Showing Emotions: Finding the Right Balance
I’ve mentioned before that one of my “most improved” writing skills is writing with emotion. At least I hope so, but there’s always room for further improvement. *smile*
The ability to manipulate our readers’ emotions is a good thing (as screwed up as that sounds). We can probably all think of books with so-so writing quality that manage to be popular with readers anyway because readers are sucked into the story. How do they manage that trick?
Storytelling and keeping readers’ interest often comes down to creating emotions in our readers. So let’s take a closer look at how we create emotions in our readers and what we need to keep in mind to find the right balance.
The Elements of Writing that Create Emotion
As I mentioned in my post about strengthening emotions, every aspect of our writing can convey emotion:
- Dialogue: “I want you to leave. Now.”
- Dialogue Cues: Her voice broke.
- Thoughts: She couldn’t take anymore.
- Action: She slammed the door.
- Body Language: She crossed her arms.
- Visceral (Internal) Reaction: Her chest tightened.
One element I didn’t include in that list is narrative. When they involve emotion, narrative (descriptive) sentences (excluding any sentences that would fall into the above categories) are “telling” and not “showing.”
In most cases, narrative emotional cues would be the bad kind of telling too, like “She was angry.” Usually, our writing will be more compelling and use a deeper point of view if we don’t name emotions, but instead use dialogue, thoughts, action, or visceral reactions to get the information across to the reader.
The Three Ways We Need to Balance Emotions
Those elements seem straightforward enough. So why do we struggle with writing emotions?
One major reason we struggle with writing emotions is because there are multiple ways we can screw it up. We need to balance emotion in our story in three ways:
Amount of Emotion Shown:
We need to match the stimulus (the trigger, or cause, for the emotion) with the response.
- Too little exploration of emotions and our writing can feel flat. In that case, we’d want to emphasize and empower the emotional response to bring it up to the right level for the trigger.
- Too much emotional response and we veer toward melodrama. Even when portraying intense emotions, we need to be careful not to overdo it.
Variety of Emotion Shown:
We need to show an emotional journey for our characters by changing their responses to the plot events over the course of the story.
- Too simplistic of emotional responses and our characters don’t feel layered. We need our characters’ emotions to change as they adjust to the plot events. A character who’s always angry isn’t interesting.
- Too complex and readers might not be able to follow our characters’ emotional journey. If our characters’ emotions change too frequently, we risk them coming across like fickle teenagers. (Even if we are writing teenagers, we still have to give the reader something to relate to other than sheer chaos. *smile*)
Elements of Emotion Shown:
We need to mix and match the elements we use to portray characters’ emotions. During big emotional reactions, we can’t get across a full emotional experience by relying only on dialogue, or only on thoughts, etc.
- Too external of a response (dialogue/dialogue cues, body language, and action) and readers won’t have enough information to know what the character is really thinking or feeling. Sure, we might say the character crossed their arms, but was that due to anger, fear, shyness, or simply being cold? If you’re familiar with Angela Ackerman and Becca Puglisi’s The Emotion Thesaurus, you’ve probably noticed that the same body language cues can indicate multiple emotions. Readers need more information.
- Too internal of a response (thoughts and visceral reactions) and we can easily overuse some of our best tools.
- Thoughts: As I mentioned in the Option A example of my post about using layers to show emotions, we need to share characters’ thoughts to reveal the why—she’s angry or scared or worried because… (She’s afraid xyz will happen, etc.) However, sharing too many thoughts can result in “telling” the reader everything in an “on the nose” style rather than allowing emotions to grow in the subtext. We want to share thoughts, but only in the character’s voice and only as much as needed.
- Visceral Reactions: Similarly, involuntary physiological responses are great for showing the gut reactions of our characters, but if we use too many, our characters can seem constantly on the verge of a heart attack. (A pain grew in her chest and she couldn’t breathe, etc.) We want to save visceral reactions for triggers that would cause a gut check, and not use them for just any random, mildly bad news for our characters.
Finding the Right Balance
With all those potential pitfalls, it’s no wonder that we sometimes miss the mark. As Angela Ackerman pointed out, just because we know how to “show rather than tell” doesn’t mean we’re home free.
Sometimes we’ll feel the need to explain and show and tell. Or sometimes our character’s emotional response will over-show, with melodrama, purple prose, or near-heart-attacks.
The wrong balance can create a shallow point of view or distant emotions. The wrong balance can cause slow pacing. The wrong balance can create two-dimensional characters. In other words, the wrong balance won’t engage readers in our storytelling.
