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Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/47794
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/47794
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

There are multiple ways to approach a character's emotions, each of which may be appropriate in context.

First, you can simply name the emotion. This is appropriate when their emotion is incidental to the main focus of the scene. It is also appropriate in cases where the character is giving no outward signs of the emotion. There is a difference between having and emotion and actively emoting, and people often hide their emotions, which is a significant aspect of their character and actions in many situations. If you have a scene were a bunch of soldiers stand guard over a comrade's coffin, for instance, you can't have them bursting into tears and sobbing their eyes out. They will be stoic in respect to both their friend and their uniform.

Second, you can describe the outward signs of the character's sadness, such as a long face or tears. This allows the reader to diagnose the characters sadness from the symptoms given. It also puts more of a focus on the character and their sadness, bringing it more to the center of the scene. But it also, for reasons explained above, tells you more about the character than simply that they had the emotion. It also tells you in what circumstances and by what means they allow themselves to express emotions, so you need to be careful to get that part of it right as well.

Third, you can make the reader intuit the emotion through the circumstances of the story. Most human being are good at intuiting others emotions. We don't need to see tears pouring down someone's face to know they are sad. If we know that they have been hoping for something and they don't get it, we know they are sad even if they are outwardly cheerful (as people often are, to mask their disappointments). Good writers exploit their reader's ability to intuit emotions by setting up the arc of the story and the arc of the characters so that when a particular event happens, we know how the characters feels because we feel it too. This is by far the most powerful way to write because here the reader is not merely diagnosing the emotions of another, they are participating in them sympathetically as we would with the emotions of a friend, and feeling them themselves.

Writing is about creating experiences. When it comes to emotions, you can create the experience of being told about an emotion, the experience of diagnosing an emotion, or the experience of having an emotion. Each of these is appropriate in its place (all three occur in real life as well) but the latter is by far the most powerful.

Original score: 4