Writing Excuses 9.19: Showing Emotion

How do you go about writing a character showing their emotions without them sounding whiny (or whatever the “too-much” version of the appropriate emotion might be)?

Adding to the difficulty of the exercise, how do you know where that “too much” line is for your book, your genre, and your audience?

We talk about how we’ve each faced this challenge, and how that’s been very different for each of us. Sometimes it comes down to “show, don’t tell,” and sometimes that rule flat out doesn’t work. And sometimes it doesn’t come down to a simple rule at all. (Okay, most of the time that’s what it comes down to.)

Audiobook Pick-of-the-Week: Valour and Vanity, by Mary Robinette Kowal, and narrated by Mary, too!

Writing Prompt: Write a letter to Jane or Vincent, and write that letter as if you were a person living in the setting of Mary’s Glamourist Histories.

via Writing Excuses

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1 thought on “Writing Excuses 9.19: Showing Emotion”

  1. I’m currently reading Ancillary Justice, which has the opposite problem- creating characters we can care about who don’t have emotions.

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