Not that I'm not guilty of this!!! I assure you, I've done this many times. But I've learned to trust my readers and they, in turn, trust me.

Fantastic post!

I love when that kind of synchronicity happens! And I’m especially glad the article gave you something useful for the scene you’re working on right now. You make a great point about emotional repetition across chapters, too. We tend to notice the bigger patterns first, but I’ve been fascinated by how much repetition can sneak into a single scene without us realizing it. Good luck with that October first-draft goal!

‘Experiencing the scene right behind the eyeballs’ is such a great description. It also connects beautifully with what I’ve been discovering about what characters notice. Once we’re fully inside a particular POV, we’re not just asking what the character feels, but what this particular character would notice, think, or do because of that feeling.

I expected to read about emotional repetition in chapters - such as when a character has emotional outbursts, or paranoia or disappointment, chapter after chapter, then it loses impact. I hadn't considered it on a scene level, so this was valuable. Thank you.

Exactly.

My 'process' has the written step in preparation for writing each scene that states: BECOME the character, and I mean channel the character in my head through the whole scene, seeing/reacting only as that character would.

It is remarkably quick at removing the redundancy - people don't think the same emotion three different ways when they have it, so putting that into the scene just doesn't feel right. I aim for 'experiencing the scene right behind the eyeballs' of the pov character, which can take many tries to get just right, but has become easier as I've lived with the three pov characters for years now. But I still have to shift consciously into each pov before I can write their scene.

I love this! The glove creates such wonderful subtext because the physical interaction is telling us something the dialogue doesn’t have to say. That’s exactly the kind of moment I’m trying to pay more attention to in my own revisions. Sometimes what the character does carries far more emotional weight than another thought explaining how they feel.

Absolutely. I think the distinction is between reinforcement and redundancy. An emotional cue that returns later in the scene, especially from a different direction, can reinforce or even deepen what the reader is experiencing. What I’ve been finding in my own revisions is the problem occurs when I stack several cues together that all communicate the same thing without adding anything new. Thanks for adding this nuance!

Thanks, Lisa. I’ve been amazed at what a difference this has made in my writing.