Emotion is the engine of fiction. Emotion is the medium of story. Now, we’ve talked about showing emotions through action rather than declaring them in text. However, before you can show emotions, you have to know what they are.

You need to know how your characters feel, and what. What would make them happy? What makes them unhappy? When are they bored and what enchants them?

So, what are emotions? And why do we have them?

You read that right. Happiness should be used sparingly, precisely, and deliberately. In this essay I’m going to talk about the structural components of happiness: how and where you use it in your story.

Desire is the most fundamental of feelings. We all want things. We all want things that we can’t have. Showing our character’s trying to get the things they want but can’t have is what makes good storytelling: and it is done best when we don’t ever explicitly state what they are feeling.

Eventually you’ll finish your first draft. Now you must sit and read your work.

Maybe you’ll think “this is fantastic, it does exactly what I want!” Great! Correct spelling/grammar mistakes and move on. Your readers can disillusion you later.

Sometimes the manuscript will feel okay but not great. This is a very difficult situation, because how do you pin down ambivalence? The answer is skill and experience. We’ll be looking at techniques to identify why your story doesn’t feel right in this article.

Finally, you may find yourself experiencing a strong negative reaction to your work. Don’t press the panic button. This reaction shows your writing skills have advanced enough to identify problems. Having a strongly negative reaction is not the time to quit. It is when you can really begin. Let’s talk about how.

I’ve described how from the beginning of our story until the very end our character is trapped in a cycle or wanting something, being presented by an obstacle that prevents them getting what they want, taking an action that risks something important to them, and then either succeeding or failing depending on how they handle their flaws.

In the last exercise we worked on writing the impact of failure to achieve what they want (they can make progress, by the by – the should make some sort of progress – but ultimate success has to wait until the last pages of the book). So how do we get from their to the next cycle of want/obstacle/action?