To find the right balance, we’ll probably have to rely on the two tried-and-true feedback methods. If we gain distance from our story, we can self-edit by reading our character’s emotional response in the full context of the story to see if it’s an off-note. Or we can use beta readers, critique partners, or editors to know when we’ve succeeded or failed at finding the right balance.
Either way, feedback from others or from our instincts can be our best weapon for getting the balance just right. The reward for succeeding might be readers who can’t put down our story. *smile*
Do you disagree that creating emotion in the reader is important for keeping their interest? Can you think of times when using narrative sentences for emotion might work? Can you think of other ways we need to balance emotions in our writing? Do you struggle with some kinds of balancing more than others? How do you find the right balance?
Pin It
Hi Jami,
As a newbie writer, I struggle with finding the right amount of emotion. My character’s response doesn’t always match the trigger. My critique partners are able to point out what needs fixed. I value their feedback and your blog. Thanks for the excellent post!
Hi Elle,
I understand. I think I might be getting better, but it’s so easy to misjudge. :/ I’m glad you have your critique partners to help you out, and hopefully with this post, you’ll have a better idea about what might need fixing. 🙂 Good luck and thanks for the comment!
Great post! I’ve always felt that this is the most important aspect of the Showing vs. Telling debate. The more we show emotions rather than tell them, the stronger our characters can get.
I like that you discussed balance. I’ve never really thought of the melodramatic side of showing emotion, but I can definitely see it happening.
It’s funny that your telling emotion example was “She was angry” because that’s what I use when teaching students about showing vs. telling.
Telling: “She was angry.”
Showing: “Her nostrils flared, her hands formed fists, and she gritted her teeth, glaring at him.”
You don’t NEED to say “she was angry” in the second example. Happy people generally don’t act like that. XD
Love your post. I’m adding it to my list of writing tips.
Hi R.A.,
The first time I was exposed to the “showing” method of emotion, with all of those elements I mentioned, the excerpt used in the class struck me as being melodramatic. I know now that it was probably just the fact that the excerpt was missing any context, but it took me a while to accept that emotion didn’t equal melodrama. But because of my initial reaction, I always emphasize balance and finding the right match between trigger and emotional reaction. 🙂
LOL! at your happy people don’t generally act like that. 🙂 Yep! Thanks for the comment!
You write the best posts on this Jami–thanks for all the links. I love it because it allows people to find help any step of the way. Emotion is a complicated element, and you explain it so very well!
Hi Angela,
Aww, thank you! From you–the co-author of The Emotion Thesaurus–that means a lot. *blush* Thanks for stopping by! 🙂
Loved this post Jami, there’s nothing better than losing oneself in the emotions on the page. I know it’s a good book, when I look up and have to blink myself back into the room, 🙂
I can only hope to one day write that well.
Hi Jacquie,
Ooo, yes, I love that feeling. That’s what I read for. 🙂 Thanks for the comment!
Genre and target audience are factors. Hard sci-fi, for instance, tends to be more about the underlying ideas and what the characters do than how they’re feeeeeeeling. In that situation—and dependent on the overall style and point of the scene or story—summarizing “He was furious” might very well be better than even “He ground his teeth in fury.”
Character and PoV make a difference in where the balance needs to be. I’ve dabbled in converting A Fistful of Fire into 3rd person, past tense (it’s 1st person, present), and it’s interesting to see how much that changes. Some lines, I have to outright decide if I want to keep the original phrasing or the original tone/mood, because I can’t keep both.
Bestsellers succeed because they connect with their readership. Different readerships want different things, but you have to connect with that readership’s emotions to get them viscerally interested. That takes different things for different genres or types of writing.
Hi Carradee,
Agreed that genre makes a difference. In fact, I had a whole ‘nother section of this post written about plot-driven stories and how those handle emotions, but I decided that topic deserved its own post. So thanks for playing into my plans. Mwhahaha! Maybe next week. 😉
Great point too about character and POV changing the balance as well. Some characters will be more emotionally expressive than others. I think this is one of the reasons I struggled so much with the characters in my first novel–the heroine is very emotionally distant–so it wasn’t until I started writing a different story and character that I saw what emotion in writing could be. Thanks, as always, for sharing your great insights! 😀
The narrator of the novel I’m wrapping up now—which is in “close” first person, present tense—actively represses and ignores a lot of her own emotions. –_– She’s sometimes aware of them, but her default is to dismiss them and focus on what others “need” (or want) to see. Part of that’s necessity. She’s been through a lot of sh*t.
