and I’ve never dug so deep into my mind about my imaginary world. He truly knows how to prompt creators to think outside of the box, how to rewire brains to bring forth some serious work of the subconscious.

But if you don’t have the money for that workshop, I recommend doing as many of the exercises in this book as you can. What you discover will change you and most certainly change your fiction for the better.

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Regency romance, romantic mysteries, & writing tips too.

Writing Fiction So That Readers FEEL (Emotion Is Everything)

Writing Fiction So That Readers FEEL (Emotion Is Everything)

Writing fiction is a challenge because it’s all about the readers’ emotions. Bestselling authors are masterful at conveying emotions . They make us cringe, laugh, and weep.

When I’m reading, if an author makes me feel, I love it, even if the emotions are uncomfortable and I have to remind myself that the book is make-believe, it’s not real. This writing skill goes beyond craft, into real art. By tugging on our emotions authors pull us into the world of their books. We keep reading.

Readers have endless options for entertainment. They can drop your novel to read another one, or they can watch Netflix or hit the kitchen for a cooking session. Of course, the siren song of Facebook is always there.

So, how do you keep readers reading?

Emotion is always the key to writing novels which make readers live in the world of your fiction and care what happens to the characters. And emotionally-driven stories start with you.

Writing fiction with emotion: focus on fear

Natasha Lester has an excellent infographic in her article, On Writing Characters in a Novel and Making Sure Readers Care About Them :

“… sometimes this makes me leave things out entirely… the full and deep explication of my character’s thoughts and feelings and emotions… how can they feel if the feelings are hinted at, suggested, but never quite there?”

Natasha focuses on her characters’ fears. Oddly enough, this never occurred to me. Yes, I knew that following a characters’ thoughts was key to driving reader emotion. Then I thought about it. My characters focused on their fears — and now I could do it intentionally.

It’s made my current novel easiest to write, because once I asked myself what the point of view (POV) character’s fear was in a scene, the scene was easier to write. When I gave those scenes to my writing buddy to read, she said that they were stronger.

She also made a suggestion. “When you write from the antagonist’s point of view and add what he fears, that might make him more human, and even scarier.”

Good advice, and I’m going to try it.

Fear drives your characters’ goals, and their motivation

I like to write my novels’ blurbs as soon as I can, preferably while the book’s still in outline form. It gives me direction. If a blurb sounds weak, I know that the novel will be weak. ( Blurbs are book descriptions.)

Your blurb starts with the logline which has three basic elements. From SAVE THE CAT!® 10 GENRE LOGLINES :

“The Big Three – the hero, goal, and problem of your story…”

When I revised my current blurb to focus on the leads’ fears, it made the blurb stronger — it pumped up the emotion. I was thrilled.

Over to you: make the most of your characters’ fears

How do you handle emotion in your fiction? Do you make the most of your characters’ fears?

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Writing for the Emotions

(I wrote this article in 2007 and posted it at A Novel Edit . I’ve posted it here to make it easily accessible to readers of The Editor’s Blog.)

______________________________________________

Favorite stories— what are they?

Are they the cold, emotionless tales that report facts and figures, rather like a business report?  Or, are your favorite stories—books that you return to for a second read, novels you recommend—are they instead tales that have touched your emotions?

Have you spent the early part of an evening devouring Stephen King and the remainder of the night in suspense, tense and trembling at every sound?

Do you laugh at Stephanie Plum’s antics, cry with Travis and Old Yeller?

Does a brutal murder steal your breath?  An erotic scene get you hot?

Do books make you tremble with anger or steam at injustice?  Does your heart race?  What about your nails—ever chewed them off during an intense read?

Most of us like our fiction to touch us.  And not only a simple nudge.  We want to be prodded and pulled and pushed.  We want tears and laughter and shivers and breathlessness.  We want to feel the more-than-normal emotions that fictional characters experience.  If we didn’t, we’d be satisfied with the business report and the newspaper article and our magazines.

For writers, this is key.  Whether we intentionally write a scene to stir emotions or we go back and add words that engage the reader’s passions on a rewrite, we have to do it.

We’ve all read books that are technically perfect but emotionally barren.

Where’s the life?  Why couldn’t we, as readers, engage?

Often we find books cold because the author hasn’t raised the emotional level .  Hasn’t considered emotions at all.

Details and description have their places, but emotions flavor a story .  A whodunit can engage a reader’s mind and for some readers of mysteries, that may be enough.  But for the romance lover or the reader who craves action/adventure, a writer must add more.

A writer need not feel an emotion when writing , but he must be able to tap into it.  He must know how to convey it.  Never lost a child to violent death?  How about a beloved pet?  Transfer that feeling of loss over Fido to your character as she fights traffic, intent on getting to her child’s side in the ER, knowing that she’s already too late.  We all know the impatience stirred by traffic.  Exacerbate the panic and fear and helplessness for the mother as tears blind her and her breath is stolen by terror.

Emotions pull readers into the story faster than most anything else a writer could try .  They are instant connection points.  Think of emotions as tentacles reaching to the reader and tying him to your tale.  Wrap him tight so he must stay with you until the end.  You do want your readers to stay with you for reasons other than the $23.95 paid for the book, right?  You want them to become involved.  You want them to read your next story and the one after that.  So don’t shortchange them.  Give them all of you, including your private emotions and memories.

Writing to create emotional responses in your reader will cost you.  You will reveal part of yourself.  You will show that you know what moves others, what touches your readers.  You’ll be proving that you’ve been moved at some point in your own life.  Writing to stir emotions may also rouse some of your own.  And to do it effectively, you may have to expose yourself.  We writers like to think we’re private, but we often reveal our deepest selves when we write.  Especially when our characters’ strongest emotions influence our readers.

———-

Put your protagonist in an absurd situation and let her react with aplomb.  Or let your klutz of a character skate through a scene oblivious of the chaos he leaves behind.

Ratchet up fear and suspense so your readers feel like hiding under the covers.  Write to trigger adrenaline surges in your readers.

Make your readers cry.  It’s okay—they want to.  They want to laugh and scream and tremble.

Why engage emotions?  To create a good read.  So yours will be the books that readers come back to again and again.  So your characters will be remembered.  So your novels will be recommended among friends

Need practical tips and strategies for inducing emotions in your readers? Read Creating Emotion in the Reader .

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The Most Important Writing Exercise I’ve Ever Assigned

An illustration of several houses. One person walks away from a house with a second person isolated in a window.

By Rachel Kadish

Ms. Kadish is the author of the novel “The Weight of Ink.”

“Write down a phrase you find abhorrent — something you yourself would never say.”

My students looked startled, but they cooperated. They knew I wouldn’t collect this exercise; what they wrote would be private unless they chose to share it. All that was required of them was participation.

In silence they jotted down a few words. So far, so good. We hadn’t yet reached the hard request: Spend 10 minutes writing a monologue in the first person that’s spoken by a fictitious character who makes the upsetting statement. This portion typically elicits nervous glances. When that happens, I remind students that their statement doesn’t represent them and that speaking as if they’re someone else is a basic skill of fiction writers. The troubling statement, I explain, must appear in the monologue, and it shouldn’t be minimized, nor should students feel the need to forgive or account for it. What’s required is simply that somewhere in the monologue there be an instant — even a fleeting phrase — in which we can feel empathy for the speaker. Perhaps she’s sick with worry over an ill grandchild. Perhaps he’s haunted by a love he let slip away. Perhaps she’s sleepless over how to keep her business afloat and her employees paid. Done right, the exercise delivers a one-two punch: repugnance for a behavior or worldview coupled with recognition of shared humanity.

For more than two decades, I’ve taught versions of this fiction-writing exercise. I’ve used it in universities, middle schools and private workshops, with 7-year-olds and 70-year-olds. But in recent years openness to this exercise and to the imaginative leap it’s designed to teach has shrunk to a pinprick. As our country’s public conversation has gotten angrier, I’ve noticed that students’ approach to the exercise has become more brittle, regardless of whether students lean right or left.

Each semester, I wonder whether the aperture through which we allow empathy has so drastically narrowed as to foreclose a full view of our fellow human beings. Maybe there are times so contentious or so painful that people simply withdraw to their own silos. I’ve certainly felt that inward pull myself. There are times when a leap into someone else’s perspective feels impossible.

But leaping is the job of the writer, and there’s no point it doing it halfway. Good fiction pulls off a magic trick of absurd power: It makes us care. Responding to the travails of invented characters — Ahab or Amaranta, Sethe or Stevens, Zooey or Zorba — we might tear up or laugh, or our hearts might pound. As readers, we become invested in these people, which is very different from agreeing with or even liking them. In the best literature, characters are so vivid, complicated, contradictory and even maddening that we’ll follow them far from our preconceptions; sometimes we don’t return.

Unflinching empathy, which is the muscle the lesson is designed to exercise, is a prerequisite for literature strong enough to wrestle with the real world. On the page it allows us to spot signs of humanity; off the page it can teach us to start a conversation with the strangest of strangers, to thrive alongside difference. It can even affect those life-or-death choices we make instinctively in a crisis. This kind of empathy has nothing to do with being nice, and it’s not for the faint of heart.

Even within the safety of the page, it’s tempting to dodge empathy’s challenge, instead demonizing villains and idealizing heroes, but that’s when the needle on art’s moral compass goes inert. Then we’re navigating blind: confident that we know what the bad people look like and that they’re not us — and therefore we’re at no risk of error.

Our best writers, in contrast, portray humans in their full complexity. This is what Gish Jen is doing in the short story “Who’s Irish?” and Rohinton Mistry in the novel “A Fine Balance.” Line by line, these writers illuminate the inner worlds of characters who cause harm — which is not the same as forgiving them. No one would ever say that Toni Morrison forgives the character Cholly Breedlove, who rapes his daughter in “The Bluest Eye.” What Ms. Morrison accomplishes instead is the boldest act of moral and emotional understanding I’ve ever seen on the page.

In the classroom exercise, the upsetting phrases my students scribble might be personal (“You’ll never be a writer,” “You’re ugly”) or religious or political. Once a student wrote a phrase condemning abortion as another student across the table wrote a phrase defending it. Sometimes there are stereotypes, slurs — whatever the students choose to grapple with. Of course, it’s disturbing to step into the shoes of someone whose words or deeds repel us. Writing these monologues, my graduate students, who know what “first person” means, will dodge and write in third, with the distanced “he said” instead of “I said.”

But if they can withstand the challenges of first person, sometimes something happens. They emerge shaken and eager to expand on what they’ve written. I look up from tidying my notes to discover students lingering after dismissal with that alert expression that says the exercise made them feel something they needed to feel.

Over the years, as my students’ statements became more political and as jargon (“deplorables,” “snowflakes”) supplanted the language of personal experience, I adapted the exercise. Worrying that I’d been too sanguine about possible pitfalls, I made it entirely silent, so no student would have to hear another’s troubling statement or fear being judged for their own. Any students who wanted to share their monologues with me could stay after class rather than read to the group. Later, I added another caveat: If your troubling statement is so offensive, you can’t imagine the person who says it as a full human being, choose something less troubling. Next, I narrowed the parameters: No politics. The pandemic’s virtual classes made risk taking harder; I moved the exercise deeper into the semester so students would feel more at ease.

