Sunday, January 11, 2015

Expressing Character Emotions - Introduction

Expressing character emotions is one of the most important and challenging aspects of writing fiction. If the reader does not experience what the character is feeling, the scene has failed. Physical reactions (pounding hearts, single tears) tend to be over-used. Interior monologue may sound like an info dump or excessive hand wringing.

While I hardly feel qualified to discuss this topic, a friend convinced me to give a short presentation on character emotions at an upcoming local SCBWI event called the Mid-Mitten Meet Up. (Times and locations of meet ups can be found at the SCBWI-MI website and on the SCBWI-MI Facebook page.) As I worked on my presentation, I decided to expand it into a blog series. Then I was recruited to do a guest post on the Mitten blog for SCBWI-MI.

My character emotion blog series will include posts on:

The posts will be primarily my opinion, but I’m getting help from:

The next post will be up on Wednesday, 1/14/15.

6 comments:

TimInMich said...

That sounds quite interesting, Ann. I look forward to Wednesday's post. And thanks for those interesting resources.

Ann Finkelstein said...

Thanks, Tim. I guess I'd better start writing that post.

Kathy Cannon Wiechman said...

I look forward to reading your posts on the subject. It was a problem I ran into in the first draft of my most recently finished novel. Not enough emotion. Someone needed to get mad!

Buffy Silverman said...

Sounds like a terrific series for the Mitten--looking forward to reading it.

Ann Finkelstein said...

Thanks, Kathy and Buffy. The series will be here. The Mitten will have a summary.

Ruth McNally Barshaw said...

I'm really excited to read this series.