hello! do you have any tips for capturing emotional depth in writing? you do it so well! everything feels very powerful, and i don’t want to say it’s understated, necessarily, but somehow the characters are never drowning in feelings even when they’re going through a lot. how do you do it?
cry? a lot? no that’s not it lol. this is such a hard question! i think that depth is in the eye of the beholder, and it changes all the time. so with the usual disclaimer that i can only speak from my own experiences…
don’t name the emotion. maybe it’s like explaining a joke, but this is the fastest way to cut the emotion out of a scene. “he was so angry” is never going to hit the way describing that anger will. and for that, you really have to be in the character’s head, and you have to be willing to share a little bit of yourself. any time i write about grief or anger or anything else, if it comes across as real it’s just because i’ve described how those emotions made me feel at some point. so i could say “he was sad” or i could think about the times in my life when i’ve been so upset about something that i couldn’t talk around it, and describe it that way.
it’s okay to let a character feel more than one thing at a time. we really rarely feel only one thing as people, so don’t forget to let your character go in and out of whatever they’re going through. moments of humor in moments of sorrow are a relief for the reader, and vice versa can make those mournful moments hit harder.
this is an aside, but listening to good music can really help, not because of the emotionality of the music but because song lyrics are the epitome of conveying emotion through showing rather than telling. the lyrics just accentuate whatever the notes are doing (i am an idiot, i don’t know anything about music theory, please don’t hurt me) and your writing should do the same: the emotion is already there, your job is just to describe it in a way that will reframe it for the reader in a way that will make it mean more to them, if that makes sense.
less is more with emotions. i’ve always been frustrated as a reader by stories that put in too much of it and stories that put in too little. if you let the character be completely taken by some emotion, it cuts down the mood and flow and gets repetitive enough that the emotions kind of get bleached out, if that makes sense? and on the other side of it are stories where i’m screaming at the author to just let them have a moment. i think it’s a balance you have to strike to satisfy yourself, first!
but most of all, this is one of those aspects of writing where the thing about “let the first draft be bad” is so important. you might just not hit it the first or second go round, or it make take days or weeks of teasing it over before you realize what the character is even feeling in a scene.
and last: sometimes it should be a surprise, to both the character and the reader, how they feel about something. like you know those times when you didn’t realize something was bothering you until it was done and that overwhelming relief? or alternately, losing something you didn’t know you cared about, and the associated grief. it really humanizes a character to let them not always be sure how they’re feeling. decide on the reaction first and don’t feel pressured to name the emotion at all.
i hope any of this helps!! and of course, i still love reading those stories where the angst is overwhelming and overbearing, or the characters don’t seem to feel any emotion at all. it all depends on what mood you’re in as a reader/writer and every rule is made to be broken. follow your heart with it!!
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