Have you ever heard the phrase “show, don’t tell” in relation to emotions? Instead of saying “Bob was mad,” my latest blogpost on writing emotions discusses ways to show emotion. First, I introduce the emotion wheel that I’ll be using in this post and future posts on emotions. For this post, I focus on the base emotions at the center of the wheel. After getting that out of the way, I go through some of the overall reasoning and places to add your emotions, such as physical cues, internal cues, and narrative techniques. Finally, I go through those base emotions with descriptions of why we have the emotions, a list of specific words, phrases, and actions you can use, plus a summary of how the emotion impacts your writing and story. I’ve got some really practical stuff in here that I hope you can use!
