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If you want to create a story that will be remembered you must create emotion. The emotion you create doesn't matter. If you can make your reader feel love or hate or fear or joy or even sadness they will remember your story. In order to do this you must feel emotions for your story, create those emotions in the characters and find a way to pass that emotion on to the reader. Each of these three steps requires a different skill and each is necessary to create a truly memorable story.

The first step is to create a story that you feel emotion about. To do this you must learn to find stories that matter to you. Find things that excite your emotions and try to understand why. These can be things from your past or hopes from the future. It is also useful to learn to think carefully and logically about those emotions. The more you understand the how you acted, felt and physically reacted the better you will be at making your character act that way without resorting to exposition.

That ability to not use exposition to portray emotions is one of the keys to creating characters who carry emotions. You can say that someone is scared but that immediately cuts a line between the reader and the character. If you instead say their heart is beating, their hands a sweating and their eyes widen you will express the emotion without having to tell the reader. This ability to put emotions on the page without using the name is one that takes some practice but once you get good at it you will begin to find all of your characters filled with more interesting emotions.

No matter how much emotion you put into your characters it doesn't matter if your reader doesn't pick up on them. The most important thing to remember to help with this is that your readers don't know what you do. Try to read everything from the perspective of someone who doesn't know anything about the story except what you put on the page. This is often difficult because you know exactly what they are feeling and thinking.

All of this alone will help to create good stories but alone it can still seem flat. And this is where you must begin to create the mood. Every aspect of your story can provoke emotions. Create a story with short declarative sentences and the reader will feel rushed long stories will drag. The smell of baked bread may make a person feel comfortable and the feel of a slimy lizard uncomfortable.
Your characters are the first and most important step in creating a emotional story but it is not the only one.

Truly capturing emotion is difficult and every person reacts different which is why most writers fail often but when written well the failures to excite emotions are extra description and when they succeed they create stories that the reader will remember forever.

Learn more about this author, Elton Gahr.
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