How to write point-of-view characters’ emotions
I felt sick to my stomach. I felt shock. I felt a great emptiness within me, which then filled with silence.
So feels Pi Patel, the main character in Yann Martel’s award-winning novel Life of Pi, when the ship he’s sailing on sinks to the bottom of the sea.
And I’m glad that he does, because like any other reader, I come to novels to witness how people react to conflict and crisis, how they find a way through challenges to their physical, mental, and spiritual safety. Martel’s three deceptively simple sentences ferry me directly to Pi’s experience of emotional upheaval. They make his character pulsate with life.
No matter what kind of story you’re writing, you’ll need to open a thousand windows to the hearts of your characters as they encounter obstacles and navigate change. A character who doesn’t emote is only a cardboard cutout. A character who is realistically affected by turbulent situations becomes flesh and blood in your reader’s imagination.
Most important are the emotions of the point-of-view character, the being through whose eyes and ears readers are experiencing the story. Most often, it’s the protagonist. In The Lord of the Rings, Frodo Baggins is the POV character: we’re essentially living in Frodo’s head throughout the book, seeing, hearing, and feeling what he sees, hears, and feels. In A Game of Thrones, the chapters cycle between different POV characters: Bran, Catelyn, Dany, Ned, Jon, and so on. In each chapter, we are privy to only one POV character’s thoughts and feelings.
In a story, five main threads lead to the emotions of a POV character:
Thoughts (Oh, shoot—a monster’s coming!)
Inner physical sensations (She is possessed by a desperate, lung-crushing fear.)
Dialogue (“Let’s get out of here!” she says in a tinny voice she doesn’t recognize.)
Actions (Galvanized by terror, her legs spur into action and carry her down the hall.)
Setting (The hallway that was once so homey now looms dark and malignant before her.)
Like a braid, a great story weaves in each of these threads to create a nuanced, multi-sensory portrayal of the character’s mental state. If one thread is weak or missing, so is an opportunity to deepen the three-dimensionality of the character.
Showing vs. telling emotions: Aim for balance and variety
Regardless of which threads you’re picking up, you can go the direct route (what many writers call “telling”) or the indirect route (“showing”). Both techniques are useful; both have their place in a narrative writer’s toolbox.
On the direct route, you tell the reader what the emotion is by naming it: words like fear, dread, afraid, frightened, anxiously, apprehensively.
On the indirect route, you imply what the emotion is rather than stating it outright. Body language, physiological factors (like heart rate and sweating), and emotionally charged thoughts and dialogue are all indirect ways of showing what a character is feeling.
Writers often forget that setting can and should communicate the POV character’s emotions as well. Feelings colour the way we perceive the world: if I’m in a bad mood, I’m more likely to notice what I find repulsive or annoying in my surroundings; conversely, if I’m feeling jolly, I find something to like in even the dreariest of environments. Fictional people behave in exactly the same way.
“Telling” has been much maligned in writers’ circles. Maybe you avoid using emotion words like frustrated and stunned—aren’t those telling the reader what the character is feeling instead of showing it?
Yep, and sometimes, a shortcut is exactly the way to go! Wildly successful authors do it all the time. Within the first chapter of Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, feelings are mentioned no less than 36 times. In Chapter One of Catch-22, I counted 33 of them, and in Gone Girl, 27 emotion words appear within the first two brief chapters. Emotion words are clearly part of the characterization toolbox of many master wordsmiths. Not all authors are as liberal in their use—detective stories come to mind, with their notoriously cool-headed, rational-minded protagonists—but you’d be hard-pressed to find a novel that doesn’t contain any.
Here are ways that the bestselling middle-grade fiction author Lemony Snicket describes the emotion of fear in A Series of Unfortunate Events: The Wide Window. Each chapter features a well-balanced mix of showing and telling—often both in the same paragraph.
