Every writer hears these three rules: “write what you know,” “bleed on the page,” and “show, don’t tell.” Since those rules don’t tell you how to use them in storytelling, many writers turn to classes or books to learn how. They learn skills that are helpful. But those skills won’t forge an emotional connection with your readers. For that, you need three unique and interrelated skills: knowing what you feel, knowing the best words to use, and the willingness to share raw and honest feelings. This post shares information and suggestions on how writers can develop these three skills.

Knowing What You Feel

Humans are born with the capacity to experience and express basic emotions. Researchers have observed happiness, sadness, fear, anger, surprise, and disgust in infants across all cultures. These inborn emotions are identifiable through specific, recognizable facial expressions. But understanding, regulating, and labeling our emotions are skills we must learn. A wide range of factors—trauma, emotionally distant parents, depression, anxiety, mental health conditions, environmental, societal, and cultural factors, educational factors, biological factors, and more—influence how well you develop your skills in understanding, regulating, and labeling emotions. It’s a wonder anyone can know what they feel.

When you know a character’s personality and why it’s there, you’ll have what you need to write their behavior authentically. - Angela Ackerman

Most of us have grown up with the notion that there are positive emotions and negative emotions. That is true in that we have biological and mental responses we interpret as positive or negative. But emotions are our body’s way of communicating with us. For us to understand what that message is, we must first be aware. For writers, this is crucial to being able to convey characters’ emotions in a believable way.

Mindfulness

The first step is to increase your emotional awareness is to be mindful of your own. Listen to your body, your self-talk, and pay attention to the circumstances you’re in. Big feelings are easier to identify at first. So, if you’ve not included this in your writing practice before—start there. Write it all down. Describe what happened, what emotions you experienced, and where on or in your body you experienced those emotions first. Try to describe the intensity of your feelings.

If you feel too exposed having your feelings in writing, you can lock it up (passwords for digital files, physical locks on journals or boxes to keep journals in). You can also write a first entry advising anyone who reads your journal that these are exercises you are doing to improve your craft. Some writers have included the destruction of their journals in their last will and testament. Do whatever allows you to be raw and 100% honest in your journal. 

Blind Spots and Triggers

We all have emotional blind spots and triggers. 

Blind spots are areas where you lack insight into your emotions or the emotional impact you have on others. Blind spots create opportunities for character development, conflict, dramatic irony, and much more. You can reveal them as your character’s boundaries or flaws. Your characters can be completely unaware of them or develop an awareness of them over the course of your story.

Triggers are things (words, events, places, etc.) that you respond to with strong emotional responses. You probably already use emotional triggers in your writing. In scenes where one character betrays another, or falls in love, or dies, you create emotional triggers for your readers. You can add depth to characters with emotional triggers based on wounds from the character's past or with new triggers based on events in the story.

Understanding and identifying your own blind spots and triggers opens a hidden world of emotion and awareness you can create for your characters. Overdone, these things will read as melodrama. If the blind spots and triggers are unrelated to anything else in your story, or only appear once, readers will find it odd or inconsequential. Striking the right balance is key.

Emotional Literacy

Emotions are a complex mix of what goes on in our heads and hearts and our physical responses.

A writer who is emotionally literate has awareness, can label emotions appropriately, has a basic understanding of what triggers these emotions, and understands how emotions affect behavior, decision making, empathy, and interactions (social and personal). Without at least a basic understanding of these things, crafting believable and relatable characters will be much more difficult.

We learn the labels we give our emotions over a lifetime. Often they are imprecise or contain connotations specific to where we grew up, who our parents were, their background, cultural influences, and societal influences. Sometimes we simplify our emotions down to basics when they are much more complex.

It’s no wonder that most humans are not great at labeling their emotions. not even all psychologists agree upon how many emotions all humans experience. There are theories that say there are six and others that say eight.

Fortunately, there are tools writers can use to help them identify emotions and express them through concrete details.

The Emotion Wheel

The Emotion Wheel is a visual representation of emotions created in 1980 by an American psychologist, Robert Plutchik, to help patients identify eight core emotions: joy, sadness, fear, anger, anticipation, surprise, disgust, and trust. Other psychologists narrowed those down to six core emotions. Whether you use Plutchik's eight core emotions wheel or the six core emotion one, the design of the wheel places each emotion’s polar opposite on the opposite side. Example: joy is in the position opposite of sadness. 

