Writing a Novel – How to Create Believable Character Emotion How do we breathe authentic, effective emotions into characters when writing a novel? The emotions of characters inform every aspect of a novel. Emotion is what pulls readers in and keeps them hanging on every word of every page. The best fiction writers take readers on an emotional journey, one with emotionally complex characters that readers will be thinking about long after they’ve finished reading the book. Because of this, novel writing is only for those who are willing to work hard enough to create complex characters that believably portray complex emotions.
Writing a Novel with Authentic Emotion A typical writer understands feelings – we’ve all had our share of grief, happiness, anxieties, fear, exhilaration, depression, love, hate, and so on. Much good comes from writing a novel when we take the feelings and experiences we’ve had and use them to understand and portray our characters emotions. Using our experiences allows us to write with authenticity. For example, in my novel Peripheral View, my lead character (Pearl) suffers from epilepsy and her fear of having a seizure out in public led her to having first anticipatory anxiety and eventually full-blown panic attacks. I wrote a scene that showed her reacting to the attack by trying to claw her way out of a bus. A reviewer of the novel happened to be someone who had epilepsy. She asked if I suffered with it too. After I told her that I didn’t have epilepsy, her next comments both amazed and pleased me. She said that my portrayal of Pearl’s seizures and anxiety felt so close to her own experiences that it made her wonder how I knew the feelings. This is the deal with that. Peripheral View, although a work of fiction, was inspired by a true story. Pearl was based on my Aunt Lucille, who suffered from epilepsy and the stigma that came with that since she was a child. Visiting with me at my home, she had a grand mal seizure. So, I certainly can imagine what it would feel like for Pearl to have a seizure, particularly in a public place. And, while I don’t have epilepsy, I once suffered horribly from anticipatory anxiety and full-blown attacks. I could easily see someone who feared (and anticipated) the worst – the humiliation and embarrassment – of having a seizure on a public bus, could feel that fear mounting, feel the helplessness of not being able to control what might happen next, feel it to the point of seeing her desperately trying to get off the bus – right now! My own experience with anxiety informed how I should write the scene.
Writing a Novel Using Your Experiences If you can take your own experiences and transfer the emotions you felt with them into the scenes of your novel, all the more for making readers believe in the emotional state of your characters. It’s one of the most effective tools for creating character emotion. Not that the reader should be thinking, “This must have happened to the writer, it’s so real.” We don’t want the reader thinking about the writer at all while they’re reading the story. (They can think and wonder about you all they want after they’ve read the story.) No, we want them to believe in your character’s emotions.
Writing a Novel is Not a Factual Account We can use the emotions we’ve had, but that’s not to say that we want to write factual accounts of our experiences. When writing a novel, it’s important to keep in mind that fiction is not real life. A factual account of something is flat and is more of a report. Writing a novel isn’t about reporting on feelings, you need to surround the reader with incidences of how a character came to have a certain feeling. You are writing about your character’s situation and their emotions, which must remain true to their character traits. Additionally, don’t use an incident or an emotion just because you think it will make good reading. If it doesn’t fit with the profile you’ve created for your character, don’t use it.
Writing a Novel with Believable Character Emotion Many people can write, but those who write well are the writers who have labored over every word of their novel. “Labored” is a good way of describing it, I think, because it’s easy to settle for “good enough” writing when writing a novel and it’s much more difficult to attain great writing. Great writers don’t settle for the first description that comes to mind – when writing character emotions, constructing dialogue or setting a scene – they stretch their own imagination to capture that of their readers. You can finish reading this article on our website about writing a novel.