In a post on Writer Unboxed, Susan DeFreitas offers advice for conveying emotion on the page. “It’s one of the most magical properties of fiction, the way we can share in the emotions of an entirely imagined character—and understand the emotions of the people that person encounters in the story,” she writes. “We might forget their plots, but we never forget how they made us feel, and how they made us feel is what made us want to become writers ourselves.”
At the ground floor, avoid simply telling your reader what’s happening with your character. “John felt sad,” or “Julia was furious,” are terrible ways to portray emotion. “Rather than allowing the reader to experience that emotion for herself, these sorts of overt statements tend to create a sense of distance from the character’s POV—the sense that we’re looking at what they’re feeling from a distance, rather than feeling it for ourselves,” DeFreitas says.
Instead, use your character’s thoughts to show their emotion so that the reader can experience them simultaneously. Body language and physical responses can also carry emotion, especially when you need to portray the feelings of non-POV characters. “That means including body language that indicates how they’re feeling, as well as whatever they’re saying via dialogue,” DeFrietas says.
