Tips for Capturing Emotions in Your Novel
BLOGGER: ANGELA BREIDENBACH
Angela will teach an Afternoon Workshop and serve on the Critique Team at the Mount Hermon Christian Writers Conference, March 18-22, 2016.
TIPS FOR CAPTURING EMOTIONS IN YOUR NOVEL
Emotions are often scary because we feel out of control. Enter the writer who needs to infuse emotion into the character and story so the reader can feel them as the story world unrolls page-by-page. The problem isn’t knowing the words to use. Anyone can write dictionary words like angry, funny, afraid, hurt. But the story doesn’t evolve from just words, does it?
Capturing emotions in your novel means capturing your own emotions—and then being willing to let some stranger get really intimate with you by, gasp, reading them. Writing a novel is much like writing a journal. A journal is a safe place to pour out all those secret feelings in any order. No one is editing. No one is judging. But a novel?
My favorite “secret” place to capture my emotions for a novel is my personal journal. I don’t mean telling all my secrets by writing them on the page for those unknown eyes. I mean looking at the actual words I use to describe how I feel. When I’m angry, I let my pen leave fiery, ferocious words like an avalanche. They roar down the page until I’m spent. When I’m jotting a funny moment, the ink chortles in spurts of glee. And when I write of love the prose dances in swirls and loops caressing the memory.
Journals are excellent places to write your thoughts, memories, and experiences. But they’re a treasure trove when you need just the right word to express an emotion happening in your story. The way you express yourself in your real world is invaluable to the way your characters express themselves in a fictional world.
How, you ask?
Make column headings for basic emotions like anger, sadness, joy, fear, Surprise… (Think of those words as the simplest form.) Go through your journal and put the emotional words you find in the appropriate category. Once done, you’ve just created your own emotional thesaurus in words you would use. As you’re mining those gems, you’ll make another amazing discovery — your writing voice. A little refining, you’ll see characters leap off the page without revealing your personal secrets.
Share an emotion word from your journal that one of your characters could express. (Remember, just the emotion word, not your secrets.)
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Come meet 2016 faculty member Angela Breidenbach at the 47th annual Mount Hermon Christian Writers Conference, March 18-22.
The $75. Early Bird Discount ends Monday, February 1, 2016!
