How to Convey Emotion in Your Writing | Writing Tips

hey guys it's shaylen and i'm here today with another writing video today we're going to be talking about writing emotion it's pretty rare if ever that you'll be writing a piece at least a piece of creative work where there won't be at least one emotion involved to some extent at some point probably more of them the writing of emotion is a pretty critical part of fiction writing creative writing in general the specific focus of this is not how to make your writing more emotional it's not like how to make things sadder how to make things more exciting or more intense it's to talk about how to actually convey emotion you know emotion is critical in a novel you'll probably have a long string of emotional responses based on the events of the plot with probably some kind of central emotions that build the tone of the story in a shorter piece like in a short story you're more likely to have like a central emotion that is explored in the piece and that kind of colors the whole piece rather than a wide emotional range so let's just jump into it the first point that i wanted to talk about is about specificity it's always about specificity on this channel and it's to specify your emotions there are obviously broad emotions that we're familiar with like there's anger and there's sadness and there's joy these are words that have definitions that we are aware of but in the context of fiction and honestly in the context of our lives there is more to an emotion than just what emotion it is in every emotion that you convey in a story that emotion has a specific emotional context that informs it and kind of makes it a more unique specific emotion it's not just anger it's the character is feeling anger because a certain thing happened to the character which makes them feel maybe cheated in this specific situation which is maybe an emotion that they have felt before and it links back to specific events in their backstory anytime a person or in this case a character feels an emotion there's a lot more at work there's a whole array of factors from their whole life their current situation that boil down into this specific little emotional potion you want to think about that specific emotional potion and not just say it's this emotion but know all the factors going into the emotion and what influences how is it how it is felt and how it is experienced to that character in that moment there's no such thing as just like a blanket feeling of sadness that everyone who has ever experienced sadness in any instance has felt in the exact same way don't just ask yourself what's the emotion ask yourself what's the specific emotional situation every emotion that is felt by a character has a cause and it has an effect and those are all part of that little emotional potion now i'm going to next talk about what i think is the most general advice when it comes to writing emotion i wanted to include it because i wanted to get it out of the way and because i do have points that build off of it any article on writing emotion it's going to say this and it's don't label the emotion because this is a form of telling you know this is classic show don't tell right instead of a character saying i feel sad we would describe a feeling of sadness we would show them being sad i do want to draw your attention to a very common pitfall when applying this advice it's something that when i look back at like my teenage writing i did all the time and i clearly thought i was being very clever with my words um i wasn't if you describe the emotion and still label it you're still labeling the emotion let's say a character is angry and so you have a sentence i feel angry and you're like that's labeling emotion and that's a form of telling i need to expand on that so i'm going to describe what it feels like to feel angry you might say something like anger boiled through me now boyle is a great verb choice here because anger kind of does boil like that's kind of what it feels like but you're still labeling the emotion sadness tightened in my chest again you're still labeling the emotion it's great that you've got you've got the physical sensation but you're still labeling the emotion it's like removing a filter you might change anger boiled through me something like i tightened my fist like my blood was boiling um that's not amazing because like i said it's just off the top of my head but tightening your fists shows a response to anger and you still have that physical sensation but you're not labeling the emotion similarly with sadness tighten my chest you could just turn that to like my chest tightened and it's not that you can never use an emotion word it's not that you can never use the word anger in your piece there's certainly times you may even want to label an emotion and that's done with intention and i can't give you specific cases where it's okay because that's up to you if you feel like now is the time to label an emotion in this case it works then go for it nothing is really an absolute with writing at all this is not a rule but i do want to draw your attention to it because i think it's something that people often do because they think it's good writing like they think it's showing but it's actually really just an embellished form of telling now that that's out of the way let's build off that idea of what showing emotion looks like so i think the main thesis here is that showing emotion is not just about describing how it physically feels it's about understanding how your specific character reacts to this emotion and how that's going to manifest in their actions like i said earlier there's no blanket experience of any emotion it's specific to the character so when you're thinking about showing emotion it's not about thinking what does the sensation of anger feel like and how do i describe it although that can be good it's asking yourself how does this character experience anger how does it manifest for them this specific emotion in this specific character because people have very different experiences with different emotions i am not a very angry person i've just been using anger as the example throughout this video it's hard to get a rise out of me i really don't have a temper whatsoever so when i am mad it's almost kind of weird it's not like a temperamental thing it's almost more a form of sadness other people completely different everyone experiences different emotions in different ways keep that as kind of a thesis as we go forward try to think about your specific character and how they experience this specific emotion in a specific case and how