Questions tagged [emotions]
This tag should be used in question related to portray a given emotion in a writing, or dealing with certain feeling during the act of writing.
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How to write an insulting experience for my protagonist?
My protagonist finds out that his friends have completely forgotten him. I want to write an insulting scene for my protagonist and want the readers to connect with him fully. Need some tips on how to ...
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How could I write a tragic, depressed character without making them completely unbearable/hateable?
In the middle of my epic, the deutertagonist's love interest gets brutally killed off and she is forced to watch. For the third quarter of the story, she is trying to deal with the pain and trauma.
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Describing paralyzing fear in the first person
I would appreciate some suggestions that would help me describe intense terrifying fear that my main character feels when the airplane he is on suddenly goes into a seemingly out of control dive that ...
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Writing a character with amnesia
I'm working on a webcomic in which the main character has amnesia from head trauma. She was an experiment and when escaping she hit her head. She has one sentence of dialogue to the other main ...
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How do you write about the human condition when you don't understand humanity?
I was talking with some writers, and they were mentioning how writing is fundamentally about "the human condition, our take on it, what we see in our world and experience. All stories, no matter ...
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How can I make a situation where someone close to a character is killed emotional?
How can I make a situation where someone close to a character is killed emotional? I've tried many times, and each time it seems to me like the reaction of my main character isn't like what a real ...
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Is it possible to write an emotional narrative in a game with player-made character?
I'm in the process of drafting a story for a single player game where the player controls their own made character.
I'm planning for the game to have an emotional narrative but I cannot wrap my head ...
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How do I build a friendship?
How can I build a realistic friendship that utilizes emotion? One of the main problems in my writing is characters not seeming to be as emotional or have real seeming connections to family or friends.
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How to write a character who is falling in love, but doesn't know?
So I have been trying to write a character that is oblivious to romantic advances because they mistake them for normal, platonic reactions. I know how they act in my mind, but I can't convey it enough ...
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For people of color, are there unique ways to describe emotional state through skin tone, besides 'going pale,' 'turning red,' 'looking green,' etc?
Are there some words or phrases to describe a person of color, specifically darker colors, when their skin tone changes with emotion? Like for a white person, they'd turn pale when scared or turn red ...
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Using rhythm to evoke emotion
When writing there is one area I am not great at leveraging. That's rhythm or meter. I don't hear meter naturally like some people do so I have to really break down the meter in order to work on it. ...
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Guy's POV when falling in love. Too much, not enough?
Half of my story is told from (1st person) male POV and he falls in love with the leader of a rebellion he's meant to be undercover investigating and trying to stop. He slowly comes round to join the ...
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How to write Man vs. Self conflict?
CONTEXT: The action of my story takes place in a typical dystopian world, where society is harshly indoctrinated and restricted. The main character, who needs to raise money for his family, joins the &...
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How do you write a character with goes from A to Z and back to A realistically?
How do you write a character with goes from A to Z and back to A realistically? Let's say the characters is extremely in love, then wants to murder the person she was in love with and then go back to ...
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How to describe a character waking up in an alternate world?
So I am a new writer and I am working on a fantasy novel. One of the main characters is Nolan. He is a boy that was born on another planet but was sent to Earth as a baby. When he is 18, a person ...
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How can I show characters dealing with rejection?
From my own experience reaction to rejection is very internal. I'm having troubles with coming up with actions that rejected people do, that would be perfect description for what they feel. It would ...
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Writing from a depressed character's point of view
I've got characters on an adventure together, nothing groundbreaking. But one of them (let's say "Alice") loses a body part in one of their fights, and winds up in a dark mental place as a ...
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Writing scenes where everything goes absurdly wrong?
I'm writing a short story where a mysterious rich man has just died and his friends are gathering to find out his will. The dead man was quite eccentric and wanted to send them all on a wild goose ...
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How to communicate characters' inner states?
This is a huge question, parts of which have been answered on this site. However, this is one of the biggest challenges writers face, and so I think the question's relevancy matches the amount of work ...
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How do you preserve emotions in a poem?
I am just another person who writes poems to vent out emotions. I discovered that the amount of emotions that I feel my poem has during the time of writing, slowly evaporates away. When I re-read it ...
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Italicizing for emphasis
I've noticed that I have had a lot of dialogue between characters with words that need to be said with a noticeable amount of emphasis, and in order to get that emphasis I have had to italicize lots ...
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Is it okay to write short adjacent story of a second lead in the main story?
I am writing a story of a slice of life of a teenager girl who seeks her forgotten past and run away from her forced marriage to follow her dreams. I want to add another story of her cousin and her ...
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How to write a character with a bipolar personality?
I need some help. I am already deep into 2 stories that involve composers and in both stories there is a character based on Ludwig van Beethoven. Here is what I have trouble getting across:
Friendly ...
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How to write a hospital death scene without sentimentalism?
The cliché scene where a man dies on the hospital bed and ECG goes "beep beep beep" is seen by everyone in movies. The problem is that someone told me that I go too sentimental in scenes ...
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How to detach yourself from a character you're going to kill?
