In a post on Jane Friedman’s blog, Susan DeFreitas offers advice for getting emotion on the page. “People often don’t remember the plots of the novels they love, but they absolutely do remember how those books made them feel,” she says. But how do you create those emotions in your reader?
According to DeFreitas, some elements work together to create this alchemy: The story’s stakes, backstory of the characters, the closeness of their relationships, and the protagonist’s thoughts, actions, and dialogue. But there’s more!
One key element is writing the character experiencing the emotion in the moment, without distancing the reader from the scene. Often, even excellent writers will rely on trite phrasing like “She was stunned” or “She felt angry.” Neither is likely to evoke the emotion in the reader. Generally, people don’t identify emotions as they feel them, and sometimes can’t pinpoint exactly what they felt until they have time to reflect. “Those words—angry, sad—are the sort of labels we apply to our feelings after we’ve had a chance to process them,” DeFreitas explains. “The feelings themselves are much more immediate and visceral.”
To put your reader into the scene, you have to describe their emotional response without hitting the reader over the head by naming it directly. DeFreitas offers two tips for managing that trick:
- Body language. A tried and true approach for writers, as we have all experienced the physical sensations that go along with fear, anger, stress, and joy. Go too far with this technique and your writing will veer into melodrama, but body language remains indispensable.
- Internal narrative. DeFreitas says a stronger approach is internal narrative, the thoughts your character processes during an emotional scene. While body language can convey emotion, thoughts put the reader into the character’s head and thereby into the scene. “These sorts of thoughts are part our internal narration—the story we tell ourselves about ourselves, and about what’s going on in our life,” DeFreitas writes. “Internal narration does a lot to show the reader the meaning the character takes from the event being related, which helps to keep us clearly in that person’s POV—and helps us to feel exactly what they’re feeling.”
Finally, DeFreitas suggests combining these tactics to create the strongest association for the reader. Master this technique, and you’ll never have to tell a reader your hero is sad.