Between each emotion on the wheel is another emotion that combines two adjoining emotions. For example: between anticipation and joy is optimism. Between anger and anticipation is aggressiveness.

The wheel goes even further. Not only does it give the emotions that are combinations of feelings, it also identifies degrees of emotion. For example, anger can range from annoyance to full-blown rage. Anticipation can go from mild interest to vigilance.

You can find more information about the emotion wheel online in videos and blogs. And you can buy your own wheel at online retailers. 

The wheel is not perfect, but as a tool it can help you figure out the range and progression of your characters’ emotional responses.

Turning Your Emotions into a Character’s Emotions

When you have kept a journal of the range of your emotions, the stimuli that triggered those emotions, and where you experienced them in your body, you have an invaluable took that will help you “write what you know” even when you have never been in that exact situation. For example, you have never experienced a lover’s betrayal, but you have experienced betrayal by a co-worker. With concrete details in your journal, you can use them to portray or extrapolate what being betrayed by a lover could feel like. Based on your authentic experiences, you have a much better chance of making your reader feel that sense of betrayal is real.

When you mine your journal, your emotions, for those concrete details, you can get into a rut of sameness. That’s not surprising. You experience your emotions in a certain way every time. To avoid all your characters having the same concrete details of emotions, use an emotion thesaurus. I (among many of the Writers In the Storm Blog Hosts) recommend The Emotion Thesaurus by Angela Ackerman & Becca Puglisi. Its entries include the definition, a list of physical responses, internal responses, mental responses, signs of acute or long-term experiences, and signs of repression, and additional writer’s tips.

The key to turning any emotion into something that feels real to your reader is in which concrete details you use and when because you have experienced something similar.

The Problem with Using Tools

As a writer, you can use tools like the Emotion Wheel but it may not give you the authenticity your readers crave. Unless you are vulnerable enough to educate yourself, to be aware of your own emotions and their underpinnings, you won't recognize when your characters feelings (and how they express them) are not quite relatable.

Is that a problem? It depends on your characters and the story you want to write. You will create a stronger connection between your characters and your readers if you are vulnerable enough to share concrete details from your own personal journey.

Emotional Awareness is Your Author SuperPower

What we do, say, and believe lines up with who we are and what shaped us. - Angela Ackerman

Your awareness of your emotions is a crucial step to using the power of emotions in storytelling. Writers are people. And as people, some of us may lack awareness of nearly all but the most basic emotions, while others of us might know every tiny nuance of their emotions. Awareness launches your journey toward emotional storytelling, but to deliver those emotions authentically in your writing requires more. You’ll need emotional literacy to pinpoint and express precise emotions at critical moments. And perhaps most importantly, you need to be vulnerable enough to express your rawest and most honest emotions. These interconnected elements—awareness, literacy, and vulnerability—get stronger the more you develop and sharpen them. It’s a lifelong personal and professional journey. It’s not a journey every writer needs to take in order to sell their work. But it is a journey that might be worth your time and energy both personally and professionally.

Has recording or studying psychology or your own emotions been a helpful part of your writing life?

About Lynette

Lynette M. Burrows is an author, blogger, writing coach, and Yorkie wrangler. She survived moving seventeen times between kindergarten and her high school graduation. Her stories weave her experiences into speculative fiction stories that balance character growth with thrilling action and social themes. 

My Soul to Keep is book one of an alternate history dystopian trilogy about a young woman of privilege who in her desperation to avoid her pre-planned life, escapes and ends up in a no-win situation. She faces a choice: return to suffocate under the rules of her society or fight for her country and her life. Book One, My Soul to Keep, and Book Two, If I Should Die, are available at your favorite online book seller. Book Three, And When I Wake, will be published in December 2025.

When Lynette’s not writing she avoids housework and plays with her two yorkies. They live in Dorothy’s home state of Kansas. You can follow Lynette on her website or her Facebook page or Sign up for her newsletter.

Image Credits

Smiley image by Gino Crescoli from Pixabay

Emotion wheel is courtesy of Ainrvteers Emotion Wheel on Amazon.