Thoughts:
She wasn’t sure they were perfectly safe, not at all, but it seemed best to tell Aunt Josephine they were perfectly safe. (showing)
Violet was afraid that she was calling out Aunt Josephine’s name when her aunt could no longer hear it. (telling)
Inner physical sensations:
Her heart in her throat, Violet stood in front of the creature and gave it a fake smile. (showing)
She was cold. She was frightened. But she had escaped. (telling)
Dialogue:
“She’s awake!” Violet shrieked. “He’s awake! It’s awake! Hurry, Klaus, open the gate and I’ll try to distract it.” (showing)
“She’s crawling very slowly toward that person,” Violet said, afraid even to blink. (telling)
Actions:
Violet hung up the phone, her heart pounding, and turned to Aunt Josephine. (showing)
Violet looked at the shack with dread in her heart. (telling)
Setting:
It seemed as if the entire house were holding on to the hill for dear life. (showing)
It made her feel cold and lost, as if she was not simply looking at the shadowy lake, but had been dropped into the middle of its depths. (telling)
As we can see, both showing and telling characters’ emotions are valid approaches. What does weaken prose is depending on one technique at the expense of the other. He was sad, then he was mad, then he was sad again: the direct route, if abused, can seem simplistic and shallow. But long, indirect descriptions of a character’s feelings, especially in less important scenes, can bog down the pace of the story. Sometimes a well-placed emotion word like disconcerted or relieved is all that’s needed so we can move on to the next juicy part. A good balance between showing and telling is one of the secrets to immersive storytelling. And there’s no magical ratio: different writers prefer different ratios, and that’s perfectly fine.
Another key to captivating storytelling is variety. Great authors constantly renew the ways that they convey their characters’ emotions. Imagine if J. K. Rowling had written “Harry was scared” every time a creepy character turned the corner. We’d be snoring instead of staying up late, eagerly turning the pages. No, what she did write is stuff like “Harry’s heart dropped like a stone” and “A mixture of fear and excitement gripped him” and “Harry’s insides did a horrible somersault.” These kinds of evocative turns of phrase keep her prose perpetually lively.
One of the most common problems I encounter when I’m assessing a manuscript is a lack of variety in how the characters’ emotions are expressed. It’s totally natural to have pet words and phrases—we all have them. One pet phrase that I often come across is she took a deep breath. Two more are his eyes widened and she rolled her eyes. But if phrases like these show up over and over again, readers do start noticing it, and it does get irritating, and they will put down your book. In literature as in the real world, variety is the spice of life.
Revising to power up POV characters’ emotions
As you’re revising your draft, tune into your POV character’s emotions, scene by scene. What strategies did you use to express their feelings to your reader?
❏ Thoughts (the character’s internal monologue)
❏ Inner physical sensations (feeling hot or cold, feeling tensions rise and fall in their body, etc.)
❏ Dialogue (what the character says)
❏ Actions (the character’s gestures and movements)
❏ Setting (location, time of day, weather, etc.)
❏ “Telling” (using emotion words like indignant, nervously, bewilderment)
❏ “Showing” (alluding to emotions indirectly, without using emotion words)
If you consistently used a wide variety of strategies, this is one of your strengths as a writer! If you discover that there are one or two strategies you rely on most heavily, ask yourself whether your story might benefit from shaking it up a little. If there’s a strategy that you rarely use, try it out: you may find that it adds an intriguing layer of nuance to your storytelling.
Novel study
A remarkably effective way to improve your portrayal of POV characters’ emotions is to see how your favourite writers do it. Pick up a book in the same genre as yours and flip to three emotionally intense scenes in the story. Run them through the checklist above and ask yourself the following questions:
What strategies does this author handle particularly well?
What turns of phrase are particularly compelling in conveying the POV character’s emotions?
What’s one takeaway you can apply to your own writing?
Over to you
Off the top of your head, what are your go-to techniques for expressing your POV characters’ feelings? Which strategies are you interested in experimenting with further? Are there any pet words & phrases that like to sneak into your stories? Comment below!
