forum Creating Emotion Towards Characters

Started January 08, 2018 by Ethan and Erin

tune

How do you go about making the reader have a specific feeling to a character? HELP!!

Show them!

If you want them to find a character annoying, think of things that annoy you when people do them. If you want them to be creepy, use things that creep you out. If you want them to be sympathetic towards a character, use your own experiences to show that and so on ad nauseum. I usually just google stuff like "annoying habits list" or "cute things kids do", so if you're looking for a specific feeling, Google is definitely your friend.

Another good method is to gauge how other people in the story feel about the character in question. For example, if you want to have one character come off as misunderstood, have other characters around them make a lot of false assumptions about their life.

Here's a good YouTube video on it! I'd check out all of her stuff. Another quick thing I'll say is that you should never have your narrator or characters blatantly say that a character is sad (or whatever). You should be writing in a way that lets readers figure it out for themselves. It's a big challenge, but once you practice you start getting really creative, since you can't lean on the crutch of the narrator to tell readers what's going on.