(Her father fathered a bunch of children just so he could mold them into what he wanted, and he picked her to be a player on the shadow game. Ended up being good for her in some ways, because it enabled her to break loose eventually—most of her siblings died before they got the chance—but wow, is she messed up. For instance, she’s is the type of person who nurtures, protects, and takes care of others even if it harms her…and she is convinced she shouldn’t be trusted with children. She’s even pregnant in the story, and from the start, her plan is to hand the baby to the father and flee for the child’s own good…and keep an eye on him from afar.)
Interestingly, this particular character pays attention to physical reactions, which leads to lines like “Something skitters along my bones. It takes me a moment to recognize the sensation as discomfort.”
More than one character ends up going something like, “IT’S OKAY TO BE [whatever emotion she’s ignoring at the moment]!”
I think those other characters might be part of why the character’s working.
Hi Carradee,
Interesting! And great example of how emotions can be very individual to the character–and if we’re writing in deep POV, they should be specific to the individual. And great point too about how we can use other characters to fill in the blanks on unexpressive characters. 🙂 Thanks for the comment!
Hmm… I think that between this artical and the comments, I know what kept me from finishing the last Issac Asimov book I read… It was too much about ideas (good, Interesting Ideas, here, don’t get me wrong) and not enough about character… not enough emotion to keep me invested in the story…
Thanks for another interesting blog post!
Hi Robin,
Interesting! Especially when combined with Carradee’s point about authors knowing their readership.
I’d go so far as to say that book was probably geared toward readers more interested in ideas than characters or emotions. (I’ve read many (most?) of Asimov’s work, so this is more than a suspicion. 😉 ) Thanks for the comment!
Do you struggle with some kinds of balancing more than others? How do you find the right balance?
Currently I’m struggling with a certain character in a story of mine. This character doesn’t have much emotion…or at least, they don’t show it. They are quite distant and make it difficult to balance out emotions with other aspects of them. Right now, I’m trying to show their inner battle with their own suppressed emotions (the ones they still feel, anyways) but I’m hoping to find a better way to show emotion (and balance them out). Until then, this blog post helps a lot (not just with them, but with other characters as well)! Thanks for the advice!
Hi Ebony,
I hear you. :/ As I mentioned in my comment to Carradee above, the heroine of my first novel was like that. I finally had to set that story aside and work on other stories so I could learn better how to capture emotions. Someday, I’ll go back to that story, now that I have the tools. 🙂
As you said, we might show them suppressing or shoving aside the thoughts they don’t want to have. My post about using layers might help too. Good luck and thanks for the comment!
Great article thanks Jami!
This is something I’ve struggled with. Having an editor whose most frequent repeated comment in my manuscripts is “But what is he/she feeling? SHOW me!” has helped a lot. That and The Emotion Thesaurus, which I recommend to every writer I know! I write romance, and getting the reader emotionally involved in the character’s inner life is way more important there than in some other genres, like the science fiction mentioned.
One of the things I was most pleased to see in reader reviews of my first published book were comments that the story was deeply emotional and pulled the reader right into the character’s emotions.
I do sometimes wonder if I put in too much emotion though and slow the pacing down too far.
Varying up emotional responses is an issue for me too. It’s easy to rely on the same visceral responses over and over until they become clichéd and repetitive. My challenge now is finding new ways to describe the effect of emotions on the character without straying so far from the usual that readers miss what the emotion is! 🙂
Hi Autumn,
Good point! Yes, the readership of the romance genre expects far more emotion than some of the other genres. So what passes for melodrama in some genres would be seen as normal in others. 🙂
Good point too about how there’s a limit to how uniquely descriptive we can get about a response. As you said, the point is for readers to recognize the response and know what it means. No doubt that this is tricky. 🙂 Thanks for the comment!
