How to Evoke Emotion Through Your Writing

The stories that readers enjoy the most are the ones that they can immerse themselves in, stories which make them feel as if they’re being transported into the book itself. There are several things writers must achieve to create this experience for readers – well-written characters, a developed world, a good plot, and emotion.

If readers aren’t emotionally invested in your story, they’ll get bored and put your book down.

Before you begin writing a scene, ask yourself, what do you want your reader to feel?

Show Don’t Tell

There are places in your story where it will be better to tell than to show, but in emotionally driven scenes it is far more effective to show readers how your characters are feeling.

It is more effective to say, ‘Holly could smell her mum’s apple pie in the oven before she walked in the door. Her stomach rumbled,’ rather than, ‘Holly was hungry.

Use the Five Senses

Using the five senses to describe things in your story can help your readers to connect with your characters. For example, most of us know what it feels like to drink a cool glass of water on a hot day, or to walk into a kitchen and smell the meal that our parents are preparing, or to lie down on a soft bed at the end of a hard day.

When we use senses to describe things our readers can understand, we make the characters more relatable.

Our senses are deeply tied to emotion. Let’s look at the feeling of touch. If your character puts a soft scarf around their neck, this can create feelings of comfort, warmth, cosiness, and protection from the cold. If your character is touching something dirty, this can create feelings of disgust and discomfort.

Eliminate Filter Words

Filter words are words that filter the reader’s experience through the main character. Examples of filter words include: felt, heard, noticed, considered, and thought.

These words can distance readers from the emotion of the story because they prevent the reader from feeling as if they are experiencing the story first-hand.

Eliminating filter words is easy to do once you can recognise them, and is a great activity to do in the revision of the first draft of your manuscript.

Stay in the Scene

Remember this is your character’s story, not yours. Your goal should be to speak through them, writing about what they think, feel and notice. A good way to do this is to keep them in the moment, to keep them present on what is happening in that scene. If your protagonist is a teenager speaking to her crush, she’s going to be thinking about him, about how to talk to him and what he thinks of her. If you write that she is thinking about the weather or what to have for dinner, your taking your character and reader out of the scene. If your character is a footballer getting ready for a game, he’s going to take notice of the other players, of what his coach is saying, of how his team mates are behaving. He’s not going to be thinking about anything else except the game – unless of course what he’s thinking about is relevant to the plot of your story. For example, if you’re writing a romance, he might be wondering if the girl he likes will be watching his game – this is relevant and you can write about how this affects his performance on the pitch.

Keep it Moving

When you write a scene, keep in mind the purpose of the scene. If your character has lost someone they love, this is what the scene needs to be about, but there’s a skill in knowing how much detail to include; this might depend on your character, their relationship with the person they’ve lost, the genre of the book and the tone of your story. Some writers want to create strong emotions in their readers by providing a lot of detail, but sometimes this can have the opposite affect – they can become tired of reading about the same thing, the same emotion, five times in the space of a few pages. The longer you stay in the same moment the less impactful it can be because readers get bored.

Dialogue

Emotion is rarely spoken about. How often does someone let you know how they feel and then explain to you why they feel that way? If your character were to do this it would seem unrealistic, but worse than that, it would erase any tension and conflict that you could create that would keep your readers engaged in your story.

Instead, emotion is usually conveyed through dialogue through the tone of a person’s voice, the length and flow of their sentence and their choice of words.

Body Language

This is one of the easiest ways to convey emotion. A happy character will smile, a welcoming character will embrace someone, an ashamed character may look at the floor. All of these actions are visual and impactful.

Pacing

The pacing of your story can give readers clues as to how they should feel in different scenes in your story. A faster pace creates a sense of urgency which can excite a reader, whilst a slower pace will give readers the chance for reflection. When you want your reader to experience every sensation, you want to slow the pace down.  

Character Reactions

A reaction is an emotional response to something that happens. Stories are built on a pattern of action, and reaction. When something happens, readers want to know how the characters will react. The way the character reacts can help readers to connect with them, and will draw them deeper into the story. A character’s reactions can make readers more curious about them, it can create empathy and help us to understand them.