After one session, a student stayed behind in the virtual meeting room. She’d failed to include empathy in her monologue about a character whose politics she abhorred. Her omission bothered her. I was impressed by her honesty. She’d constructed a caricature and recognized it. Most of us don’t.

For years, I’ve quietly completed the exercise alongside my students. Some days nothing sparks. When it goes well, though, the experience is disquieting. The hard part, it turns out, isn’t the empathy itself but what follows: the annihilating notion that people whose fears or joys or humor I appreciate may themselves be indifferent to all my cherished conceptions of the world.

Then the 10-minute timer sounds, and I haul myself back to the business of the classroom — shaken by the vastness of the world but more curious about the people in it. I put my trust in that curiosity. What better choice does any of us have? And in the sanctuary of my classroom I keep trying, handing along what literature handed me: the small, sturdy magic trick any of us can work, as long as we’re willing to risk it.

Rachel Kadish is the author of the novel “The Weight of Ink.”

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Emotional Responses to Fiction

Imagine that you are reading The Fellowship of the Ring . Tolkien introduces you to a strange new world where, amongst other magical occurrences, you fictionally encounter monsters. Your responses to the orcs, giant spiders, and other monstrosities are probably nothing like what they would be if you encountered them in real life; you would fear the orcs rather than feel curious or intrigued by them and you would run away from the creature rather than remain in your comfy chair. Indeed, we often don’t intentionally react to the objects we see on a screen or stage or read about in a novel beyond mere reflexes and basic physiological responses. Our intentional behavior to fictional entities is much different from how we would behave towards their real-life counterparts, emotionally, morally, and functionally.

The asymmetry between our behaviors and emotional responses to real-life versus fictional characters has drawn a great deal of philosophical attention. The nature of our emotional responses to fiction bears on debates in ontology, philosophy of language, philosophy of mind, epistemology, ethics, as well as philosophy of art. Emotions about fictional entities are also central to many peoples’ lived experience: isn’t it both strange and fascinating that we care so deeply for certain characters, such as dear Frodo, even though we know they aren’t real?

The central philosophical puzzle concerning fiction and emotions is captured by the paradox of fiction , first introduced by Colin Radford (1975). This paradox captures an interesting tension concerning emotional responses to fiction, for surely we only have genuine emotional responses to things we believe to be real! In these debates, “fiction” occurs in literature, motion pictures, TV shows, opera, theater, and perhaps even some works of music (e.g., SZA’s pop song “Kill Bill”) or paintings (e.g., The Lady of Shalott by John William Waterhouse). All such works have the power to emotionally move audiences, but the nature of the psychological states and processes involved is the subject of debate. Recently, though, philosophers have moved past questions concerning the nature of emotions about fiction to concerns about the social and moral ramifications of emotional responses to fiction (Feagin 2011).

The majority of this article focuses on the psychological foundations of our emotional responses to fiction and the paradox of fiction. §1 covers several different scholarly perspectives on the nature of our emotional responses to fictional entities. §2 addresses the paradox of fiction and a variety of approaches that scholars have taken to dissolve it. §3 provides a brief introduction to several further puzzles concerning emotion and fiction, including the sympathy for the devil phenomenon, the paradox of painful art, and the puzzle of imaginative resistance, and how these puzzles inform and build on those addresses in the previous sections.

Further reading: Carroll 2011; Currie 1995; Gendler & Kovakovich 2006; Tullmann & Buckwalter 2014; Walton 1978 & 1990.

1.1 The distinct attitude view (DAV)

1.2 theories of make-believe, 1.3 simulation theory, 1.4 empathy, 1.5 alternate views, 2.1 emotional responses are irrational, 2.2 against the first proposition, 2.3 against the second proposition, 2.4 against the third proposition, 3.1 the puzzle of imaginative resistance, 3.2 sympathy for the devil, 3.3 paradox of painful art, other internet resources, related entries, 1. the psychology of emotions about fiction.

Typically, if harm comes to someone I care about, I would feel a great deal of sorrow and concern for that person. I may also feel anger at whomever or whatever harmed them and would be motivated to act on their behalf. However, we generally won’t have such reactions during our emotional engagement with works of fiction. To borrow an example from Radford (1975: 70), I do not weep over Mercutio’s body after he is killed while watching a theatrical production of Romeo & Juliet . I do not seek revenge or challenge Tybalt to a duel. I do, however, feel very strongly about Mercutio’s death. It’s the behavioral responses to our emotions about fictional characters and reality that vary wildly. In this section, we will explore some of the ways to explain this asymmetry and, in general, the nature of our emotional responses to fiction. Ultimately, one’s response to the “asymmetry problem” depends on further commitments concerning the nature of emotions and other mental states. The views expounded here—theories of make-believe, simulation theory, and theories of empathy—all explain emotional responses to fiction in relation to real-life emotional responses. The views differ with respect to the psychological framework they emphasize, be it imagination, offline processing, or a range of empathetic practices.

Some scholars argue that a solution to the asymmetry problem requires a distinctive mental attitude that we employ during our engagements with fiction. The nature of the distinct attitude varies by the theorist. Quite often, a mental “box” or mechanism is posited that we utilize exclusively when considering non-actual objects, including fictional ones (see, for example, Nichols & Stich 2003), as well as hypothetical and counterfactual thought, mental activities involving deliberation and decision-making, mental imagery, and mindreading (attributing mental states to other people).

Alternatively, we may use largely the same mental processes as in real-life situations, but these processes are run “offline”, disconnected from their typical functional and inferential output. The result is a different kind of mental state than we would have if we considered a real-life or actual object. We adopt pretend (Searle 1975; see also Kripke 2011 & 2013), simulated (e.g., Currie & Ravenscroft 2002; Walton 1997), or imaginary beliefs, desires, emotions, and thoughts toward non-actual objects (e.g., Schroeder & Matheson 2006; Weinberg & Meskin 2006). These states are isomorphic to genuine mental attitudes and may sometimes be phenomenologically indistinguishable from them. While pretense, simulation, and imagination differ in important ways, each view trades on the idea that our mental attitudes concerning fiction differ in content and functional role from those concerning actual events or objects—even if, phenomenologically, the experience of each is similar (see Friend 2022 for a comment on and critique of this asymmetry).

All proponents of the distinct attitude view argue that mental states such as emotions can be identified in terms of their characteristic functional roles. Consider beliefs. It is generally understood that our beliefs about real-life and non-actual objects utilize many of the same causal and inferential pathways. However, they have significantly different inputs and result in very different outputs. Our real-life, everyday beliefs are about things that we can or might in principle see, touch, and hear—things that exist concretely, or spatiotemporally. These objects act as the input for our everyday, stereotypical beliefs (see Fitzpatrick 2016; García-Carpintero 2019; Lewis 1978; Plantinga 1974; Quine 1948 [1953]; Sainsbury 2010; Salmon 1998; Schiffer 1996; B. Smith 1980; Thomasson 1999 & 2003; Walton 1990). In contrast, beliefs about fiction (and other non-actual objects) do not take actual, concrete objects as their object. Rather, they are about fictional things, however that might be cashed out ontologically. The output of our mental processing about actual and fictional objects is also different; they result in different kinds of behaviors. So, while our beliefs about real life and our beliefs about works of fiction are similar in many ways, proponents of the DAV hold that they are different enough to constitute a distinct kind of mental state. The result, on this view, is that we have belief- like (or imaginary, or simulated) attitudes towards the content of fiction, but not beliefs simpliciter.

Consider Currie and Ravenscroft’s (2002) argument for imaginary mental states. They maintain that mental states such as emotions and beliefs serve as part of an inferential network, motivating not only action, but also other mental states. The authors posit that beliefs about fiction are run offline, disconnected from their normal behavioral and cognitive networks. The same goes for other activities with non-actual content, such as hypothetical thought and pretend play. These states are not stereotypical beliefs, but rather imaginative ones because stereotypical beliefs are understood in terms of the behavior that they produce.

The psychologist Paul Harris (2000) provides further evidence for this view, particularly in terms of our emotional responses to imaginings. Very young children tend to be overcome by the emotions caused by their imaginative activities—e.g., fearing the monster under the bed or witches that they saw in a movie—even if they know that the fiction is not real. Older children and adults are generally able to regulate and override these emotions, but still may often become absorbed in their imaginative activity. We get “lost” in a film or novel and experience strong emotional reactions, emotions that color our real-life activities. We generally do not act on these emotions, though, which suggests that they are distinct from the everyday emotions we experience in response to real-life objects and events.

Further reading: Camp 2009; Damasio 1994; Fontaine & Rahman 2014; Gendler & Kovakovich 2006; Gilmore 2020; Goldman 2006a; Kosslyn 1997; Kosslyn et al. 1993; LeDoux 1996; Meinong 1904 [1960]; Moran 1994; O’Craven & Kanwisher 2000; Stecker 2011; Toon 2010a, 2010b, 2012; Tullmann 2022; van Leeuwen 2013.

One way of explaining the asymmetry problem from a distinct attitude perspective is a fictional theory of make-believe, popularized by Kendall Walton (1978 & 1990). According to a theory of make-believe, our engagements with fiction draw on our capacities for imagination and pretense. While reading a novel, for example, we play a game of make-believe, creating a “fictional world” in which the propositions presented in the novel are fictionally true. On this view, each reader is the participant and creator of her own fiction-based game. Fictional worlds are similar to the imaginary worlds that children create during their pretend play (Walton 1990; Currie 1990, Harris 2000). Works of fiction prescribe imaginings: words on a page, for instance, invite imaginative engagement with a work. Pretense , here, involves acts of behaving and thinking as if some proposition or state of affairs is true while knowing that it is not. In their games of make-believe, a child may pretend that a couch is a house, underneath a dining room table is a dungeon, and a baseball bat is a magnificent sword—all while knowing that none of these are the case. Rather, the imaginative game of make-believe makes it fictionally true that the dining room contains a dungeon and that the baseball bat is a sword.

Theories of make-believe hold that something similar occurs when adults engage with fiction, but this time the props are largely imaginative. While reading the Lord of the Rings series, we pretend that there is a world like our own in which wizards, elves, and dwarves exist alongside good-natured hobbits and an evil dark lord. The novel itself acts as a prop, each line feeding into our fictional world and adding layer upon layer of detail to our game of make-believe. The game of make-believe extends to our psychological states: we pretend to believe that Frodo defeated the Dark Lord by tossing the Ring of Power into the fires of Mount Doom, for instance. Importantly, we have fictional emotions about Frodo and his crew and fictional desires for the young hobbit to vanquish Sauron. Stacie Friend (2022) points out that Walton does not deny that we have some genuine emotional responses to fiction. Rather, he seems to deny that we have genuine fear, pity, joy, etc. Instead, we experience a different kind of emotion that is bound by the imaginative game; these emotions are different in kind from everyday emotions because they are functionally and cognitively “quarantined” (to borrow Friend’s term) from cognitive and functional states about real life things.

A theory of make-believe attempts to explain two things: the ontology of fiction and the nature of our psychological states about them. Let’s begin with the ontological question. Do fictions and fictional characters exist? What are fictional entities such that we can think about them, speak about them, etc.? Theories of make-believe have a ready response to these questions: fictional entities do not, strictly speaking, exist outside of one’s game of make-believe. Instead, when we discuss fictional entities, we make pretend illocutions concerning pretend objects. Like an actor in a performance of Hamlet , we do not make genuine assertions when we speak about the goings-on of fiction. We merely pretend to do so as a part of the game. Fictional entities are not objects that can be found in space or time, even if the images or words used as props can be (a painted figure, a film image of a person, or words that describe a villain).