it's going to manifest for them we want to see the emotion influence their actions you know it's one thing to describe what an emotion feels like but it's a level further and i think much more impactful writing to see that emotion then manifest in something that they do if your character is angry it will carry on the anger if they are someone who tends to react to anger in a way maybe it makes them kind of impulsive and volatile maybe they go do something really impulsive um you know maybe your character is really mad and they're like okay i'm gonna go cool off because i just got in a fight with a character maybe someone i care about i'm gonna go cool if i'm gonna go walk around and while they're walking around they see a fallen street sign and they think i'm gonna steal it because i'm really mad i'm gonna steal that and so they steal it and that's something that that is manifesting their anger you know maybe they want to get back at someone maybe something was stolen from them and that's why they were mad and they're thinking okay you know what this is kind of my little personal act of revenge and i'm mad so i'm just going to do it that's their personal reaction to anger not everyone's going to react to anger in that way i certainly i have never been so angry i wouldn't stole a road sign i'm more likely to sit in my room and cry so very different in that case you almost don't need to go through those formalities of what does the emotion feel like how can i describe what it feels like we're going to see it an even more visceral way we're going to see them go have an actionable response to the emotion and that is really what drives plot and reveals character if the way a character was feeling had no impact on the way they acted in the plot what would be pretty boring story and what would be the point of the emotion then that brings us to my next point which is we want to see emotion then having a consequence on the plot so in a character-driven novel especially there's kind of a um equation of emotion that goes like this something happens which causes an emotion which causes a desire or emotional response in the character which causes them to act which causes the plot to move which causes another event which causes emotion which causes a desire response which causes them to act which moves the plot etc etc etc it's this forward turning wheel of the character's emotions their emotional responses fueling their actions which move the plot forward that ultimately is what pulls along their character development for positive or for negative that's kind of how emotion works it's as like the central fuel of a character-driven piece in a longer work in a shorter work it'd probably just be like one rotation of that emotion wheel now another technique i wanted to draw your attention to this is a bit of a tangent this is kind of an unrelated technique but i do think there's a way to tell without telling by juxtaposing relevant information flashback or detail with the emotion currently being felt if a character is feeling a certain emotion rather than trying to describe how the emotion feels physically because again that not that that's a bad technique i'm not knocking that technique it is good to be able to physically lift up those emotions and the piece actually that's great it gives a heightened sense of body and bodily awareness of the main character which can make the writing very visceral however it doesn't really work every single time you're gonna find your writing getting pretty tired if every single time a character feels an emotion you're just like okay time to describe it physically that's going to get old pretty fast and it's going to lose its impact it's more about the ripple effect of those that emotion and a deeper level of it manifesting in actual action and actual also thought one great way for this to manifest in thought as opposed to action is to juxtapose the current emotional situation with a past emotional situation so what you would basically do is have the character reflect on a moment this could be literally you could put a full flashback it could literally just be a sentence of an anecdote kind of calls back to a time where they also felt that emotion and you evoke that emotion and its current resonance with the main character through that flashback or through that memory so for example and again this is going to be a pretty overt example because it's an example you can make this more specific and more original and more subtle when you have an actual context to work with so let's say your character is feeling hopeless like something has happened to them that is making them feel hopeless and that there's nothing they can do to solve the problem instead of just sitting around and going i feel really hopeless and the hopelessness feels like this the character might recall time they felt hopeless without ever saying that they're not gonna go oh this reminded me of that time i felt hopeless instead they might say when i was eight years old i had this toy that i really cared about because it was something that i don't know my grandma gave me and i brought it with me everywhere and one day it was really windy and i was crossing a bridge and i accidentally dropped it over the side of the bridge and i looked and i saw like the waves below and i couldn't even see it you know it was super high up and i realized that there was no way that i could get it back i think that this is a pretty impactful way of really driving home the hopelessness you know anytime you're like hey i'm digging deep into my childhood to this other time i felt hopeless as a child like that's really gonna hit hard i'm just editing this video um i just wanted to clarify one thing i made it sound like this technique can only be used with flashbacks or things that have happened in the past but it doesn't have to be the character could recall an article they read about beluga whales that that made them feel a certain way something they saw that happened to someone else it doesn't have to be a memory of their own life you can do this technique with pretty much anything obviously this is not a technique you can use every single time or your piece will just be full of a bunch of flashbacks to highlight moments of emotional resonance but i do think it's a good way to build your character's relationship to specific emotions and use that to drive home impact in the fictive present of the story i also do think it is worth and this is more common advice but i'll bring it up here it's definitely worth thinking about how whatever the current emotional state of the character is can bleed into