Since many people have been asking me through the years, I decided to put everything I know about writing in a book. I hope it helps you improve your writing and motivate you to create.
Feel free to tag people on the comments who may be in need of h...
Oops! This image does not follow our content guidelines. To continue publishing, please remove it or upload a different image.
As we all know most of the time, it's hard to come up with a good emotional description and because of that, we try to embody that emotion into the physical movements of our character.
When someone is angry, for example, you could have your character clench their fist at the side of their body and that physical movement would portray the emotion. However, Even though it's common to do that, it's insufficient. Because it can be unclear. Someone could be clenching their fists because they are annoyed, frustrated, triggered, not just angry.
So in order to make it clear, I usually try to mix the description of thoughts with the description of emotions that the character is feeling.
Example 1: His fingers played at the side of his body as he heard her speak.
Example 2: The whispering words in his head - that loomed around as she spoke- made his fingers start playing at the side of his body while he was inwardly praying that she did not know the truth.
As you can see in the second example, we have more than just a physical description of nervousness/anxiety. We have a glimpse of his thoughts and hopes. Reading the second one could actually make you feel slightly nervous yourself as you read it.
That's the aim of good emotional delivery. To make the reader, feel the emotion you are speaking of.
Now how do you do that?
Firstly I think it's important when writing emotional moments, for the writer to literally try and feel that feeling themselves. You must have heard the saying " Experience makes a better writer" That applies to life experience and not just writing experience.
We have all felt things because of one reason or another. Use the memory of those feelings. When you had last been disappointed, how did it make you feel? That heavy feeling on your chest, that slight erased something, that dragged down motion inside us. How do you express that well?
Metaphors come to play on such occasions. Or comparison aka similes. Because feelings are abstract, we as writers need to make them more concrete in any way we can, using any words that could come close to the said emotion.
Example 1: She felt her heartbreak into pieces to the point that her breath got cut, ache taking over her body quickly, filling her with bitterness.
Example 2: Fire erupted under her skin, taking hostage all her insides along with her breath. The poison slipped through the cracks of her scattered entity, quickly enough for her to taste it on her tongue.
Now both examples aren't bad, but we can clearly see the second one is more captivating and it possibly makes you feel more as a reader. And that's all on the use of language. Choosing to create metaphors that we deem compatible for the pain we are talking about. In this case, fire is used to portray the burning pain of a heartbreak, or even the subtle anger such a thing could provoke in someone.