Walton contrasts his view with a realist Meinongian theory, according to which fictional entities exist eternally as abstracta, similar to Platonic forms (1990; see also Sainsbury 2010 and Wolterstorff 1980). On this view, fiction entities are not created, but rather drawn upon and put together in creative ways by authors, filmmakers, dramatists, etc. Meinongian theories have come under strong attack, and rightly so—it is counterintuitive that fictional entities are Platonic ideals that are not created by the author, for instance (see Thomasson 1999). However, contrasting a pretense theory with the Meinongian position ignores the more fine-grained issues concerning the existence of fictional entities. The middle ground includes other broadly realist theories, such as the possible objects view (Lewis 1978, which holds that fictional entities are denizens of far-off possible worlds) or the abstract artifact view favored by Kripke (2011 & 2013), Salmon (1998), Schiffer (1996), and Thomasson (1999), which holds that fictional entities are non-corporeal but created entities whose existence and persistence depends on the practices of people in the real world.

However, neither realist nor pretense-based ontology entails that our mental states about fiction are distinct in type. It could be that we merely pretend that fictional objects exist when we think about and discuss them. Our mental states about those objects are the standard mental states, about something fictional. That is one possible way in which to understand the ontological and psychological questions of fiction: an anti-realist ontology of fictional entities coupled with a genuine attitude view of mental states. Unfortunately, this view raises a host of questions concerning the possibility of referring to nonexistent objects.

For this reason, many anti-realists about fictional entities favor the DAV according to which our mental states towards fictional entities are not stereotypical mental states. One popular way in which to ground a psychology of make-believe is to adopt some form of simulation theory (ST), which we will explore further in the next subsection. ST is typically used in cognitive science to explain how we attribute mental states to others, especially to predict their behaviors and understand their emotional state (see Goldman 2006a; Gordon 1986; Currie & Ravenscroft 2002; Nichols, Stich, et al. 1996; Prinz 2002). Currie and Ravenscroft (2002) argue that imagination essentially involves the capacity to put ourselves in the place of another or our self in another place or time. Importantly, both Walton and Currie/Ravenscroft hold that the mental attitudes we adopt in our imaginings are substitutes for genuine ones; we have imaginative or fictional beliefs about fiction instead of beliefs simpliciter. On their view, imagining simulates the role of other states, such as the role beliefs play in inferential processes (2002: 49).

The upshot of a theory of make-believe—combining anti-realism about fictional entities and ST to explain our psychological states towards them—is that it allows proponents of the distinct attitude view a theoretically cohesive and elegant means by which to solve the puzzles of fiction described below. For example, we can solve the paradox of fiction by arguing that we do not possess ordinary types of beliefs about fictional entities, rejecting the premise of the paradox that states we have genuine beliefs about fictions. We feel “sympathy for the devil” because that emotion is distinct from our normal cognitive processing, which allows us to experience unique emotional and moral responses towards entities that do not match how we would respond to their real-life counterparts.

Further reading: Kroon 1994; Levinson 1993; Mothersill 2002; Searle 1975; Summa 2019; Toon 2010a & b, 2012.

Simulation theory gained prominence in the late 1980s with the work of philosophers like Alvin Goldman (1989, 1993, 2006a,b), Robert Gordon (1986 & 1996), and Jane Heal (1996) and has been adopted in a variety of fields, including aesthetics, to explain our mental processing about other persons’ mental states. ST holds that we utilize our own perceptual, emotional, and cognitive mechanisms while mindreading (attempting to understand the mental states of others). We project or imagine ourselves in the situation of the observed person. As with the cases of mental states about fiction mentioned above, these mental mechanisms are run offline, disconnected from their typical functional output (see Currie & Ravenscroft 2002). This results in simulated mental states that are distinct from stereotypical mental states. In fictional cases, audiences utilize simulated input (non-genuine emotions, for example) and garner simulated output (a pretend emotion about what a character thinks or feels) when simulating the mental states of a fictional entity.

Consider Alvin Goldman’s version of ST (1993 & 2006a). Goldman argues that we attribute mental states to another after we recognize our own mental states under actual or imagined conditions. I transform myself, imaginatively, into her based on my understanding of how I would feel or think in the same situation. I imaginatively take on what I imagine to be her relevant beliefs, desires, emotions, and perspective to determine further mental states and behavioral predictions. This is called enactive imagining —or, e-imagining, for short—because I utilize my own mental processes for simulative imagining. Once I e-imagine myself as the target, I can introspect what I feel during this particular situation. I then judge that the target feels the same way.

Gregory Currie’s version of ST provides another elegant explanation for psychological states about fiction. Currie has backed away from a strong simulative approach in some of his recent work, but the general assumption of offline ST remains the same (see Currie & Ravenscroft 2002). Like Walton, Currie argues that our basic psychological interactions with fiction involve games of make-believe, games that are based on imaginatively simulating fictional actions and the minds of fictional characters. On this view, audiences imaginatively take on the mental states of others as closely as possible and run their own “mental economy” to see how they would feel in a comparable situation. This view also adopts a version of the DAV; our mental attitudes about imaginings are not stereotypical mental attitudes, but rather pretend/imaginary ones. This is because these states lack their typical functional role.

According to Currie’s ST, audiences are intended to adopt imaginative attitudes toward fictional characters and situations (Currie 1990). Currie distinguishes between primary imagining and secondary imagining . Primary imaginings involve what is true in a story, “those things which it makes fictional” (1995: 255). We adopt the fictional beliefs necessary to maintain a coherent fictional world while disregarding those which contradict it. I disregard my real belief that eagles are not large enough to carry humans while reading The Lord of the Rings , for instance. I also adopt the imaginative belief that there exists large, perambulating tree folk. When I watch the film adaptation of The Fellowship of the Ring and come to learn of the danger and power of the One Ring, I do not acquire a new belief that “there is One Ring desired by Sauron”, but rather a “belief-like imagining” of this proposition.

Secondary imagining is a form of simulation that occurs when we engage in an empathetic reenactment of a character’s situation (Currie 1995: 256). First, I put myself into a fictional character’s position: I imagine what it would be like to be Frodo learning about the ring from the wizard Gandalf. Then I reflect on what I currently feel as the result of this imagining: surprised and scared. Once I identify my thoughts, desires, and feelings, I then imagine that that is how Frodo feels in this situation as well. In this sense, secondary imagining helps us to identify and empathize with fictional characters. I then remove myself from the simulation, so to speak, and attribute these same feelings to Frodo. The assumption is that all or most of this mental processing occurs both offline and unconsciously, so we do not act on our emotion-like imaginings and are not necessarily aware when they occur.

Further reading: Blanchet 2020; Cochrane 2010; Gallese 2019; Gordon 1992; LeBar 2001; Nichols & Stitch 2003; Short 2015; Spaulding 2016.

Finally, some philosophers contend that the primary way by which we emotionally engage with fictional entities is through empathy (see Agosta 2010; Bailey 2021; Coplan & Goldie 2011; Gallagher 2012; Maibom 2014; Prinz 2011; Stueber 2011; Vetlesen 1994; Walton 2015). Arguments about fiction and empathy are very similar to those concerning simulation and make-believe; in each case, audiences are thought to imaginatively put themselves in the situation of the character, consider how they would feel in a similar context, and infer that must be how the character feels as well However, empathy can take on a variety of forms, some which are quick, seemingly automatic and outside of conscious control and appear rather different from the simulation theories described above. Other forms of empathy are slower and more deliberate, like those that may be part of games of make-believe.

Martin Hoffman (2008) identifies processes like mimicry, mirroring, and direct association as three forms of fast, unconsciously activated empathy. Mimicry involves an “innate, involuntary, isomorphic response to another’s expression of emotion” (2008: 441). There are two steps involved in mimicking the emotion of a target. First, there is an automatic change in the subject’s facial expression, voice, and posture at the same time as a corresponding change in the target’s facial expression, vocal intonation, posture, etc. These changes then trigger similar feelings in the target as those present in the target. Mirror neurons may be the neural basis of mimicry. These neurons are triggered when one person observes the actions or emotional expressions of another. This results in the same kind of neural pattern in the subject as if she were performing the observed action or having the same emotion herself (2008: 441; see also Freedberg & Gallese 2007; Clay & Iacoboni 2011; Decety & Meltzoff 2011; Goldman 2006a).

There is also some evidence that subjects can mirror the motor intentions of a target; witnessing a movement in another (or even in a statue!) results in the subject’s motor cortex being activated as if she were the one moving (Freedberg & Gallese 2007).

Finally, direct association occurs when we perceive a target who undergoes an event that is similar to one that we have experienced in the past (Hoffman 2008: 441). For example, a friend of mine has recently lost her pet dog and displays sorrow-related signals (crying, having a “long face”, slouched posture, etc.). My memory of a similar situation in which I lost my pet parrot makes me also express these signals and even consciously experience sadness. I make this association unconsciously, without thinking about it or planning to do so.

While some of our social cognitive abilities seem to occur automatically, there are other cases in which understanding a target’s mental state requires slower, more thoughtful, and deliberate processes. Sometimes we may need to deliberately take on a target’s perspective to know how they feel or what they will do next. Perspective-taking seems especially important in ambiguous scenes in which we do not know enough about a person or her context and so we have difficulty judging how she feels or what she believes or desires. Sometimes perspective-taking is simply equated with empathy. When subject X empathizes with a target, Y , they imaginatively take on Y ’s mental states as closely as possible. X shares in Y ’s mental state and, further, that X ’s responses are caused by and involve the same type of state as Y ’s. In taking another’s perspective, I “put myself in their shoes”, and imagine what they must think or feel in a particular situation.

Each of these forms of empathy is relevant to how audiences emotionally engage with fictional characters. To continue the Lord of the Rings example, audiences may have to take Frodo’s perspective to fully appreciate how he feels the moment he discovers how dangerous Bilbo’s old ring really is. Mirroring Frodo’s facial expression (while watching the movie) may engender similar feelings of fear and surprise in me. These are both instances of empathy, each of which, arguably, helps audiences better appreciate the work of fiction and characters within.

Further reading: Carruthers 1996; Goldman 1993& 2006a; Freedberg & Gallese 2007; Clay & Iacoboni 2011; Decety & Meltzoff 2011; Hoffman 2008.

The above views—make-believe, simulation, and empathy—explain interactions with fiction in a similar manner: we engage with fiction by utilizing similar pathways to real-life interactions but with non-real objects. Our mental states about fiction may not be genuine sorrow, anger, etc. The differences between the views are in the details of how the psychological states concerning fiction are cashed out—whether the best explanation for engagement with fiction stems from simulation theory, a theory of imagination, or a theory of empathy.

Some philosophers have rejected simulation theories and theories of make-believe as the primary way to understand the psychological mechanisms involved in our emotional responses to fiction (Carroll 2008; Matravers 2014; Tullmann 2022; Wilson 2011). Philosophers such as Noël Carroll (2008) contend that simulation, make-believe, and empathy are generally not required for understanding fictional entities. Authors, filmmakers, and other fictional content creators often make the inner lives of characters obvious to their audiences. For instance, in the Frodo and the Ring example, it is clear that Frodo is scared by his words, actions, and facial expression—no make-believe or simulation is required!