non-emotional specific aspects of the piece for example setting or setting description there's kind of two ways to go about this for one you could just pick settings or images that reflect the emotional state of the character this is more of a authorial thing to do pathetic fallacy one could say you're literally putting the character in a situation that mirrors their emotion you know like the most obvious example would be your character is sad so it's gonna be raining you know you have to be careful with this but you could definitely use that technique you don't want to go too overt with it but if you do want to pair outside details with internal emotions it can create a greater sense of cohesiveness you can also just describe whatever setting you're in through the lens of the emotional state and in fact i would pretty much always recommend you do this pretty much any time you're like describing a setting you probably do want it to be influenced by the emotional state to some extent so if we take for example a field a description of a field a field could on one hand feel open it could feel like a place of possibility it could feel like a place of unrestraint and freedom the character might have a desire to or they might even want to run through it you know with their arms outstretched and feel the long grass kind of hitting their arms and brushing past them they might even feel like it's like kind of lifting them off the ground like they're flying but you could equally take that same field and it could feel empty it could feel barren the character might feel exposed and unprotected and want to clutch their arms around themselves maybe in this case instead of it being sunny the field is full of fog and it almost looks endless and like a place that you can't escape you know the wind might channel through and rather feel than feeling like the wind is pushing them we might note how cold the wind is it might feel like a force that is battering them like it's trying to push them over it could be the exact same place the character in a different emotional state will experience it pretty differently almost any time you're writing setting description you probably do want to pay mine to the character's emotional state sometimes this is going to be extremely subtle sometimes it's going to be more overt like in the um example i just mentioned i wanted to close on the idea that sometimes with emotion less is more a few years ago i did a video on writing melodrama well not writing melodrama how to avoid melodrama in your writing and a lot of that was fueled by some instincts i had for writing when i was a teenager when i was a teenager around 1516 my understanding of writing emotion was that the more emotion the better the more intense the better the more intensely described the better and the more extremely emotional situation the better that is not always the case if you want to write more about more extreme emotional situations please be my guest you totally can do that but sometimes the most subtle expressions of emotion are the most impactful sometimes when a character receives terrible news and they have a moment of grief or heartbreak the most impactful thing is the personal subtle little thing they do whatever little mannerism they do that is particular to them rather than bursting in tears and falling on the ground not that every single instance of emotion needs to be restrained because i do think that the idea that the best literature is subtle and restrained all the time and you know unrefined literature is feral and unhinged i don't agree with it in fact i like writing to be feral and hindigence i like it when writers don't hold back but i do think when it comes to the expression of emotion a lot of the time the most power is in the tiniest details and it's not in grand displays of extreme emotion the greatest power can be in tiny displays of extreme emotion i bet you can think of a movie or a book or a show where let's say a character lost a loved one someone they really cared about and obviously when they first experienced that lost they probably had some kind of more overt emotional reaction they cried another character held them it was really sad but i bet that was not the most impactful moment for you i bet the most impactful moment of that lost was when a few chapters or a few episodes later the character seems to be doing better and they're in a situation completely unrelated to this loss and something tiny happens or they react in a very small way you know they see something that reminds them of their loved one and it causes an emotional response in them maybe they don't even enact it outwardly maybe the way they enact it is extremely subtle maybe they lost someone that they had like a special handshake with and suddenly they're in a situation that reminds me of the loved one and they just kind of to themselves do their half of the handshake those little moments i bet are the ones that really get you the most there's a book that called treasure island by sarah levine it's about a woman who becomes obsessed with treasure island and rebuilds her life around the book it kind of ends up ruining all her relationships she has a parrot she gets because she's obsessed with treasure island and the parrot like many parents repeats things the parrot starts sobbing and you realize that the reason the parrot is sobbing is because it's repeating the sound of the main character crying herself to sleep at night even though we never see her cry herself to sleep in fact if we did it would be way too melodramatic and it's not stated on the page that this is the reason that the parrot is making the sound of sobbing it's just implied but when you get there oh boy does it hit hard so that's what i've got to say on that if you want to check out my video on melodrama it's a pretty old video i look very different i've got extremely long hair but i'll leave that for you to check out so that's all i've got for this video on writing emotion thank you so much for watching if you have any questions you can always send me an ask on tumblr and i'll see you in another video bye [Music]

Channel: ShaelinWrites

Views: 50,429

Keywords: writer, writing, author, novelist, creative writing, writetube, writetuber, writing advice, how to write a book, how to write a novel, writing vlog, creative writing degree, books, nanowrimo, authortube, writing tip, writing emotion, how to write emotion, how to evoke emotion in your writing, how to convey emotion in your writing, show don't tell

Id: v0CdOqgXljE

Length: 17min 40sec (1060 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 12 2021