24/09/2020 - Emotion Words

The world’s quickest entry today, because I’m tired and don’t really have a lot to say. However, I’ve come across a piece of advice which seems really useful - avoid emotion words when trying to establish a character’s emotional state. I.E. Don’t write ‘I was scared’ - write how the fear manifests. The feeling in the character’s stomach, their nervous tics, their dry mouth and so on. I’d already intuited this advice to a certain extent, but as a rule I quite like it. I’ve gone back over my most recent manuscript using a ctrl+F for ‘fear’ and, whilst most of them are used quite well, there was one sentence that read, in its entirety: “Fear rose in me.”

That’s not exactly a bad sentence but it smacks of telling the audience what the character feels rather than demonstrating the emotion and having the atmosphere carry that across to the reader. This sort of advice is sometimes called ‘show don’t tell’ but I hate that term, because it’s advice that comes from screenwriting. When you’re making film or television, you have a choice between showing the audience what’s going on with character action, or simply having a character tell the audience what’s going on. Show vs tell.

With text, 100% of what you’re doing is telling the reader what’s happening, unless there are pictures. The advice, when applied to novels, is better phrased as ‘demonstrate, don’t report’ or something similar, although I admit that’s less catchy than ‘show don’t tell’.