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Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/27012
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/27012
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

I suspect that you don't really want to describe their emotions in the clinical sense. Rather, you want the reader to know how they feel, and to feel how they feel, or at least to feel sympathy for how they feel, at the moment of the kiss.

If so, the way you do that is not through what you say in the moment of the kiss. It is how you set it up. Think about how a great romantic kiss is handled in a movie. It does not come out of the blue. It is meticulously set up as the characters go from bickering to flirting to longing so that long before the kiss comes the audience is aching for it, is shouting "shut up and kiss her you fool" at the screen as the hero bumbles through his courtship. Once all that setup work is done, there is no need to describe anybody's emotions. The audience knows exactly what the emotions are, and they feel those emotions too. This kiss is just the trigger, the moment of release, the moment of fulfillment for all the work that has gone before.

As a writer, therefore, you never describe important emotions. You create them. You only describe an emotion if it is secondary, if it is not something that you expect the reader to participate in or empathize with -- some piece of business that is necessary to drive the plot but is not of the essence of the story arc.

So many of the POV question here really come down to the same thing. A struggle to describe in the moment emotions that should have been set up by careful preparation. They are not really POV problems at all. They are setup problems. Create emotions, don't describe them.

Original score: 18