by Elton Gahr

Created on: May 09, 2009

If you want to connect your readers to your character the key is emotion. No amount of interesting quirks or even great personality will overcome the lack of emotion in a character, but you can't simply tell a person what the emotion of a character is and expect them to believe it. In order to effectively create emotion in your characters you must enhance them by doing something more.

The first thing you must do if you want to enhance the emotions of characters in your story is to understand emotions better yourself. Most people don't consciously think about how they act or feel in different emotional states, especially the more powerful emotions. As a writer, it is useful to consider it carefully. If you can catch yourself when you are angry and think about what physical reactions you are having, the same is true of fear, love, hate, even relaxation. Can you hear your heart beat, is your face warm, did you clench your fists or stand up? Every clue that you can gleam from yourself is something that you can use to make your character more real.

If like most of us you are unable to fully examine your own emotions while in the middle of them there are books that hold much of the same information. This is second hand knowledge but as you have experienced the emotions you will know what is true and what is not easily enough.

Once you understand the emotions it is useful to understand what effect they will have on the reader. Every emotion that your character feels that is real to the reader will connect him in some way to that reader but not all in the way that you want.

The most basic way to connect a person directly to a character is to put them in pain. Humans are naturally empathetic so if you put someone in simply physical or emotional pain the reader will feel a natural connection to them.

Love is another basic emotion that helps build a connection. Everyone knows what it is like to fall in love at least on a basic sense and humans almost universally pull for love to work. So creating a character who is in love will put the reader on his side, at least in that aspect of the story. Even an unlikeable character can gain sympathy through love, so long as he isn't to vial.

The third step is to use the entire story to convey the emotions. Good physical description mixed in to create emotions will get you most of the way, but as you learn pacing and mood in the words you choose and the style of writing you will be able to take it the final step. Using short sentence fragments to help create a mood of fear can be useful, but using the same style to create the feeling of a spending an lazy afternoon on a date isn't going to have the same affect.

If you can learn to create emotions in a real way rather than stating them, and understand how to weave them into a story in a way that connects the reader to the characters you will enhance your character emotions and make your story far better.

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