Emotion in Writing – Part 2
Part 1 looked at how to get the reader to invest in the main character to help establish an emotional bond and create characterisation so that they care about what happens to these characters. To continue to build emotion in writing, writers must show the readers what to care about. Simply telling the reader how a character feels doesn’t work because there is no emotion involved. You have to show emotion to your readers for them to feel what’s happening with the story. To achieve that you need some well-worded description, which helps to strengthen a story, but also evoke emotions. Without showing , you end up with ‘telling’. If you resort to ‘telling’ throughout an important scene, then there will be no immediacy, no connection with the main character and, ultimately, no emotion. The reader won’t care what happens to the main character. That’s why it’s vital to describe a character’s physical responses to the things going on around him/her, whether that’s a car chase, a