The main theoretical support for the DAV stems from a folk psychological and functionalist understanding of the nature of mental attitudes. Beliefs, desires, judgments, etc. have characteristic behavioral and inferential roles, understood in terms of inputs from stimuli and their cognitive and behavioral outputs. As we have discussed, real-life emotions and their imaginative counterparts might utilize much of the same causal and inferential pathways to bring about certain responses, but they employ significantly different inputs and result in very different outputs (see, e.g., Currie 1990; Currie & Ravenscroft 2002; Weinberg & Meskin 2006; Schroeder & Matheson 2006). Furthermore, research in psychology and cognitive neuroscience seems to support the idea that engaging with non-actual objects utilizes many, but not all , of the same neural pathways as our mental activities concerning actual things (Kosslyn, Thompson, & Alpert 1997; Kosslyn, Thompson, & Ganis 2006). These studies help to explain why our reactions to imaginative activity are often so robust but may also suggest that we utilize a distinct attitude in our engagements with fiction (Damasio 1994; Schroeder & Matheson 2006).

As we’ve also seen, theorists generally try to explain the distinctness of our imaginative attitudes in terms of functional role (behavioral outputs) or inferential role (mental outputs); our mental states towards fiction do not lead to the kinds of thoughts and behaviors that they would for real-life objects. This problematically assumes a straightforward functionalist view of mental states that, while attractive in terms of folk psychology, may not accurately capture the nature of how mental states motivate action or inferential processes. However, if mental states are not individuated in terms of functional role, then the case could be made we may in fact have standard mental states towards fiction, despite the fact that we do not act towards fictional objects as we do towards real-life ones (see Buckwalter & Tullmann 2017). One can argue from a principle of parsimony that there is no need to posit a distinct mental attitude if typical ones have the same explanatory power.

Finally, the DAV (especially one utilizing a theory of make-believe or simulation theory) does not seem to be able to account for our actual phenomenological—that is, conscious, possibly introspectable—experiences with fiction. Our emotions, beliefs, desires, and other mental states towards fiction feel natural and relatively automatic, not like we are playing a game of make-believe or simulating a possible course of action. The assumption, here, is that there is something it is like to engage in a game of make-believe; we knowingly and willingly begin games of make-believe and do not explicitly do so with works of fiction. The proponent of the DAV may dismiss the phenomenological worry by arguing that the game of make-believe or simulation takes place unconsciously and, after some practice, quite rapidly. Some of the imaginings involved in a game of make-believe are deliberate and consist of conscious, occurrent mental states. But others are spontaneous, unconscious, and automatic. We do not tell ourselves to begin imagining what is going to happen to our favorite television character. We simply do it, sometimes without realizing it. Walton says that when this happens our imaginings “have a life of our own” and we feel less like an author than a spectator to the imagining (Walton 1990: 14).

Stacie Friend (2022) has recently put forth another approach to the psychology of fiction that provides nuance to the debate concerning genuine and fictional emotions. For Friend, emotions about fiction and those about real life cannot be so easily separated in terms of functional role, motivation, and phenomenological experience. Some emotions about fiction are motivational and some emotions about real life are not (admiration, for instance). Walton and Friend deny that there is a phenomenological difference in kind between the two types of emotion: we cannot say, for instance, that our sorrow over the death of Anna Karenina is less intense than sorrow about the death of a real-life friend—or, at least, the intensity does not differ so much to warrant a distinct type of mental attitude. In general, Friend states:

Emotions are multidimensional, and each dimension—physiological, phenomenological, motivational or evaluative—is complex, admitting of a variety of degrees and distinctions. There is no dimension along which a dichotomy between “fictional” and “ordinary” emotions can be sustained. (2022: 262).

The upshot of this view is that discussions concerning emotions and fiction can move past debates concerning the nature of fictional emotions to questions about the appropriateness, rationality, and social/moral implications of those emotions, as we will see in §3 below.

Further reading: Carruthers 1996 & 2011; Friend 2020; Gopnik 1993; Gopnik & Schulz 2004; Fodor 1983; Robinson 2005.

2. The Paradox of Fiction

The nature of the mental architecture for imaginary and fictional contexts grounds some of the pressing puzzles concerning our emotional responses to fiction—most prominently, the so-called paradox of fiction. Cognitive belief-based theories of emotions were in full sway when the paradox was first introduced (Radford 1975; Walton 1978; Currie 1990). According to these views, an emotion about an object X requires that we have some relevant belief Y concerning X ’s relation to our well-being. For example, experiencing fear requires that I believe that there is an object in my environment that could harm me or someone I care about. We lack the emotion if the relevant belief is absent (Solomon 1976 [1993]).

The wording of the paradox reveals an adherence to a belief-based theory of emotions. One version of the paradox states:

  • We have genuine emotions about fiction all the time.
  • We do not believe that fictional characters exist.
  • We can only have genuine emotions about things we believe to exist.

Different authors word the three propositions slightly differently—and, indeed, this formulation is not found in Radford’s original 1975 piece—but the tension between belief and fiction is the same across versions. The paradox is intended to capture a very natural thought concerning our emotions: if we know that we are engaged with a work of fiction, we should not have the emotionally relevant belief. No emotion should arise. Nevertheless, we have emotional experiences about fiction all the time, whether these are genuine emotions or not.

Responses to the paradox typically proceed by either accepting the irrationality of emotions about fiction or dismantling one of the propositions of the paradox. Some reject the paradox out of hand. This section explores each of these responses in turn.

Further reading: Buckwalter & Tullmann 2017; Langland-Hassan 2020; Cova & Teroni 2016.

One interpretation of the paradox states that there is something fundamentally irrational about our responses to fictional entities. Colin Radford (1975) accepts (variations on) each of the paradox’s propositions, arguing that our emotions towards fiction force the reader into adopting two contradictory beliefs: we both believe and do not believe that the fictional object of our emotion exists. Radford states:

I am left with the conclusion that our being moved in certain ways by works of art, though very “natural” to us and in that way only too intelligible, involves us in inconsistency and so incoherence (1975: 78).

It isn’t immediately clear what Radford meant by this inconsistency and incoherence. One way of understanding this statement is to suggest that Radford contends that we hold two contradictory beliefs (about the existence of a fictional entity) at the same time. Fabrice Teroni (2019) suggests that Radford simply means that our emotions about fiction do not make sense, because they ought to dissipate once we acknowledge that the object is fictional—similar to Radford’s case in which it would be irrational to continue to feel sorrow about the death of one’s sister once one comes to realize that the belief in one’s sister’s death is false. Still, it does seem that, to Radford, it is just a brute fact of human psychology that we have emotion-like responses to fiction. We are sad when our favorite character dies and are righteously angry when they are harmed. But these are not genuine emotions, because most, if not all, genuine emotions require a belief in the existence of their object. Radford doesn’t treat the irrationality of emotional responses to fiction as a problem, however. In fact, he argues that we have these sorts of incoherent responses all the time: when we cheer for our favorite sports team, fully knowing that nothing we do on our couch at home influences the game, or when we fear death even while acknowledging that it is nothing more than a dreamless sleep (to use Radford’s example, 1975: 79).

While not explicitly addressing the paradox of fiction, other philosophers have taken up the question of the rationality of emotions in ways that could be relevant to a response to the paradox of fiction (Gendler & Kovakovich 2006; de Sousa 2002 & 2004; D’Arms & Jacobson 2000a & 2000b). There are several ways in which emotions can be understood as being rational. First, emotions can be correct . Friend (2022) states that “It is correct to respond emotionally only if the object of emotion exists” (2022: 264). This would seem to imply that emotions about fictional entities are incorrect since the object of the emotion does not exist. In contrast, Teroni (2019) states “Correct emotions for fictional entities are emotions that correspond to truths about these fictional entities supplied by the relevant fictions” (2019: 125). To use Teroni’s example, one’s fear of a dog is correct if the dog is dangerous. For the fictional case, emotions are correct if the work of fiction gives reasons to believe that the fictional entity or event warrants that emotion. Fear about the fate of the hobbits at the end of the Lord of the Rings trilogy is correct if the text provides evidence to suggest that the hobbits are in danger.

Even if an emotion with a fictional object is incorrect (on Friend’s view), that doesn’t entail that the emotion is irrational. Teroni’s conception of emotional correctness has a stronger normative component than Friend’s—that is, conditions for which emotions might be apt. The former view might be likened to an understanding of emotional fit : how an emotional response may fit its object (see D’Arms & Jacobson 2000a). An emotion fits its object if we have some good reason to feel it; the emotion accurately represents its object. We can compare the fit between an emotion and its object to that of a true belief and a state of the world. Both spiders and battlefields may be fitting objects of fear; this evaluation is apt in some way, as being proper formal objects. Our colleague’s promotion may be a fitting object of jealousy. An off-color joke may be a fitting object of amusement. On this view, emotions fit their object in case we have some reason to have them for that object (compare this to D’Arms and Jacobson’s slightly different account of fit, which they characterize in terms of a response-dependent feature of the object that does not require reasons or norms, 2000a).

Finally, we can also speak of an emotion’s propriety . “Propriety” carries significant normative implications; it suggests that there are appropriate contexts in which one can or should have certain emotions. This way of understanding the aptness of emotions moves beyond reasons for belief and into the appropriateness of those emotions. The latter has significant social and moral implications, some of which are captured in the puzzles mentioned below in §3 . Importantly, correctness, fit, and propriety may not always match in any particular object. An emotion may fit its object, but not necessarily be the proper response to take. For example, even if a battlefield is a fitting object of fear, it may not be proper for a soldier to feel if he or she has an important task to fulfill. If our colleague is also our friend it may be improper for us to be jealous of her promotion—we should be happy for her—even if it is fitting for us to be, since, perhaps, we were also due for a promotion and did not get one. When we conflate the fit and propriety of emotions, we commit the moralistic fallacy : taking the morally normative implications to be built into our emotional responses towards things in our environment (D’Arms & Jacobson 2000a & b).

Recent literature in cognitive science has begun to debunk the traditional bifurcation between rationality and emotions, showing that emotions are often necessary (or at least useful) for planning, making important decisions, and making moral judgments (Ben-Ze’ev 2000; Damasio 1994; Gordon 1986; Nichols 2004; Solomon 1976 [1993], etc.). However, it is debatable whether these benefits extend to our emotions about fiction. The central question remains whether it is rational (fit or proper) to have emotional responses to things that have no bearing on our actual lives. Moreover, Currie (1995) points out that the concept of epistemic emotional rationality is puzzling because fiction presents audiences with a great deal of false information. This could undermine one’s ability to function in the real world if one takes it literally (see Best 2020 & 2021). If this view is right, then Radford’s paradox highlights an important aspect of human psychology.

Further reading: Adair 2019; Greenspan 1988; Roberts 1992; Song 2020.

One popular way of responding to the paradox is to argue that our emotions about fictions are not genuine—we do not have genuine emotions about fictional entities all the time. While initially counter-intuitive, this view makes sense when thought of in terms of a theory of make-believe or simulation as described in §1 . Perhaps the most influential view on these lines comes from Kendall Walton (1978 & 1990), who, as we have seen, has argued that our engagements with fiction are akin to childhood games of make-believe. Some of our emotional responses to fiction are genuine, but some are imaginary or make-believe. As described in §2 , Walton holds that emotional responses we have towards fictional objects are very similar to emotions we have about real-life objects but are not typical emotions. This explains both why we do not act on those emotional responses and why we may seek out fictions that elicit negative emotions such as anger or sadness.

