In today’s fast-paced, content-saturated world, readers are constantly bombarded with entertainment options, making it harder than ever for authors to capture and hold their attention. What sets great books apart isn’t just clever plots or witty dialogue; it’s the ability to make readers feel something—whether it’s joy, heartbreak, fear, or excitement. Emotion is the lifeblood of storytelling, and learning how to write with emotion is key to creating a lasting connection with your readers.
Let’s dive into the steps to emotional writing and transforming your stories into experiences that resonate deeply with your audience.
1. Develop Emotionally Rich Characters
Before you can write with emotion, you need to know your characters inside and out. Emotional writing starts with understanding what makes your characters tick. Who are they at their core? What motivates them? What are their deepest fears and desires? When you understand these aspects, you can more easily create situations that challenge your characters emotionally and reveal their humanity.
-Tip: Write detailed character backstories. Even if all the information doesn’t make it onto the page, knowing your characters’ pasts will help you shape their emotional responses to events.
- Example: In ‘Harry Potter’, readers connect with Harry not just because of his magical abilities, but because of his emotional journey—his loneliness, his desire for family, and his internal struggles with loss and belonging.
The more real and complex your characters are, the easier it becomes for readers to relate to them. And when readers care about your characters, they’ll care about what happens to them, making every emotional beat of your story hit harder.
2. Show, Don’t Tell
This classic writing advice is the cornerstone of writing with emotion. Telling the reader, “She was sad” doesn’t invite empathy—it merely informs. Showing that sadness through a character’s actions, thoughts, or physical responses, however, allows the reader to experience it themselves.
Instead of:
- “She was sad.”
Try:
- “She stared at the half-empty coffee cup, her fingers tracing circles on the rim, but couldn’t bring herself to take another sip. Her eyes blurred, and she blinked rapidly, as if to force the tears back in.”
This engages the reader’s senses and allows them to infer the emotion, making it more impactful. Your goal is to immerse readers in the character’s experience so that they feel the emotions right alongside them.
- Tip: Use body language, gestures, and subtle actions to convey emotion. Think about how people act when they’re angry, nervous, or in love. Use those small, relatable cues in your writing.
3. Use Deep Point of View
If you want to bring your reader closer to the character's emotional experience, writing in deep point of view (DPOV) can be a powerful tool. DPOV allows readers to see and feel events through the character’s perspective, removing the distance between them and the story.
For instance:
- Shallow POV: “John felt terrified as he saw the car speeding toward him.”
- Deep POV: “The headlights bore down on him, a cold sweat breaking out across his forehead. His pulse throbbed in his ears. He couldn’t breathe. Couldn’t move. The car was too close. Too fast.”
By eliminating phrases like “he felt” or “he thought,” and showing John’s physical and emotional reactions, the reader is placed directly into his experience, making the moment far more visceral.
4. Pacing Emotional Moments
Writing with emotion is all about balance. If every scene is packed with emotional intensity, your readers will eventually become desensitized. Emotion needs pacing—think of it as a rhythm or flow, much like in music or cinema. There should be moments of tension and release, build-up and resolution.
Consider how powerful emotional moments happen in real life. We don’t cry nonstop for days on end, nor do we stay in a state of excitement indefinitely. Life is full of quiet moments, little breaks where we reflect, pause, or laugh. Your book should have these moments too.
- Tip: Use calmer scenes between high-emotion events to give your readers (and characters) a breather. This creates contrast and makes the big emotional moments more impactful when they do happen.
5. Raise the Emotional Stakes
For emotion to truly resonate with readers, the stakes need to be high. If the character doesn’t have much to lose—or gain—then the emotions won’t feel significant. The higher the emotional stakes, the more invested readers will be.
- Ask yourself: What does my character stand to lose or gain in this situation? How will the outcome affect them emotionally, mentally, or physically?
For example, a character who is just mildly annoyed by a problem won’t evoke much empathy from readers. But a character who’s on the verge of losing everything they love? That will grip readers’ hearts. Emotional stakes don’t have to be life-or-death—they can be personal, internal stakes. The important thing is to make them feel important to the character, and by extension, to the reader.
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