So, in a WW2-ish story featuring a co-ed military, I have a female soldier who is very kind and caring. I'm setting her up to be a mascot and somewhat of the postergirl. Trouble is, she dies further ...
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Writing about extreme trauma
I've just written a chapter in which one of my protagonists witnesses her entire family massacred during an invasion of her home city. This is obviously an extremely traumatic and horrifying event and,...
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Having trouble keeping my emotionless character emotionless
I wrote the first chapter for one of my stories in which I have a character who went through a bunch of training for a secret government organization and ended up an emotionless killing machine. Only ...
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Characters feelings; Using them for pacing/tension
I'm writing a novel and in the opening chapter, one of the main characters finds herself traveling by foot through a very severe sandstorm. I used the character's feelings of choking/suffocating to ...
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Show vs Tell: Complex and nuanced emotions
The one writing guideline that has altered my writing the most is the Show vs Tell guideline. I was probably far into the "tell" territory before, but sometimes I feel like this guideline is ...
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Are there any good alternatives to "a fire inside" of someone?
I'm trying to express the idea of a character undergoing a realisation, thus feeling an idea along the lines of a "fire being ignited inside of him".
However, I was wondering, are there any better ...
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How to write a vulnerable moment without it seeming cliche or mushy?
So, I have a kinda loudmouthed character who's always the first to fight and first to go on the offensive (This is a fantasy, so she fights a lot.) But, later in the story, she comes across someone ...
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How to "show" a "Yes" head confirmation
How can I "show" that my character is saying "yes" as a respond from a question?
The only thing that comes to my mind is
Mike moves his head, confirming that he is okay.
I think this is not good ...
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How do you show an introverted, socially awkward character is kind?
I have a character for whom three of their most prominent traits are meant to be their kindness/high degree of empathy, social awkwardness/obliviousness to social cues, and overall introversion. I am ...
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How to NOT get sad when writing
I am writing historical fiction novel.
Some parts are very sad.
I am identifying with my characters to develop and write about them.
How to move past the sadness and write about ill-fated ...
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How to represent jealousy in a cute way?
The main character (which is a girl) of the first romance I'm writing would feel jealous sometimes of her love interest, but I want it to be a cute trait or even a setup for funny scenes, not a very ...
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How to develop my reluctant character?
I am writing a novel which is about a naive, good-for-nothing boy who is also suffering from low self-esteem. One day, due to some events, he gets some special powers and is unwillingly forced into a ...
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How to get across pain more effectively in my story?
I have been writing a story about a young pianist living with the great composers. After the composers have a meeting, it is decided that Mozart should be her first teacher. My main character's name ...
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Outlining the climax made me lose interest in writing the actual story
I am a discovery writer. I wrote more than 50% of my first novel's first draft.
I got really confuse about some aspects of writing, so I took a break and analysed my plot. I've started developing my ...
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Emotional arc types
Assuming this vocabulary: the narrative arc is the arc which makes the plot go forward, while the emotional arc is the arc which engage the character on a deeper, not always logical level.
While ...
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What is one way to write about feeling someone's sadness? [closed]
For example:
I sensed as if he became sad from the way he spoke after telling him
that I would go with her.
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What makes writing emotional?
Over the years, my English professors seem to have agreed on one thing: that I'm a superb technical writer, but terrible at eliciting emotional response in something like a story or an argumentative ...
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How important are the author's mood and feelings for writing a story?
How important are the author's mood and emotions while writing a story or describing a scene?
For example, while writing an erotic scene, is it important for the author to feel the same way as they ...
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Developing a dialogue that unexpectedly leads to strong feelings between two strangers
A short story I'm writing involves a stage in which the male protagonist talks to a stranger with the intent of asking them to do a favor for his friend. I want them to start having strong feelings ...
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How can I portray a resentful character without making them overtly angry?
I am writing a fiction story about a elite unit, SFD (Strike Force Delta), during the Third World War. The war is basically extremely variable, it lasts from 2025 to 2030. I like to call it the '...
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How can I write a panicked scene without it feeling like it was written in haste?
I normally try to place myself in my character's shoes and I think to myself, "how would I react if I were in this situation?" Well one of my beta-readers commented on my work, and he said the chapter ...
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How can I showcase the dynamic relationship between two personalities? [duplicate]
The protagonist, as a child, was born into an eldritch cult which worships the being known as shub-niggurath. His parents chose him to be an unwilling participant in a sacrificial ritual, using his ...
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How do I make the downfall of a character moving without being cliche?
So, the character is an anti hero, he loses all his morals, and becomes the very thing he fights against.
How can I make the downfall of this character more emotionally moving/impactful without ...
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How to create feeling with setting
I have a passion for setting. I've heard you should write about what you're passionate about. Now when I say passion I mean I like to visualize the fantastic place the author is describing to form a ...
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Lovesick Character Distracting Readers
How do you show that a character is suffering from lovesickness in a story plot, but not distract the reader from the actual main plot of the story?
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Dealing with quick shifts in emotion
I have a character that, by design, quickly jumps between emotions. To put it into human terms, I have pictured scenes where he will, literally, within the span of a sentence, go from hysterically ...
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