Character Emotions By Lexi Jewlgia It’s simple to create a character, but it’s challenging to create a character that connects with the audience. The characters need to evoke emotions in your readers in order for them to be believable. Write what you know: Use your own personal experiences to aid you in building up emotions in your characters. Think about situations you have been in and how you felt during those times. Analyze the events, emotions, and outcome of the situations. Let History Play a Part: Give your main characters credible backgrounds. Let your readers learn why your characters are molded the way they are. The cause of your characters behaviors and opinions eventually should be made known to the readers. Use their motivations, conflicts, successes, and failures to draw emotions. Readers can develop natural reactions by connecting with your characters because of their flaws and fears. Write in your voice: There are many writers that try to emulate other authors, and that can cause problems. Spending time trying to write like other authors can cause your story to get lost and your readers to disconnect. Find your own style and use your own voice. Research the Unknown: If you write about a topic you aren’t familiar with, or have your characters feel things you haven’t then do some research. For example, if you write a story based on a lawyer then know the terminology and definitions of the words you use in the story. It’s a horrible mistake to use them if you aren’t aware of what they mean. Readers can get turned off by someone using random words just for the sake of using them. Show the Emotions: Showing the readers what you characters are going through will help your audience connect to your characters. Show your characters’ facial expressions, actions, gestures, and movements. There’s nothing wrong with the following sentence, but it’s very ordinary. There’s nothing about it that would make me want to continue the story. I can’t picture her crying just from those words. The movie made Kirsten cry. I see everything the character is going through in the description below. I can relate to the emotions and situation. It stretches the moments giving me time to connect with the character. While watching the movie, Kirsten felt a lump in her throat, making it difficult for her to swallow. She reached for a tissue to wipe the tears falling down her cheeks. Let creativity take its course and show your readers the characters through your use of imagery and description. There’s nothing better than seeing characters come alive and off the pages. If you achieve this then your readers will be able to feel and believe your characters’ emotions. Lexi is an author on http://www.Writing.Com/ which is a site for Creative Writing.

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