As I’ve been on my self-education journey as a writer, I’ve been reading a lot of books. One of the first ones I delved into was Writing the Heart of Your Story by C.S. Lakin. In the very first chapter, Lakin lays it on the line:
The whole point of a story is to evoke emotion.
This stopped me in my tracks. Because I hadn’t really been thinking about storytelling this way. I’d been approaching it as a purely intellectual exercise. What is the character observing, sensing, seeing? What is happening in the story from scene to scene?
But I was failing to always bring in emotion. It was beginning to show in the critiques I was getting back. In a story I wrote about a teenager smelling the first smoke of a nearby wildfire, my protagonist checked the news, looked outside for signs of danger, then took a shower and carried on with her evening.
“She’s a bit of a cold fish,” one of my crit partners observed.
In other stories, characters would interact with each other: misunderstanding each other, giving advice, confronting each other about past injuries. The dialog was sharp and punchy, but I kept forgetting to linger on the aftermath of a revelation. “How does she feel when he says that?” my readers would provoke.
A local writing coach I work with, Bronwyn Emery, points out that in every good story, emotion must evolve. You start the narrative sad, and you end it happy—or the other way around. For novels, it takes the entire book to make this transformation; for short stories, it should happen in a single scene. The emotion drives the character’s motivation, which moves the story forward.
Conveying more emotion in stories
I’ve started mapping my protagonist’s emotional journey as a parallel “beat sheet” to the story’s plot. What’s happening right now, and how is the character feeling about it? I’ve also started paying closer attention to how authors show emotion in the books I’m reading, as well as how directors evoke it in TV and movies. (I recently finished the three-season show Somebody, Somewhere, and found myself on the edge of my sofa, hands in the air, wanting so hard for the main character to open herself up to the man she likes; the build-up, pain, sadness, and hope that scene stirred up in me is my guiding light for writing the perfect emotional scene!)
Conveying how a character feels isn’t always easy. You can show it in dialog and facial expressions, but to really convey emotion you have to get into the person’s inner thoughts, and there are only so many ways to communicate those. Saying “She felt sad” falls flat. And flip-flopping stomachs, hearts in throats, tears in eyes, and spinning heads can start to feel clichéd if you use them too many times.
Because this part of writing doesn’t come naturally to me, I have to go back through my drafts and infuse the story with emotion in the places it’s missing—reactions, revelations, plot turns, climaxes. Here are a few examples of how I’ve been trying to write emotion by complementing internal feelings with physical reactions and external detail:
Her anger flared so ferociously that she could have up-ended the table, smeared salad dressing on his face, tossed her tea at him. “You’re crazy. Do you know that? Is that why you invited me here? To talk shit?”
After chicken and potato salad, they lay back on the dock. For the first time in more than a month, Penn felt satiated and content. Hopeful. The sun sank gradually, then plunged behind the horizon, leaving behind a glorious peach and purple sky.
A gust of wind rattles the bedroom window, a hint of it slipping in around the edges. Tessa returns to Dorian’s bed, slides under the comforter, and pulls it up over her nose. She only means to stay for a minute or two, just to warm up, but cocooning in Dorian’s bed scintillates her, feels illicit and dangerous. She breathes in the herbal and cottony traces of him.
I begin to tremble, both terrified I’ll fall backwards and enraged at this punk taunting me from my own rooftop. My body breaks out in a fiery sweat. I’m paralyzed, stuck between inching my way back down and scrambling blindly up to strangle this shithead who’s invaded my peaceful home.
Lakin teaches that "telling" a character's emotion must be in character: "If it’s in character for your character to think like that, then, by all means, do so. What kind of character would name her emotion? One that has enough self-awareness to be able to identify what she is feeling. Or at least try to identify. Or want to identify her emotion."
Of course, the key to all this is to learn to capture how I feel emotion. It isn’t lost on me that I “forgot” to add emotion in my storytelling—so busy moving my characters through the plot that I neglected to check in with them when it really mattered—and that maybe I forget to check in with myself sometimes too. This article discusses the importance of keeping a journal, not just to write down ideas and observations but to getting better at analyzing feelings. Emotion makes a great story, but it’s also pretty important for life.
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