From the course: Crafting Dynamic Characters

Unlock this course with a free trial

Join today to access over 22,600 courses taught by industry experts.

Tool 5: Revealing character through emotion

Tool 5: Revealing character through emotion

From the course: Crafting Dynamic Characters

Start my 1-month free trial Buy for my team

Tool 5: Revealing character through emotion

“

- We touched upon emotion in the last tool when we talked about voice. But now in this lecture, we're going to dive deeper into the topic and really master the skill of communicating emotions on the page so that your reader can truly feel what your character is feeling. Now, of course, we could always just write, I am sad, I was angry, she was happy, he is hurt. That would certainly be the fastest, easiest way to convey emotions to a reader. But as you probably gathered as you read these sentences, they didn't do diddly squat in terms of making you feel anything. Did you feel sad just because you read the words I am sad? Of course not, and neither will your reader. This is a perfect example of telling or force feeding information to your audience. And if you do it, they will not feel very respected as readers because you're taking the joy of discovery, and the job of reading away from them. So how else do we…

Contents