The central issue with this view is that it certainly feels as though our emotional responses to works of fiction are real. When I watch a horror film such as Get Out or Hereditary , I may cover my eyes with my face, my heart rate accelerates, I break out into a cold sweat, and involuntarily scream. These are all embodied indications of fear that I’m not faking. I really do feel terrified. According to the current response to the paradox, however, the fear responses and phenomenal states that I experience in such cases aren’t full-fledged emotions. They are “quasi” emotions. Importantly, on this view, feelings and bodily responses are not emotions themselves. While Walton is not explicitly cognitivist about emotions, he does make certain statements that seem to suggest cognitivism. For instance, in “Fearing Fictions” (1978), Walton states:

It seems a principle of common sense … that fear must be accompanied by, or must involve, a belief that one is in danger; (1978: 6, 7)

and also that “Charles does not believe that he is in danger; so he is not afraid” (1978: 7; see Friend 2022 for more on Walton’s view and reception). This view suggests that emotions proper are cognitive. They involve a belief or other cognitive mental state, such as a judgment or thought (more on this in the next subsection). Specifically, this view accepts the idea that a genuine emotion—say, sorrow over a friend’s death—requires a belief that our friend actually died. Imagine that a family member informs you of the death of a beloved family friend. You feel sad because you believe that your friend no longer lives. Suppose now that your family member was merely playing a cruel trick on you—the family friend isn’t dead! Your belief about the friend’s death would be overruled. However, the feelings of sorrow may linger, the way that anxiety or fear lingers after waking from a dream that we know isn’t real. Would it still make sense to say that you are sad about your friend’s death? No; most people would likely say that emotion goes away—probably replaced with anger about your family member’s cruel trick.

According to belief-based theories of emotion, something similar is happening with our emotional responses to works of fiction. One may have all the embodied reactions related to fear while watching a fictional film, but without the belief in the actuality of the fearful object, none of those reactions amount to genuine fear.

Further reading: Dos Santos 2017; Vendrell Ferran 2022; Humbert- Droz et al. 2020; Williams 2019.

Few contemporary philosophers opt to eliminate the second proposition of the paradox of fiction. Doing so implies that a reader or viewer of fiction would genuinely believe that the fiction is real while she reads or watches it. Theorists who opt to reject the second proposition of the paradox must somehow square the “suspension of disbelief” with the contradictory beliefs and actions we seem to have in response to fiction. The notion of suspending disbelief was first introduced by the British Romantic poet Samuel Coleridge, who argued that we suspend our disbelief in the nonexistence of fictional objects during our engagement with fictional stories (Coleridge 1817; see also Hurka 2001). This supposedly explains our emotional responses to fictional entities; we emotionally respond to them because we believe that they concretely exist in the time that we engage with the artwork.

While it’s certainly true that we sometimes become very absorbed in fiction, it is a genuine question whether we forget or are tricked into believing that fictional characters and events exist. Some contemporary philosophers have followed this line of thought and argued for some kind of illusion theory about fiction (see Quilty Dunn 2015; Kivy 2011). We know that the objects in fictional films are nonexistent, just like we know that a magician’s “magic” isn’t real. The question is whether we can be tricked, perhaps momentarily, into believing otherwise. Noël Carroll (Carroll 2008) characterizes this challenge as the illusion thesis : we fall prey to some kind of illusion during our engagements with fiction. So far, we have been discussing one type of illusion, concerning belief. Carroll characterizes two types of illusions:

  • The Cognitive Illusion Thesis: one might come to believe that fictional events or characters actually occur or exist.
  • The Perceptual Illusion Thesis: we are committed to the existence of the represented fictional objects on a perceptual level.

Different artistic media may commit us to one or both of these illusions. For example, reading a novel might subject one to a cognitive illusion, but not a perceptual illusion. Perceptual illusions generally apply to visual fiction, although we can imagine someone listening to an audiobook in her car falling prey to the perceptual illusion that the fictional person being narrated is an actual person. Moreover, while neither of these theses addresses emotional responses per se , we can think of a similar type of argument in which emotions about fiction are illusory, like the phantom limb pain phenomenon or the rubber hand illusion (Richardson 2009; de Vignemont 2007).

Many philosophers reject both versions of the illusion thesis out of hand since they seem to entail that we would act towards a character in just the same way that we would act towards a real person. As Katherine Thomson-Jones (2008) points out:

I am able to appreciate the vivid depiction of an army of zombies surging forward with arms outstretched, the use of special effects or highly emotive music, the importance of the scene for the narrative, and so on. Surely, if I had suspended my belief that the zombies are fictional, I would be too frightened to appreciate film in this way. (2008: 107)

Moreover, most of our behaviors towards fiction (or lack thereof) are inconsistent with the idea that we even temporarily suspend our disbelief about the reality of fiction—this is the asymmetry problem, once again. We do not act as if we believe that the fiction is real. The same idea works for other mental attitudes, such as desires and emotions. Moreover, our conscious experience of watching a film is also antithetical to the cognitive illusion thesis. If asked, we would deny that fictional entities are real. We would also deny that we have been tricked into believing otherwise.

Carroll also rejects the perceptual illusion thesis, arguing that it our visual experiences do not meet the first criterion. Our perception of movie screens and actual objects are not identical, or even sufficiently similar to the perceptual experience of real-life objects, to suggest a perceptual illusion. There are surface interferences—scratches and dirt on a film strip, hair on the projector slide, the size and shape of the screen, framing devices, etc.—which make the viewer aware of the screen and remind her that the objects in the movie are not really in front of her. Carroll also points out that we typically perceive edge phenomena; we can see around the edge of an object as we move but we don’t experience such phenomena in our visual perception of film. We cannot look around a character to see what is going on behind her. We can provide a similar explanation for other fictional media. We do not visually perceive plays in the same way that we do real-life people and events, because of the stage and other spatial and physical discrepancies between them. Pictures are always framed and are not subject to edge phenomena, just like films (see also Derrida 1978 [1987] and Foucault 1966 [1970]). Even listening to an audiobook will probably not sound identical to listening to real people give an account of their lives.

In contrast, Jake Quilty-Dunn (2015) provides one way to argue for a version of the perceptual illusion thesis. In this view, film viewers deploy many of the same perceptual capacities that we do in real life. We may form isomorphically similar perceptual beliefs (beliefs formed on the basis of perception rather than other cognitive states) about a face we encounter while watching a film that we would the same face in real-life. The visual processing that leads to such beliefs is, in effect, under the illusion that there is an actual face being perceived. This leads to contradictory beliefs: the cognitive belief that the person we perceive does not exist and the perceptual belief that, implicitly, suggests that they do. In turn, our emotional responses to that face are genuine emotions, but the belief in the existence of the person is perceptual, not cognitive (see Siegel 2010). In this case, the perceptual illusion theory may stand to explain certain aspects of the paradox of fiction (at least for visual artworks).

Further reading: Fish 2009 & 2010; Lopes 2015; McMahon 1996; Stokes 2014.

Many philosophers opt to eliminate the third proposition of the paradox. There are several ways to do this. First, one can deny that beliefs are a necessary component of emotions, but still maintain a cognitivist position that emotions are comprised of thoughts (Carroll 1990 & Lamarque 1981) or judgments (Solomon 1976 [1993]). For example, when we engage with fiction, we generally have various thoughts about the characters. While watching The Conjuring , I may contemplate the nature of the demon that possesses one woman. This thought fills me with terror. Importantly, thoughts do not have the same assertoric requirement that beliefs do; we do not need to believe that the object of our thought exists in order to contemplate and respond emotionally to it.

Alternatively, one can deny that any higher-order cognition is required for emotions. This is the route taken by non-cognitive perception and feeling-based theories of emotions. According to these views, emotion does not require that we have a thought, judgment, or belief about an object in our environment. Conscious feelings, bodily changes, or perceptions of those changes, constitute an emotion (Goldie 2000; James 1890; LeDoux 1996; Prinz 2004a & b; Robinson 2005). Here, the ontological status of the emotion’s object is irrelevant to whether the emotion itself is a stereotypical state; if the feeling or perception of bodily changes is genuine, then the emotion is as well.

Non-cognitive theories of emotion track with the phenomenological experience of emotional responses to fiction described in §2.1 . in response to the first proposition of the paradox.

A folk psychology of emotions contends that emotions involve a conscious feeling. Prima facie , we identify our emotions by how they feel; sorrow, anger, joy, jealousy, pride, etc. all feel a certain way to us. One could ask whether someone really does feel sorrow over the loss of a family member if they never consciously felt that sorrow. For our purposes, feelings are the qualitative bodily responses that are typically consciously experienced (but see Prinz 2004a; Berridge & Winkielman 2003; Rosenthal 2008). Chocolate has a particular conscious taste and red has a specific qualitative look; similarly, emotions have a conscious qualitative character. As William James (1890) noted, feelings put the “emotionality” in the emotion, making it salient and important to our lives.

Philosophers, psychologists, and neuroscientists alike all generally accept that emotions involve some kind of judgment. Emotions are evaluative. When we have an emotion, it is because something in our environment—or something that we think, remember, or imagine—bears significance on our lives or the life of someone we care about. This may be a very quick, automatic evaluation, like when we suddenly fear a loud noise behind us or are afraid that we will slip on an unseen staircase. Or the evaluation could be quite complex, like when we experience jealousy towards someone in our workplace.

In cases of fiction, the non-cognitivist about emotion would suggest that our feelings and other bodily reactions to a terrifying monster are sufficient evidence for genuine fear. These emotions are evaluative in that they indicate and are responses to things we care about. I feel elated when Frodo finally throws the ring into Mount Doom because I care about the narrative and character. Still, one could argue that we do not have the right kind of evaluative relationship with fictional objects to justify that we have genuine emotions about them. Fictional characters may not be the kind of thing that we can genuinely care about, empathize with, feel sympathy for, etc. One might respond that we seem to care about and identify with fictional objects all the time. We feel very strongly for our favorite television, film, and literary heroes. We want them to succeed, and we feel frustrated, sad, or angry when they do not. This perspective ties back to the epistemic significance of emotional responses to fiction: whether it is appropriate or rational to care about fictional entities to begin with.

Further reading: Helm 2010; Huebner et al. 2009; LeDoux 1996; Loaiza forthcoming; Zajonc 1984.

3. Further puzzles

While the paradox of fiction still holds sway in contemporary research and thought, other interesting philosophical puzzles concerning fiction and emotions have gained prominence over the past several decades. This section introduces a few of them: the puzzle of imaginative resistance, the “sympathy for the devil” phenomenon, and the paradox of painful art. While not strictly puzzles concerning emotions, the puzzle of imaginative resistance and sympathy for the devil phenomenon is nevertheless related to emotional responses to fiction, insofar as emotions such as disgust, anger, or pride may coincide with, cause, or even constitute moral judgments (Prinz 2007; Nichols 2004; Slote 2009; Schroeder 2011; Gill 2007).

