Putting feelings into your writing + Scene Journals
Put a piece of your soul into your writing.
Have you heard that term? It means but your heart into your writing and your readers can feel how much you’ve put into your work by just reading it! It makes a lot of sense to feel what your characters feel and make decisions that your character would make too. Make some realistic conflicts and choices and empathize with your characters and plot-line.
How can you put your emotions into words? Easy, describe your feelings. Now how do you make your readers feel what your characters feel? Not so easy, is it?
Describing emotions is as easy as counting to hundred, but making those emotions make an impact and making the reader feel how your character feels is like counting backwards from hundred. Making your readers feel those emotions you’re describing is the ultimate success of creating a well-sketched character.
Here are a few tips and suggestions you can use to make your readers feel your characters emotions.
Incorporate Real-life descriptions for emotional Scenes
The only way to make your readers feel the way your character feels, is by first feeling it for yourself. If your character is betrayed and you are describing his/her anger, think of a time you felt betrayed, thinking about what you did, the decisions you made, how you handled the situation and the thoughts that were running in your head. Did you cry? Did you plan revenge? Did you confront them?
Now take your reactions and fit them to your characters personality. If you based your characters personality on yourself, then write exactly what you would have done and how you felt.
Sometimes feeling your characters emotions before writing them makes you more aware of what you are describing which will give more depth to your character and his/her emotional response to the situation.
If you based your character on a personality of a family member or friend, question how your friend would react in that particular situation, and try to relate to his or her emotions.
Thinking about real situations can help us with how our character reacts to certain conflicts.
Scene- Journal
This is something I created that personally helped me create in-depth emotional scenes for my characters. Its basically keeping a journal of small scenes that happening your life, that could potentially be useful for your certain scenes in your novel.
It could be anything from deciding between two ice-cream flavors to the adrenaline rush you felt on a theme park roller coaster, and it doesn't have to be more than a few descriptive lines.
Try sticking a few pictures that remind you of the moment. These pictures could get you the same feeling again and help writing those scenes in your novel. Here are a few steps to creating scene Journals:
1. take a blank journal and divided into sections one for each emotion (happy, sad, angry, excited, shocked, disgust, anger) you can later divide these sections into subsections (Happiness-pride, Sadness-shame, Excited- interest, Shocked-fear, Disgust-contempt, Anger-hostility)
2. Write down some real-life scenes on all the emotions you’ve made in your journal, adding new subsections whenever required.
3. Stick pictures or scraps that remind you of that moment or memory. And remember to write long and descriptive captions under those pictures to help generate the same feeling you felt when you were in that particular scene.
Add some color and VOILA! You’ve got yourself a lovely scene journal!
Don’t make bland scenes that don’t get an emotional response from both the character and the reader. Make scenes that speak to your readers, scenes that make the reader want to jump up and down in joy, scenes that want the reader to curl up into a ball and cry, scenes that make the reader swell with pride for your character. Of course the most important part is having a conflict that resonates with the plot and influences the characters decisions throughout the story.
Hope you enjoyed this read! Comment the ways you create emotional scenes in your story!
