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Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/37618
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/37618
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

Lamentably, a great many authors today are mentally acting out scenes in their heads because they are subconsciously directing a movie rather than writing a novel.

Both the screen and the page are limited media. They do some things well and some things badly. Showing facial expressions and body language generally is something the screen does well and the page does badly. Thus a movie script will often put more of the responsibility for expressing emotion onto the actors rather than on the dialogue. In fact, movie dialogue is often incredibly trite because it is meant almost as a blank canvas for the actor to use to paint in the emotions they want to portray.

The page, on the other hand, does not give much scope for acting. You can certainly mention an action or a frown now and then, but there cannot be any of the subtlety of expression or movement that an actor can bring to a scene. Only the crudest movements can be described. The novelist, therefore, puts more of the emotion into the dialogue than you would find in real life. People give speeches, they use elevated language, they use more varied vocabulary and extended metaphors and similes that people would rarely use in real speech.

This is how you express emotion in prose, therefore: not in actions but in words. And, also, not in the moment but in the setup. The real trick to creating powerful emotion in a story is not how you write individual scenes but in how you set up the scene beforehand so that the reader has the desired emotional reaction just from hearing that some dreaded or hoped-for event has happened.

In short, use the techniques appropriate to the media you are working in.

Original score: 2