Near the conclusion of “Of the Standard of Taste”, David Hume makes several remarks on the moral status of fiction that are particularly relevant when thinking about emotional and moral responses to fiction:

[Where] the ideas of morality and decency alter from one age to another, and where vicious manners are described, without being marked with the proper characters of blame and disapprobation; this must be allowed to disfigure the poem, and to be a real deformity. I cannot, nor is it proper that I should, enter into such sentiments; and however I may excuse the poet, on account of the manners of his age, I never can relish the composition. And whatever indulgence we may give to the writer on account of his prejudices, we cannot prevail on ourself to enter into his sentiments, or bear an affection to characters, which we plainly discover to be blameable. The case is not the same with moral principles, as with speculative opinions of any kind. These are in continual flux and revolution. The son embraces a different system from the father. Nay, there scarcely is any man, who can boast of great constancy and uniformity in this particular. Whatever speculative errors may be found in the polite writings of any age or country, they detract but little from the value of those compositions. There needs but a certain turn of thought or imagination to make us enter into all the opinions, which then prevailed, and relish the sentiments or conclusions derived from them. But a very violent effort is requisite to change our judgment of manners, and excite sentiments of approbation or blame, love or hatred, different from those to which the mind from long custom has been familiarized (Hume 1757a, paragraph 32–33 [1994: 90–91]).

Hume’s statement here has been taken to capture an interesting puzzle about moral responses to fiction, what Tamar Gendler (2000) termed the puzzle of imaginative resistance . Although we may be willing to accept factual or metaphysical discrepancies in fiction, we may be loath to accept deviant moral values and practices that are treated positively by the work.

Several philosophers have pointed out that the puzzle of imaginative resistance if it is to be considered a puzzle at all (see Walton 2006), should be thought of as several discrete puzzles (Walton 2006; Weatherson 2004). The first is the aesthetic puzzle : if an artwork in some way embodies moral defects, do those defects detract from the aesthetic value of the work? Walton believes that this puzzle may be only indirectly related to moral resistance (Walton 2006).

Second, the fictionality puzzle states that there are certain propositions can or should be made fictional. Walton writes:

We easily accept that princes become frogs, or that people travel in time, in the world of a story, even, sometimes, that blatant contradictions are fictions. But we balk…at interpretations of stories of other fictions according to which it is fictional that (absent extraordinary circumstances) female infanticide is right and proper…or that a dumb knock-knock joke is actually hilarious. (2006: 140).

The fictionality puzzle concerns any sort of value judgment, not just moral ones. People may often deny that a value that they reject in the real world is correct in the fictional world (or vice versa). We may refuse to accept that the dumb knock-knock joke could possibly be funny, even in a fictional world. We may also be unable to accept that female infanticide is morally permissible in another world because we don’t believe that it is in ours.

Finally, the imaginative puzzle does not concern what is or is not fictional, but rather what we can or can’t imagine to begin with. We might be able to imagine a situation in which female infanticide is morally acceptable, even if we do not accept that it this could ever be fictionally true. Alternatively, we might not even be able to imagine that female infanticide is morally acceptable. We are unable to conceive of a world in which it is morally acceptable to kill one’s female child because she is female. In other words, the fictionality puzzle concerns what we can accept as true in the world of the work. The imaginative puzzle concerns the limits of our imagination.

Philosophers have responded to the puzzle(s) of imaginative resistance in several ways. Gendler (2000) argues that there are two basic ways to explain the imaginative puzzles: we can be “cantians”, “wontians”, or some hybrid of the two. Cantians about resistance argue that we are often unable to imagine certain kinds of impossibilities or evaluative deviances. Wontians hold that resistance arises because we are unwilling to imagine a situation in which a certain impossibility or deviance is acceptable. Gendler argues that imaginative barriers arise when the principles and background knowledge the reader has accepted in the story leave no way for the impossible or deviant proposition or situation to be true (Gendler 2006). This makes Gendler a cantian about the imaginative puzzle. We are unable to imagine some deviant moral scenarios. However, Gendler is a wontian concerning the fictionality puzzle. Even if we could imagine some deviant evaluative response in a fiction, we often will not allow ourselves to believe that the value judgment is true in the fiction. That is, we may be able to imagine that some moral or aesthetic value could conceivably differ from that we hold in the real world, but to actually imagine that, for instance, female infanticide is morally acceptable even in a fictional world would make some readers balk.

Walton takes the opposite approach: whereas Gendler is a cantian about the imaginative puzzle and a wontian about the fictionality one, he argues for the reverse (Walton 2006). I may not imagine a solid gold mountain or a round square, because I have an inability to imagine such a thing. The difficulty in imagining in these cases has to do with one’s imagistic and conceptual limitations. I do not imagine female infanticide is right, because I am unwilling to do so. So, Walton is a wontian when it comes to the imaginative puzzle (see also Moran 1994). Graham Priest (1997), another wontian, argues that we can understand stories that contain inconsistencies like both occupied and unoccupied boxes; if we do not imagine them, it is because we are unwilling to.

Further reading: Black & Barnes 2017; Flory 2013; Levy 2005; Liao 2016; Miyazono & Liao 2016; Nanay 2009; Tooming 2018; Tuna 2020; Stock 2005; Yablo 2002

Why do consumers of fiction find themselves drawn to morally deviant characters, whose real-life counterparts we would find abhorrent? Following Noël Carroll (2004 & 2008), we call this the sympathy for the devil phenomenon (hereafter, SDP). The SDP covers any of our pro-attitudes towards immoral or unlikeable fictional entities including, but not limited to, sympathy. Other pro-attitudes include emotions such as admiration, compassion, empathy, pity, pride, and joy. We may admire morally deviant characters for their wily ways or feel compassion for them once we learn of their difficult upbringing. Sometimes audiences come to feel pro-attitudes toward an anti-hero, a hero who is characterized by moral and personal flaws, but nevertheless is shown throughout a text or film to have sympathetic characteristics (Carroll 2008). Anne Eaton also describes the “Rough Hero”: a flawed protagonist whose flaws “are always moral, conspicuous and grievous” and whose flaws, in contrast with the anti-hero, are “an integral part of his person” (Eaton 2010: 516). It is often an aesthetic achievement, according to Eaton, for an artwork to get an audience to feel pro-attitudes toward Rough Heroes, whose character and actions ought to be reviled.

Philosophers have responded to the SDP in a variety of ways. One way to explain the SDP is to adopt a simulation/distinct attitude approach, along the lines of Gregory Currie (1997). One this view, we imagine or simulate moral propositions and judgments that we normally would not in our actual lives. This would allow us to feel (imaginary or make-believe) sympathy for a morally bad character, such as Milton’s Satan, Mad Men ’s Don Draper, or Breaking Bad ’s Walter White.

Matthew Kieran (2006 & 2010) points out that we can sympathize with an immoral character because we suppose that the character inhabits a fictional world that is quite different from our own. This fictional world encompasses a different land with different rules, including moral rules. Call this the distancing approach . Kieran contends that imaginative distancing amounts to a psychological distance between an audience and a devilish character (Kieran 2010). We feel free to allow ourselves to feel pity, compassion, and sympathy for someone like Hannibal Lecter or Milton’s Satan because of this psychological distance.

Carroll’s own view is that authors of fiction intend for their audiences to sympathize with a fictional character, and so create their work in such a way to achieve this end. Carroll calls this process “emotional prefocusing” (Carroll 2008; see also Smuts 2014). An author may intend for her audience to feel pro-attitudes toward a particular character. This character is often morally corrupt or deviant in some way but, for whatever reason, the author desires the reader to sympathize with her. So, the author “prefocuses” the work to highlight some of the character’s more morally positive attributes or goes to lengths to suggest ways that their behavior might be justified or excused. Our emotional responses to characters are often a matter of how a narrative is constructed and how the details of a story influence our feelings about particular characters. Carroll suggests that the reason we feel sympathy for Tony Soprano of The Sopranos , Tyrion Lannister of A Song of Ice and Fire , or Ethan Edwards in The Searchers is because, despite their flaws, they are morally better off than the other characters in the fiction. Tony is surrounded by an astonishing array of violent, manipulative, power-hungry mobsters. Tyrion is a clever, witty, well-meaning louse with rotten family members. Ethan Edwards is gruff and brutal, but also loyal and in possession of a certain code of honor. So, when we search the fictional world for an emotional allegiance, these are the characters we choose.

Another view holds that fascination is the key to understanding our pro-attitudes towards immoral, fictional characters (see also M. Smith 1999). Katie Tullmann (2016) argues that immoral characters in works of fiction are often attractive, interesting curiosities. Immoral characters are compelling, often more compelling than the more morally good characters. Take the Count of Monte Cristo: a revenge-driven, cruel, mysterious, and charming noble. Many readers probably think that the Count’s tactics of carefully planned revenge against those who had him imprisoned are not morally justified. Still, audiences are fascinated by immoral actions (consider also the recent popularity of the true crime genre). Readers are willing to imaginatively explore immoral actions in the safe environment of fiction (see Mar 2018 for a similar view). Perhaps we think that by taking an interest in this character we can expand our folk psychology to include the vengeful and obsessive mindset the Count represents. So, on this view, fascination is the pre-condition for our sympathy towards immoral characters. Audiences need to be fascinated by immoral characters before we feel sympathy for them. Fascination is achieved by how the character is portrayed in the narrative as possessing exotic and curious traits. Once this is achieved, other aspects of the narrative will cause us to feel sympathy for them.

Further reading: Clavel-Vázquez 2023; Dain 2021; Friend 2022; Harold 2008; Setiya 2010.

The ability of fiction to engage with an audience’s emotions is irrefutable. We seek out certain works of fiction for exactly this reason: to make us joyful, to make us laugh, to make us feel connected to others around us. Less intuitive, but no less deniable, is the idea that audiences seek out works of fiction that make them feel negative emotions such as sorrow or fear. Consider Hume, again, this time on tragedy:

It seems an unaccountable pleasure, which the spectators of a well-written tragedy receive from sorrow, terror, anxiety, and other passions, that are in themselves disagreeable and uneasy. The more they are touched and affected, the more are they delighted with the spectacle; and as soon as the uneasy passions cease to operate, the piece is at an end (1757b, paragraph 1 [1987: 216])

The “paradox” of painful art is just this: we seek out works of art with the intention of feeling negative emotions such as anger, sorrow, or fear, when we wouldn’t seek out comparable real-life situations. Indeed, people try to avoid these negative emotions as much as possible. Hume himself argued that the pleasures of the imagination and emotional expression outweigh the negative emotional responses such as sorrow—the former “predominates” over the latter. Susan Feagin (1983) argues that there are two types of (emotional) responses to fiction: direct responses and meta-responses. Feagin defines the meta-response as “how one feels about and what one thinks about one’s responding (directly) in the way one does to the qualities and content of the work” (1983: 97). Direct responses to tragedies are often negative: sorrow over the death of a beloved character; anxiety about the future of another character. The pleasure of tragedy, Feagin argues, stems from our meta-response to our direct, negative responses: we receive satisfaction from the fact that we are the kind of people that can feel anger, sorrow, fear, etc., and can respond negatively to moral ills in works of fiction.

