Do your characters keep feeling sad, furious, lonely, ashamed, or devastated on the page... but the reader still isn’t feeling much?

In this episode of Master Fiction Writing, we’re looking at the difference between explained emotion and experienced emotion. You’ll learn why naming a feeling isn’t always the same as creating it, and how to give the reader stronger emotional evidence through behaviour, body language, thought patterns, sensory detail, dialogue, silence, subtext, objects, and action under pressure.

We’ll also look at when it’s perfectly fine to name an emotion directly, why over-explaining is such a normal drafting habit, and how to revise emotional labels into moments the reader can actually feel.

The takeaway: your job isn’t to hide emotion from the reader. Your job is to make emotion happen inside the reader.

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