Generating Feelings

With feeling, introspection is needed and this makes it necessary to identify with a character and empathize with what they are facing. However, you must remember that the action in the story and the characters are merely the vehicles the reader will use to create their own emotions and experiences. Your goal is to get your readers to use your characters as a way of creating their own emotions.

In recent neurological studies, it has been determined that cognition and feeling coincide with one another; this means that one of the biggest parts of experiencing a feeling is in how it is assessed. What this means is that readers need to process feeling in order to register it. The writer needs to allow their characters the chance to think about how they are feeling so that the reader can accomplish this.

This is normally best served in scenes that follow a series of or one single scene that is dramatic, a scene that results in a reversal or a reveal that could be devastating. These kinds of scenes allow the readers and the characters to process things. Within these scenes, our point-of-view character can:

Register the impact of what happened and analyze it

Think about the meaning behind what happened

Plan how they are going to proceed

A reader and a character will both process emotion and interpretation at the same time, even though not consciously.

This kind of analysis should be short and to the point – you don’t want your readers bored; they have already processed their emotions and feelings and want to move forward. Stick to one or two paragraphs at the most. To allow the reader to dig into their own feelings and process things, the POV character must:

Dig deep. An element of surprise is needed, a starting point that appears, to all intents and purposes, to be unexpected. Readers don’t like the obvious so look for a feeling that falls as a second or third feeling in the scene, not the primary one.

Objectify. Look for an analogy of the physical kind for the feeling.

Compare. That feeling must be measurable against other times that its happened. Does it feel worse? Why? How?

Evaluate. Is this feeling right or wrong? Would a stronger person feel this way?

Justify. Why is the feeling the best one, the most honest one for this character?

Examine. Does this feeling say anything in particular about the character? Has the character moved forward or gone back?

Writing Feeling and Emotion

Your characters will evolve through the emotions that they experience, by refining the emotions into feeling right through the one thing the process provides – a feeling of self-awareness. This is a gradual process, a kind of metamorphosis that creates the internals of the story, giving the character the opportunity to move from being ruled by his or her emotions to the mastery of their feelings. And, using introspection and surprise, you, the writer, give your reader the means to travel through their own story, causing the expansion of their own emotional self-awareness. It isn’t the easiest thing to do but it is the only way to keep your readers coming back for more.