Carroll (1990) posits another response to what he calls the paradox of horror: if horror fictions are characterized by fearful monsters and disgusting circumstances, why do many of us seek them out? Carroll states: “the imagery of horror fiction seems to be necessarily repulsive and, yet, the genre has no lack of consumers” (1990: 160). Like other forms of tragedy, works of horror fiction are both repulsive and attractive. One potential explanation for this puzzle is that audiences can experience all the terror of horrifying situations but with none of the personal risk (1990: 167). The emotion is “detached” from reality. Carroll’s own account is that works of horror are constructed in a way to engage other emotions, in addition to fear and disgust—namely, fascination with the imagery and plot structures that surround the fearful elements.

Each of the additional puzzles concerning emotions about fiction highlights the curious ways in which an audience’s emotional responses to fiction belie one’s endorsed moral beliefs about the actual world in which we live. The puzzles continue to hold sway in our cultural understanding of the importance of fictional artworks. Relationships with fictional entities are often deeply important to us—consider the widespread emotional responses to scenes like the “Red Wedding” in the Game of Thrones television show, or the death of a certain prominent character in the final season of the show Succession . Such responses implicate and reveal our deepest values and beliefs. It is no wonder, then, that philosophers continually try to explain and, indeed, justify these emotions’ appropriateness and authenticity.

Further reading: Bantinaki 2012; Contesi 2016; Gaut 1993; Friend 2007; Schwarz 2022; Smuts 2009.

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How to cite this entry . Preview the PDF version of this entry at the Friends of the SEP Society . Look up topics and thinkers related to this entry at the Internet Philosophy Ontology Project (InPhO). Enhanced bibliography for this entry at PhilPapers , with links to its database.
  • Tugendstein, Gabriel Thomas, 2022, “What should we do about problematic characters and their bad fans?” , blog post at Aesthetics for Birds
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Brilliantio

Emotional Writing: 36 Prompts for Expressive and Impactful Content

By: Author Paul Jenkins

Posted on August 30, 2023

Categories Writing , Creative Writing

If you’re a writer, you know that the goal of writing is to connect with your readers. One of the best ways to do that is through emotional writing.

Emotional writing is all about evoking strong feelings in your readers. When readers can connect with the emotions of a character in a story, they are more likely to become invested in the story through the end.

Understanding emotional writing is crucial for any writer who wants to create a meaningful connection with their readers. Emotional writing is not just about making readers feel happy or sad. It’s about creating an emotional connection that lasts long after the story is over.

It’s about making readers feel like they are a part of the story. Emotional writing can be used in any genre, from romance to horror to science fiction.

If you want to master emotional writing, you need to learn the techniques that will help you create an emotional connection with your readers. There are many different techniques that you can use, from using sensory language to creating relatable characters. By mastering these techniques, you can create stories that will stay with your readers long after they’ve finished reading.

Key Takeaways

  • Emotional writing is all about evoking strong feelings in your readers and creating an emotional connection that lasts long after the story is over.
  • Understanding emotional writing is crucial for any writer who wants to create a meaningful connection with their readers.
  • To master emotional writing, you need to learn the techniques that will help you create an emotional connection with your readers, such as using sensory language and creating relatable characters.

36 Prompts to Spark Emotional Writing

Prompts can be an excellent way to unlock your writing inspiration when it comes to emotional writing. Here are a series of ideas, grouped by emotion:

Happiness 😊

  • Write about a happy memory from childhood
  • Describe a time you felt pure joy
  • List things that make you smile

Sadness 😢

  • Write a letter to your younger self about a time you were hurting
  • Describe a loss that had a big impact on you
  • List things that help lift you when you’re feeling down

Anger 😠

  • Write about a time you felt wronged
  • Describe a situation that makes your blood boil
  • List healthy ways to express anger

Fear 😨

  • Write about an irrational fear you have
  • Describe a scary experience from your past
  • List things that help you feel safe and comforted

Disappointment 😞

  • Write about a time you felt let down
  • Describe a situation where you didn’t meet your own expectations
  • List ways to reframe disappointment into opportunity

Jealousy 😒

  • Write about a time you felt envious of someone else’s success
  • Describe a situation that brought out your competitive side
  • List ways to feel genuinely happy for others

Embarrassment 😳

  • Write about an awkward memory that makes you cringe
  • Describe a time you really embarrassed yourself
  • List things that help you laugh at yourself

Pride 😌

  • Write about an accomplishment you feel proud of
  • Describe a time someone made you feel valued
  • List your unique strengths and talents

Gratitude 😊

  • Write a thank you letter to someone important to you
  • Describe a simple pleasure you’re grateful for
  • List small joys you want to appreciate more

Love ❤️

  • Write about someone who means the world to you
  • Describe what unconditional love feels like
  • List ways to show love in your daily life

Hope 😌

  • Write about a dream you have for the future
  • Describe a time you overcame a challenge
  • List reasons to remain optimistic

Inspiration 💡

  • Write about someone who motivates you
  • Describe a time you felt deeply inspired
  • List things that spark creativity for you

Understanding Emotional Writing

Emotional writing is a form of writing that evokes strong feelings in the reader. It is a way of conveying emotions through written words. In this section, we will explore the basics of emotional writing and the importance of emotional writing.

Basics of Emotional Writing

Emotional writing is all about creating an emotional connection with the reader. To achieve this, you need to use language that is evocative and descriptive.

You need to describe the emotions that your characters are feeling in a way that the reader can relate to.

This can be achieved through the use of metaphors, similes, and sensory details.

One of the most important aspects of emotional writing is character development. You need to create characters that are relatable and have a depth of emotion.

This means that you need to understand your characters’ motivations and desires, as well as their fears and insecurities.

By doing so, you can create characters that feel like real people, and the reader can empathize with them.

Importance of Emotional Writing

Emotional writing is important because it can make your writing more engaging and memorable. When readers feel emotionally connected to a story, they are more likely to remember it.

Emotional writing can also create a sense of catharsis for the reader, allowing them to experience emotions that they may not have felt in their own lives.

Emotional writing can also be therapeutic for the writer. Writing about emotions can help you process your own feelings and experiences. It can also be a way of exploring different perspectives and gaining a deeper understanding of the human experience.

In conclusion, emotional writing is a powerful tool that can be used to create a strong emotional connection between the writer and the reader.

By understanding the basics of emotional writing and its importance, you can create writing that is engaging, memorable, and meaningful.

Techniques for Emotional Writing

Here are some techniques that can help you write emotional scenes that will stay with your readers long after they have finished reading your work:

Show, Don’t Tell

One of the most effective ways to convey emotion is to show, not tell. Instead of telling your readers that a character is feeling sad or angry, show them through the character’s actions, thoughts, and dialogue.

For example, if a character is feeling sad, you can describe how they slump their shoulders, avoid eye contact, and speak in a quiet voice.

Use of Language and Dialogue

The language you use in your writing can also help you create an emotional connection with your readers. Use powerful, descriptive words that evoke strong emotions in your readers.

For example, instead of saying a character is “angry,” you can use words like “furious,” “enraged,” or “livid.”

Dialogue is another powerful tool for conveying emotion. Use realistic, authentic dialogue that reflects how people actually speak. This can help your readers feel like they are eavesdropping on a real conversation, which can make the emotional impact of the scene even more powerful.

Creating Authentic Characters

Creating authentic, believable characters is crucial for emotional writing. Your characters should have flaws, fears, and desires that make them relatable to your readers. This can help your readers empathize with your characters and feel emotionally invested in their story.

Effective Use of Imagery

Imagery is another powerful tool for emotional writing. Use sensory details to help your readers experience the emotions along with your characters.

For example, describing the smell of the rain during a sad moment can help your readers feel the character’s sadness. Sensory details ground the reader in the moment, which can make them feel it more.

In conclusion, emotional writing is all about creating a connection between your readers and your characters.

Types of Emotional Writing

When it comes to emotional writing, there are several different types of writing that can utilize emotions to create a powerful impact on the reader.

Here are some of the most common types of emotional writing:

Writing Emotions in Fiction

Fiction is one of the most popular genres for emotional writing. This is because in fiction, the writer has complete control over the characters and the situations they find themselves in. This means that the writer can create scenarios that are designed to evoke specific emotions in the reader.

Whether it’s a heart-wrenching love story or a thrilling action sequence, fiction can be a great way to explore emotions.

Emotional Writing in Nonfiction

Nonfiction may not seem like an obvious choice for emotional writing, but it can be just as effective as fiction. In fact, nonfiction can be even more powerful because it deals with real-life situations and experiences.

Whether it’s a memoir, a personal essay, or a self-help book, nonfiction can be a great way to explore emotions and connect with readers on a deeper level.

Script and Novel Writing

Script and novel writing are similar to fiction in that they allow the writer to create characters and situations that can evoke emotions in the reader. However, script and novel writing can also be more challenging because they require a strong plot and well-developed characters.

This means that the writer must be able to balance the emotional content with the overall story arc.

Poetry and Emotional Writing

Poetry is perhaps the most obvious choice for emotional writing. The very nature of poetry is to evoke emotions through language and imagery.

Whether it’s a sonnet, a haiku, or a free verse poem, poetry can be a powerful tool for exploring emotions and connecting with readers on a deep level.

No matter what type of writing you choose, emotional writing can be a powerful way to connect with readers and create a lasting impact. By exploring the different types of emotional writing, you can find the style that works best for you and your message.

Creating an Emotional Connection with Readers

To create an emotional connection with your readers, you need to engage them, evoke emotion, and build anticipation.

Engaging the Reader

Engaging the reader is the first step in creating an emotional connection. You need to capture their attention and keep them interested in your writing.

One way to do this is to start with a hook that draws them in. You can use a question, a quote, or a startling fact to grab their attention.

Another way to engage your reader is to use vivid descriptions and sensory details. This helps them to visualize what you are writing about and makes the experience more real and tangible.

You can also use anecdotes and personal stories to make your writing more relatable and connect with readers on a personal level.

Evoking Emotion

The key to emotional writing is to evoke emotion in your readers. You need to make them feel something, whether it is happiness, sadness, anger, or fear.

To do this, you need to use descriptive language that paints a picture in their minds.

One way to evoke emotion is to use metaphors and similes. These comparisons can help readers to understand complex emotions and situations.

You can also use repetition and parallelism to create a sense of rhythm and emotion in your writing.

Turning Pages: Building Anticipation

Finally, to create an emotional connection with your readers, you need to build anticipation. You want them to keep reading and turning the pages to find out what happens next.

One way to do this is to use cliffhangers and plot twists that keep them guessing.

You can also use foreshadowing to hint at what is to come and create a sense of anticipation. This can be done through subtle hints and clues that are woven throughout your writing.

By building anticipation, you can keep your readers engaged and emotionally invested in your writing.

Mastering Emotional Writing

Emotional writing is about diving into the heart of your characters, understanding their joys and sorrows, and portraying these feelings so authentically that your readers cannot help but feel them too.

Here are some techniques to help you master emotional writing:

Writing from Personal Experience

One of the most effective ways to write emotionally is to draw from your own experiences. Think about a time when you felt a strong emotion, such as love, anger, or fear. Use that experience as a starting point for your writing.

By drawing on your own emotions, you can create characters and situations that feel authentic and relatable.

Observation and Awareness

Another way to write emotionally is to observe the world around you. Pay attention to the people you meet, the places you go, and the things you see. Notice the details that make them unique and interesting.

By observing the world with awareness, you can create characters and situations that feel real and vivid.

Distancing and Perspective

Sometimes, it can be difficult to write emotionally when you’re too close to the subject matter. In these cases, it can be helpful to create some distance and perspective.

