Writing memoir is challenging enough but conveying emotion is one of the more difficult things to do. Emotion is felt in the body. To convey emotion means to write about it through the body experience of it. Instead of “I cried,” you can write about the bodily sensations accompanying that experience. I felt that familiar lump in my throat, my face flushed as the tears welled up, my hands shook as I wiped the tears from my cheeks and so on. Even the aftereffects on the body are useful in conveying emotion. A tissue to wipe your nose, swollen eyes, and exhaustion. The body is the tool the writer can use when showing emotion. I was upset and cried isn’t nearly as good as, my whole body shook as I bit the inside of my cheek to try and hold back the tears that ran down my face.
Evoking Emotion
The second challenge when writing emotional scenes is evoking emotion in your reader. How do you get your reader to laugh, cry, rage, feel humiliation, smile, feel hopeful and so on? If you write the emotion too directly, your reader won’t feel it, because your writing does all the work. You want your reader to be invited into the experience, so you must make room for the reader. As soon as your character cries your reader doesn’t need to anymore because the character is effectively doing it and there is no room for the reader to have their own experience. This is a great example of the “less is more” principle. Below you will find a few ways to evoke and convey emotion in your work.
Stay with the Body
Use the body to convey and evoke emotion. Writing about the body, is one of the trickier aspects of writing. We all have a body, and we all experience ourselves through the body but what is the actual experience of it? Sex scenes and fight scenes are both notoriously difficult because the emotion must be told through the body. Happiness, joy, contentment, pleasure is often more difficult to convey than anger, rage, sadness, and grief. By staying with the body, you have the best chance of communicating emotions for your reader.
Use your Setting
Using the natural world and the setting can do a lot toward allowing the reader to experience the moment. For example, your character is a man standing at the window on a rainy day: this scene could be sad, angry, happy, pensive, thoughtful, transcendent, and so on depending on how you use the scene and the body movement of the character. If your character is pressing his hands firmly against the windowsill, his knuckles turning white and staring at the rain hitting the roof of his car, he is likely angry or frustrated. On the other hand, if your character is holding a whiskey, remembering his dad playing in the rain with him with a slight smile on his face; pensive and reminiscent. If your character is pulling back a curtain and noticing the way the rain washes the grime from the window, dripping off the eaves and running down the street in small rivers, taking the debris of fall leaves with it, you have something closer to hope and possibility. Or the rain could be hitting the window in a tip tap rhythm, playful puddles in the grass, and that perfect monochrome silver that coats everything on a rain filled day, just right for pulling out the saxophone and filling the house with music. The rain acts as carrier of the ideas and emotions the writer needs to convey. Never waste a good setting when it can be used to convey emotional context.
Watch out for Big Words
It is tempting to use big words to convey emotion. Big words are words that hold many different interpretations. A big word like happy has too many variations to be effective. The reader won’t feel happy by reading the words “She was so happy.” They will know intellectually that she is happy, but it won’t evoke much emotion from the reader. When revising especially look out for the big emotional words, sad, cry, angry, upset, frustrated, joyful, excitement and so on. Try replacing the word with a body expression or action. Sad could become, she sat in the tub unmoving until the water grew cold and still. This way the reader can see the sadness in a specific way, a type of sadness that is special to the character. Happy could become a sparkle in her eye and humming a song under her breath. Then the words happy and sad have been implied rather than stated and the implication is specific.
Show Don’t Tell
When it comes to emotion, scene work is usually more effective than narrative. This isn’t always the case, but it often is and should be attempted first for effective emotional moments in the story. Think about the last time you really felt something from a story, the last time you laughed out loud or cried while reading. There is a strong chance it was a scene that evoked your emotional response.
Emotions are the powerhouse of storytelling. Without it, your story has no heart.
Emotions in Writing
