Feel all the feels

Why emotion on the page has to live in the body, not the brain

Because I’m always all up in my own head, overthinking all my problems, my therapist always reminds me I need to come back into my body.

How does it feel in your body? she asks. Does that emotion have a shape? A color? A smell?

So, yes, that’s how I ultimately discovered I have a giant, purple, boulder-shaped furry monster of grief and shame plunking around in my gut.

But it’s also a good reminder to me as a writer that feelings must be felt. For feelings to count, we have to make them visceral and sensory. And they have to show up anywhere in our bodies except in our monkey brains.

The detachment of thought verbs

Recently, I had a crit partner call me on how I’ve been keeping a main character at arm’s length from the reader. Paul, my protagonist, over-intellectualizes things—that’s one of his character traits. But my crit partner pointed out: “As a reader, I feel outside Paul, not inside him. I don’t experience along with him. I get the ‘analysis of him.’” She reminded me that even if he’s up in his own head, he’s feeling too—and as his narrator, I’m not doing a good job of helping readers feel along with him.

Here’s an example of a passage she called out:

He remembers when Nicole went through a Marie Kondo phase before Covid, filling up their cars with baby gear, CDs, photo albums, and old camping gear to eliminate their house of unnecessary clutter. The elimination of the junk in some ways had felt like a relief, but it also left Paul feeling a little empty.

“I’d like to feel this, not be told about it,” she told me. “It’s a summary. It keeps the reader at arm’s length.”

Author C.S. Lewis once wrote to a fan: “Don’t use adjectives which merely tell us how you want us to feel about the things you are describing. I mean, instead of telling us a thing was ‘terrible,’ describe it so that we’ll be terrified. Don’t say it was ‘delightful’; make us say ‘delightful’ when we’ve read the description.”

In other words, the job isn’t to report the emotion — it’s to engineer the conditions under which the reader produces the emotion themselves. That’s a completely different task.

Chuck Palahniuk, in his now-famous 2013 essay on craft, recommended banning what he calls “thought verbs” entirely — words like thinks, knows, understands, realizes, believes, wants, remembers — in favor of “specific sensory detail: action, smell, taste, sound, and feeling.” Thought verbs summarize, and summarizing is the enemy of experience.

Get into the body

Emotion lives in the body before it lives in language. So the first move is almost always physical.

So I must ask myself: what happens in this character’s body when they feel this? The throat tightens. The hands go still. The character notices the wrong things, hyperfocusing on a mundane detail while something enormous is happening around them. There’s an example of this in my novel The Pearl Farmers, in the moments after the character Anna’s husband walks out on his family:

Anna sat at the kitchen table for an hour after Bran walked out the door that night, her eyes locked on the jaunty, Dutch wooden wall clock, a wedding gift from one of Bran’s relatives. The children looked at their plates, then followed her eyes to the clock. For the first time Anna noticed the meticulously drawn eyelashes of each cartoonish bluebird, the strange pleats painted into each heart. The lines were all she could see. Each stroke so deliberate, yet without logic.Every moment after that was like one of those brushstrokes. She took one at a time, moving forward, but without a sense of where she was going. Two years plodded by. With each step she felt like she wouldn’t be able to take another. And then she did.

Of course, the “show, don’t tell” rule can sometimes get oversimplified by emerging writers, to the point that we misunderstand, believing that every emotion must be acted out.

“The warning against telling leads to a confusion that causes novice writers to think that everything should be acted out—don’t tell us a character is happy, show us how she screams ‘yay’ and jumps up and down for joy—when in fact the responsibility of showing should be assumed by the energetic and specific use of language,” explained Francine Prose in her book Reading Like a Writer.

Precision is the key: choosing words that create sensation rather than words that describe sensation. The goal isn’t a pantomime of emotion—it’s language so specific and alive that the reader feels something move in their chest without quite knowing why.

Another one of my crit partners, Jasmine B. Sandoval, recently published the brilliant book The Writer’s Rx, to help writers improve how they can write and evoke feelings. Jasmine is a nurse who educates writers about how emotions show up physiologically—and how we can get specific and accurate in how the brain, hormones, glands heart, or lungs might react to situations. These body cues can not only suck readers into the moment, they can help build a character’s specific personality.

One of my favorite parts of Jasmine’s advice is how we can use the science of empathy to transfer the character’s emotion over to the reader, who will mirror the character’s emotions when the writing is specific and relatable enough. “Readers are basically emotional freeloaders, hitching a ride through their favorite characters’ chaos…” she writes. “So go on, feed their addiction. Give them the drama, the tears, the spicy heartbreak smorgasbord.”

Rewriting for more feeling

So, how should I rewrite the passage above that’s leaving my readers detached? Here’s my first shot at it:

Before Covid, Nicole read Marie Kondo’s book and spent several weekends in a row filling up the trunks of the car with items that no longer “sparked joy:” baby gear stained with milk spit-up, crates of CDs abandoned in favor of digital streaming, camping gear still covered in dirt from the last hiking trip they’d taken together, years before Gillian was born. After she carted them away, Paul had lingered in the doors of the closets, breathing in the liberating new space opened up in their home and lives. Still, for a few weeks afterwards a dull heaviness hung around in his gut, a vague sense of loss he couldn’t quite explain. All that junk had just been things. Yet, they’d been his life.

What do you think? I’d love feedback on what I could do even better.