Try writing from the perspective of someone else, such as a friend or family member. This can help you see the situation in a new light and create more emotional depth in your writing.

In conclusion, emotional writing is a powerful tool that can help you connect with your readers on a deeper level. By mastering emotional writing, you can create impactful stories that resonate with your audience.

To become a master of emotional writing, it’s important to understand the power of emotions and how to use them effectively in your writing.

You should also learn how to create characters that are relatable and evoke emotions in your readers.

Additionally, it’s important to understand the impact that your writing can have on your readers. Emotional writing can be a powerful way to inspire, motivate, and even change people’s lives.

Overall, emotional writing is an essential skill for any writer who wants to create impactful stories that resonate with readers.

By mastering emotional writing, you can create stories that are not only entertaining but also meaningful and inspiring.

Frequently Asked Questions

How to write emotions in text.

To write emotions in text, you need to use descriptive words that evoke a feeling in the reader. Use sensory details such as sight, sound, smell, taste, and touch to paint a vivid picture of the emotion you want to convey. It’s also important to show, not tell, the emotion by using actions and dialogue that demonstrate how the character is feeling.

How to write emotions in a story?

To write emotions in a story, you need to create characters that are relatable and have realistic emotions. Use the same techniques as writing emotions in text, but also make sure to give your characters a backstory and motivation for their feelings. Use the plot to create situations that will naturally evoke emotions in the characters, and make sure to show the consequences of those emotions.

What is expressive writing?

Expressive writing is a form of writing that focuses on expressing your emotions and thoughts. It can be used as a therapeutic tool to help you process and cope with difficult experiences. To practice expressive writing, set aside time to write about your feelings and thoughts without worrying about grammar or structure. The goal is to let your emotions flow freely onto the page.

How to write an emotional essay?

To write an emotional essay, you need to choose a topic that is personal and meaningful to you. Use descriptive language to paint a picture of the experience or person you are writing about, and use storytelling techniques to create a narrative that evokes emotions in the reader. Make sure to connect the emotions to a larger theme or message that you want to convey.

What is an example of an emotional word?

An example of an emotional word is “heartbroken.” This word immediately evokes a feeling of sadness and loss. Other emotional words include “ecstatic,” “terrified,” “nostalgic,” “enraged,” and “grateful.”

How do you convey overwhelming emotions in writing?

To convey overwhelming emotions in writing, use strong sensory details and vivid language to create a visceral experience for the reader. Use short, choppy sentences to mimic the feeling of being overwhelmed, and use repetition to emphasize the intensity of the emotion. Make sure to balance the intensity with moments of relief or release to prevent the reader from becoming too overwhelmed themselves.

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writing fiction emotion

Estimated reading time: 9 minutes

The sense of completion, wonder, and elation when you finish the first draft of your story is often followed by a deep sense of uncertainty. Is it any good? What needs work? What happens next?

Table of Contents: • Before you self-edit • From finished draft to reader-ready • Step 1: Prepare • Step 2: Evaluate your story • Step 3: Focus on prose • Embrace the self-editing process

Whether you are considering traditional or self-publishing , you want to ensure your story is the best it can be before taking the next steps. Following a systematic self-editing process will give you confidence that your story is ready to share.

Before you self-edit

Before you begin self-editing your fiction story, consider the following.

Know your audience

Consider your readers. As you work through the self-editing process, your understanding of your audience will inform your choices. In the end, your deeper understanding can help build a more authentic connection with your reader.

Know your story

You are already the master of your story. Self-editing will help make you more confident in your choices. As you embark on the process and get feedback from others, your knowledge of your story will help you make changes that can deepen and improve the narrative.

Stay open to learning

Self-editing fiction offers opportunities for growth. A deeper understanding of writing techniques and your genre will inform your future writing. Indulge in the craft of editing — you may even discover you love it! There are a plethora of craft books and resources; devote time to researching and find inspiration.

Use technology

One of the most difficult aspects of self-editing fiction is keeping an objective view. There are technological options that can help you stay objective, save time, stay organized, and make steps in this process easier. Take some time to explore some of the great options in editing software .

Prepare for a professional edit

Your experience with self-editing can be hugely helpful when you work with a professional editor . You will better understand their feedback and will be more capable when it comes to turning their suggestions into revisions.

From finished draft to reader-ready

Self-editing fiction follows three essential steps:

  • Prepare. Set yourself up for success
  • Focus on story. Strengthen the structure
  • Focus on prose. Edit language and style

Step 1: Prepare

Take a break.

The first thing you should do is step away and give yourself space from your work. You and the story have spent a lot of time together. Celebrate this amazing achievement, just do it away from the story. Finding objectivity will be easier with some separation from your finished manuscript.

Remember your readers

Before you dive into your self-edit, take some time to better understand what your readers enjoy in the books they choose. What other books does your target audience enjoy? Have you read one of those lately? Use this time to change your perspective from writer to reader. What moves you as a reader? What’s keeping you turning the page?

Set a deadline

It can be easy to find reasons why you think your story isn’t ready to be shared — don’t let this time away cause you to lose momentum. Working with a set deadline will help you stay focused and motivated. Even if the deadline you set is only for you, use it to keep you on track.

Step 2: Evaluate your story

Grab your objective editor hat and your creative writer chapeau. Keep them close. This step is hard work, but it’s where so much of the magic happens and is where you’ll gain confidence that your story is structurally strong and ready to captivate your readers.

Before you make any changes to your manuscript, construct a revision plan. This document will help you keep track of structural issues and include notes to make each scene stronger. Make notes of all the places where you could move, add, revise, cut, or split scenes and chapters.

Make note of any inconsistencies you find or scenes that don’t work. Jot down every new idea and change you could make to improve clarity or add depth. Don’t do anything yet. You are just making a plan and coming up with creative changes.

How you do this is up to you. Some writers have one document with all the larger structural issues and a separate one for specific scene notes. Some like a fresh new notebook full of post-it notes they can move around. Others like to track changes in a spreadsheet. Fictionary works for me. I’ve let go of spreadsheets and post-it notes thanks to this software that gives me control and support through my structural edit.

Make a promise (well… two)

There are two promises that will set you up for success as you travel through this edit.

First, promise, I will keep my editor hat on until my revision plan is complete.

Editing is about evaluation. It’s about analyzing the overall structure and the scene-level structure to see what’s working and what needs revision. When you are editing, you are not revising. They are two different steps. Do not yet make changes to your manuscript. You are a READER.

This promise is going to help save you time and make your story strong.

Your second promise is your story promise. At Fictionary, we call it your skeleton blurb . Your skeleton blurb is not for your readers, it’s a tool that will help you stay laser-focused as you self-edit. It is your story at its very essence.

A skeleton blurb looks like this: (Protagonist) must (story goal) otherwise (story stakes).

Don’t let its simplicity fool you: this is a powerful tool. Let’s examine JRR Tolkien’s skeleton blurb for The Lord of the Rings : Frodo Baggins must destroy the ring of power, otherwise Sauron will rule Middle Earth. Or, Suzanne Collins’ The Hunger Games : Katniss Everdeen must win the Hunger Games, otherwise she will die and her family will starve without her.

Keep your skeleton blurb close while you edit. You may refine it while you are editing if you think you have it wrong — it is another touchstone for you and your story.

Story arc when self-editing fiction

As writers, we sometimes balk at formulas and rules. We are creative! But, just as we depend on the bones that make up our skeleton to support our bodies, a solid framework helps all great stories stand strong.

There is a wide range of structures and frameworks to choose from, and this is where I think Fictionary really helps. What makes the Fictionary Story Arc stand out is its simplicity, flexibility, and strength. Based on extensive research on story structure, the Fictionary Story Arc uses five pivotal plot points to weave your narrative around.

  • Inciting Incident. The event that disrupts your protagonist’s ordinary world.
  • Plot Point 1. When your protagonist accepts the story goal.
  • Middle Plot Point. Where your protagonist shifts from reactive to active engagement.
  • Plot Point 2. Your protagonist’s lowest moment; all hope seems lost.
  • Climax. Your protagonist addressed the story goal, either successfully or not.

Scene-by-scene editing

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Here are some key questions you should be asking in every scene:

  • Is it clear whose point of view (POV) this scene is from? If you have multiple characters telling your story, you need to make sure your reader knows whose voice they are hearing.
  • Does that POV character have a clear scene goal? Their goal should be tangible and there should be some risk that they won’t reach it. By the scene climax, the reader will know if the character attained the goal.
  • Is your POV character getting closer to their overall story goal? Every scene should move your character closer to or further from their overall story goal; otherwise, why is it there?
  • Is this the strongest scene goal? Just like your story skeleton blurb, a scene blurb shows the strength of your scene. The POV character must (scene goal), otherwise (what if goal fails/stakes). Write your scene blurb for every scene.
  • Is there tension/conflict? Consider the journey of your POV character. What obstacles are put in the way? What tension and conflict are encountered on the way to that goal?
  • Is your scene structure strong? Just like those story arc scenes build the framework for your story, these elements show the strong structure of your scene.
  • Have you immersed your reader in the story world? In each scene, notice what senses are being used. Using at least three senses builds the world for the reader. The POV character is guiding us through the world in this scene.

It’s time to get back to writing! Follow a plan for your revisions. Start with the larger issues first. If you are cutting scenes, changing protagonists, or altering your POV strategy, do this first.

Then, work through your scenes and revise only the weak areas. At this point, don’t worry about beautiful prose. That’s coming soon. Following your revision plan will help you know that you have implemented the necessary structural changes.

Step 3: Focus on prose

Your revised manuscript is structurally strong. You focused on strengthening weak areas without worrying about the beauty of your prose. Now you’re ready for the next step. Take time to enjoy another pass through your story with that writer chapeau sitting jauntily on your head. Enjoy reading each scene and adjusting your prose. Take a moment to hear your characters’ voices. Make changes and feel your writer’s voice throughout the story. Let your reading and writing flow.

Now, you are ready for the wonderful world of copy editing . In full creative mode, we sometimes lose sight of correct grammar and usage. Bring out your editor hat and your red pen. It’s time to analyze every sentence carefully.

  • Consistency and correctness. Take the time to brush up on your grammar rules and decide on the style guide you will use. Take advantage of the many technological tools out there to help you perfect your prose. I use ProWritingAid to give me the support I need in knowing the rules, offering options, and helping me to be consistent in my choices.
  • Style and word choice. As you delve deeper into copy editing, keep track of your personal style choices. A professional style guide like the Chicago Manual can be a start. Clean prose makes the reader’s experience seamless. They can get lost in your story. Copy editing ensures you are communicating cleanly and clearly.

Embrace the self-editing process

I believe we write the first draft for ourselves — it is the story we want to read. Sometimes, characters whisper in our ears. Snatches of moments, scenes, and settings urge us to write, to build a new world. Driven to create, we find ourselves holding pages of a story pulled from our minds, and often, our hearts.

Editing and revision are how the story grows and matures. This is for your readers. After all, writing is communication. Sharing will give your story life, and we want our characters to find their people, we want our story to touch others — to entertain, enlighten, terrify, and touch hearts and minds.

You have the creativity and the power to shape and shine your draft into a polished story readers will love. Self-editing fiction is a necessity for your story and your readers, and gets your manuscript ready for a final professional edit and proofreading.

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