From the course: Crafting Dynamic Characters

Unlock this course with a free trial

Join today to access over 22,700 courses taught by industry experts.

Exercise: Emotional taboo

Exercise: Emotional taboo

From the course: Crafting Dynamic Characters

Start my 1-month free trial Buy for my team

Exercise: Emotional taboo

“

- It's time to start layering some of our tools to really give our scenes depth and complexity. In this exercise, I'll give you a writing prompt for each of the four common emotions we've been discussing: sad, angry, happy, and hurt. Your job is to choose one of the emotion prompts and write the scene using two or three of the tools we've already learned, like thought, reaction, dialogue, voice, and physical showing. If you want to layer more than two or three of the tools, that's fine. As I said before, sometimes it's helpful to overwrite and then streamline when you revise so that you have more material to pick from. But try to at least get two tools into your scene. But here's the rub. You're not allowed to ever write the name of the emotion anywhere in the scene. That word is taboo, off limits! Hence the name of the exercise. So if you're doing the angry prompt, you are not allowed to use the word angry or any…

Contents