About whether “telling” emotions in the narrative (naming emotions) is better or showing visceral/ bodily reactions is better in general, I think it depends on the reader’s personal experience and what they’re used to reading. I think the vast majority of books I’ve ever read in my life “told” emotions and named them (even Harry Potter, if I recall correctly), so I don’t feel emotionally detached at all when reading “telling”, lol. In fact, words like “euphoria” really DO make me feel euphoric. But I do understand what you mean, because, for instance, two of my writer friends feel an emotional reaction to actions and gestures (e.g. he smiled at the sunset) but NOT towards emotion words. However, I myself respond quite strongly to emotion words (so “grief”, “anguish”, “despair”, etc. DO have a strong emotional effect on me when I see a character feeling these emotions), but I do see that NOT ALL readers respond to these mood words as much as I do, haha. Some examples of named / told emotions that were very effective with me as a reader, are the Dostoyevsky (Crime and Punishment) and George Eliot (Mill on the Floss) novels. Seriously, almost all the emotions are told in emotion words, not shown in bodily gestures, lol. But these emotion words once again had a huge effect on me. So again, it all depends on what the individual reader is used to reading! So it could be that I’m used to seeing the majority of… — Read More »
Hi Serena, Interesting point about Harry Potter, and I agree. I think I’ve mentioned before how children’s stories (chapter books, Middle Grade, and even some YA) might include more telling information simply because kids aren’t as good about picking out subtext. Or to touch on your later example of comparing GRR Martin’s sentence-long internalized thoughts vs. Dostoyevsky’s paragraph-long internalized thoughts, there’s no overriding guideline of the right amount to include. It all depends on the genre, reader expectations, tone, mood, POV, character, etc. If you’ve seen my post today, you know I agree completely that there’s no “one size fits all” advice that’s perfect for every story. Some stories–even outside the children’s category–fit better with told emotions, and as you alluded to, everything comes down to our target readership and their expectations. 🙂 Great point too about how body language can become cliche as well. (That’s just one of the many reasons I recommend the ET. 🙂 ) I wonder if the Chinese language affects those authors’ choices. I think you mentioned before how certain cliche phrases are necessary within Chinese language stories, and how turning a cliche would actually result in clunky writing. Do you think body language phrases fall into a similar category? I’m with you on enjoying dialogue and internalizations for emotions! And the good news is that as long as we don’t overdo it (bringing the pacing to a halt, as you mentioned), those are great ways to share our characters’ emotions. In her critiques, Janice… — Read More »
” I think you mentioned before how certain cliche phrases are necessary within Chinese language stories, and how turning a cliche would actually result in clunky writing. Do you think body language phrases fall into a similar category?”
Haha not exactly necessary, but using cliched phrases sounds more elegant than expressing it in your own words–unless you can express it as succinctly (e.g. in only 4 words!) as these cliched phrases, haha. We call most of these phrases Cheng Yu.
Eh…nah, for body language there are a few cliched phrases, but not that much; there are way more cliched phrases for emotions. For the online story I was talking about, it wasn’t using Cheng Yu, but just the writer’s own phrasing.
“everything comes down to our target readership and their expectations”
Yup!
Hi Serena,
Ah, how interesting! Thanks for the information! 🙂
Oh, I absolutely LOVE books that leave me an emotional wreck. The trick for me is to do the same in my own work. I struggle with it in early drafts, but get closer to the mark later on, once I’ve tuned up the story. Thanks, Jami!
Hi Julie,
Interesting! And this is another one of those “reading is subjective” things, as I generally don’t care for uber-high angst. 😉 But that’s why we have to do what’s best for the story we’re trying to write. Different readers want different things, and that means it’s okay to write different things. 🙂 Thanks for the comment!
[…] week, we discussed how we can balance the right amount of emotion for our stories. But as I pointed out, there’s no rule for how much emotion to portray or how to include it, […]
[…] Gold explores how we can balance emotion in our writing without telling too […]
Love this post, Jami. I just started a bestseller spy book that my husband liked and recommended I read, and after a few pages, I thought–it’s so FLAT. Duh, I’m a romance writer and reader! This is a good reminder that there are readers out there who like other styles and genres!
And P.S. I sent up a prayer for your brother. Keep us posted on his progress.
Hi Alina,
LOL! Yep, there are many reasons reading is subjective. 🙂 Thanks for the comment and the prayers!
[…] of those goals, we see a lot of writing advice about how to create emotions, show emotions, strengthen emotions, layer emotions, handle intense emotions, etc. But we might not […]
[…] Mismatched Emotions: Over- or under-playing characters’ emotions changes the reader’s impression of them, which might not match our intentions. […]
[…] often mentioned that one of the last big skills I learned as a writer was how to include emotions. That’s one reason I’ve been such a big fan of the Emotion Thesaurus. If that book had […]
[…] We’ve talked before about finding the right balance for our story’s descriptions, our characters’ emotions, and even real-world […]
[…] balance the right amount of emotion especially with intense emotional scenes […]
[…] balance the right amount of emotion especially with intense emotional scenes […]