When you write and publish a book, you want to evoke some kind of emotion or feeling from your readers. There is a subtle difference between writing feeling and writing emotion. Feeling is the kind of emotion that has been refined and is habitual; feeling is easy to understand and it may be used in a deliberate way.  Emotion, on the other hand, is raw and is unconsidered. Emotion comes to us without warning and without being asked for.

Both are vital parts of any fictional and nonfictional work but, given that each has its own unique qualities, both require completely different techniques to get them on paper successfully. Both emotion and feeling rely for the most part on what a reader wants. They don’t read a story so that they can experience what the writer or the characters have; they want to have their own experiences and your job, as the writer, is to come up with the sequence of effects that provide and enhance the experience.

Evoking Emotion

Emotion on the pages of a book is made through action and, to have any real effect, it relies almost entirely on the element of surprise. That surprise comes from the character expressing or showing a specific emotion that may not immediately be clear in the scene.

In any situation, we all experience at least one emotion, usually more. The same is true of a character in a book.  For a writer to create emotion in a book scene, an emotion that is genuine, the first job is to identify the response to a situation that your character is most likely to have and then identify any other emotions they may experience. Do this until you get to a third emotion and then write your character to experience that emotion. This uses the element of surprise, an emotion that the reader does not expect and that will lead to the reader experiencing a wider range of emotions and that, on their eyes, takes the scene to another level.

We can also generate the element of surprise through reversals and an unforeseen reveal. To do this, the writer needs to use misdirection, i.e. creating an expectation that is entirely credible that something will happen, only to have something completely different happen instead. This can be done using any one of these misdirection types:

Ambiguity – a choice of results, any one of them could happen

Fallacy – the mistaken belief about what is happening and what it may mean

Sympathy – focusing intently on one character to make the reader overlook what another character may do

For a surprise to be grounded in emotion, there must be the belief that another outcome, the emotional opposite of what you want to evoke, is possible and highly likely. For example, if you want your readers to feel panic, dread or terror, you must make them feel that those emotions are not, in any way, inevitable. Your readers don’t want to feel a negative emotion; what creates it is the hope that what will cause it may be circumvented and, once it happens, the emotion is intensified.

Read on to see how to generate feeling in your readers.