This week: Emotional Fiction Writing Edited by: NaNoNette  
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| "Emotions are the vibrant threads that weave a connection between characters’ souls and readers’ hearts." - K. M. Weiland |
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Emotional Fiction Writing
The word "emotional" can easily be mistaken for either romance or behaviors that are overly dramatic in a negative sense. Writing emotional fiction is at the same time much less than that, yet so much more.
Some of the most famous characters in fiction are emotional basket cases. Take The Witcher, also known as Geralt of Rivia. He would say so little and give so few hints at his inner life, that the actor who portrayed him for a TV show had to fight to make him come across in just the emotional stunted way that he is written in the books. Behaving like this works if it's one character in a story involving many others who behave differently. Even if you're a writer who enjoys describing the silent hero, you need to infuse the world around with colors and emotions.
There are a few things you can practice to recognize when emotions are needed in your story and how to best include them.
Do some work on yourself. Learn how to become emotionally intelligent.
For instance, while is seems counter to itself, an emotional reaction is a physical reaction.
Only by understanding that clammy hands can be a sign of inner turmoil will you be able to write characters who experience clammy hands when they experience certain feelings.
As you work on describing emotions, touch on all three parts affected: the heart, the body, and the mind.
When you examine your first draft, read it with an eye to the areas that need pertinent emotions added in. Once you've found the areas, figure out how to insert emotions into the text so that it flows with it.
Go ahead and use your own experiences to tap into emotions. No, don't just write what happened to you. Instead, as you put your characters through situations, think of a time when something similar happened to you and try to describe what was going on in your mind and your body.
What you are trying to accomplish by working emotions into your short and longer stories, is to avoid flatly stating or telling a reader, "Character A felt fearful." You need to put that fear into your reader!
Which emotion do you think you write well? Which emotion would you like to write better?
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Replies to my last Short Stories newsletter "Word Count" that asked Have you ever been disqualified from a contest because you forgot to add a word count? Or because you went under or over the limit?
Samuel Max  wrote: Thank you. Sometimes I don't know exactly how long a document or story that I've written is and that there is a way that can be checked on how many words there are. I will have to check out that feature next time I'm on an Office or Word document.
Thank you for the comment. Yes, word processing software is a great help.
Beholden  wrote: "Have you ever been disqualified from a contest because you forgot to add a word count? Or because you went under or over the limit?"
The short answer is no to both questions. I think I've missed on occasion for being a bit too liberal with genre or strict interpretation of the prompt, but the word count is one of the most important things to me. It defines how much room you have to say what you want, after all. And that means you have to be careful about what can be included right from the start. A flash fiction piece of a hundred words requires a very different technique from something that allows up to 1,500 or 2,000 words, for instance.
And thank you for including my short story, Scapegoat, in your Editor's Picks section!
Thank you for sharing my opinion that word count is important.
scifiqueen wrote: I was disqualified from a Writer's Cramp contest for forgetting to put a word count in the post. I felt bad about forgetting that because I felt it was real contender, but I understood my mistake and, COVID brain fog or not, I was disqualified for a legitimate reason.
Sorry that you were disqualified. The rules are there to help the judges to create an even playing field and to ensure that there is no time wasted on finding the word count somewhere in an item.
Write_Mikey_Write!  wrote: Thanks for making The Hanged Man one of your picks! Your suggestion regarding copy / paste / count eventually dawned on me, and that's how I operate today. Why? Because I got DQ'd on The Amazing 55 Word Contest more times than I care to remember. Apropos of word counts: In general, do contest hosts only copy / paste the tale for compliance? I ask, because adding dropnotes, for example, ups the word count when you use the item's Word Count function.
In my contests, if I ask for 2,000 words, the I mean only the actual story. All the other stuff around like a link to the contest, the words: Wordcount, and a copy of the prompt are not part of the allowed word count. So, your total item could be way over 2,000 words, but only the story words count. That was a good question. |
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Short Stories: May 08, 2024 Issue [#12539]
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