It can be challenging to strike the right balance when writing an emotional scene. You don’t want your scene to come across as cringe, but you also can’t avoid emotion entirely. What’s a writer to do?

Writing, truly, is all about emotions: capturing them in your writing, and also inspiring certain emotions in your readers. Most people’s favourite books and movies have won their hearts because these stories made them feel something. So emotions are a really important aspect of writing — to an extent, you might say they’re the most important aspect.

No pressure, but it’s important to get feelings right in your fiction. So here are some key things to be aware of when you’re writing emotions.

One mistake writers make is that they write about emotions in an over-the-top soap-opera way. They have characters screaming, crying, falling down… Which can happen in real life, but only in extreme situations when someone has been pushed to their absolute limit.

If your characters have truly been pushed to their limits, that’s fine, you’ve earned that loud, melodramatic scene. Enjoy it.

But most of the time, emotions are much too complicated to be shouted out loud. People are often processing them at the same time as feeling them. In other words, we often don’t immediately know what our emotions are. They sneak out of us in subtle ways.

So one thing to remember is that you should avoid making your character too emotionally aware. You, the writer, should know exactly what they’re feeling and why, but the character should usually be a few steps behind.

It’s also important to remember that when it comes to showing emotions in our writing, less is usually more. In real life, not only do people often misunderstand their own emotions, but they tend to suppress or hide them from others. So a character who is experiencing sadness wouldn’t necessarily cry — instead, they might try to distract themselves from their emotion, or try to prove to others that they aren’t sad at all.

To better capture emotions in your writing, it’s important to be a keen observer of how emotions play out in the real world. One of my favourite things to do is go to a public place (like a coffee shop, a mall, or a public square) and watch the people around me, paying attention specifically to their emotional states. What are they feeling, and how do I know that? How do they communicate, or not communicate, to others what’s going on inside?

Also, pay attention to how emotions show themselves in your body, mind, and heart. Keeping a journal can be really helpful here. We often turn to our journals anyway when we’re feeling emotional turbulence, so use this as an opportunity to get very honest and specific about your thoughts and feelings. Keeping an emotional record will help you immensely when it’s time to write about a character going through something similar.

Above all, remember that emotions are complex. It’s very rare for someone to feel only one thing at a time. If you make sure your writing honours that emotional complexity, you really can’t go wrong.