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How to Make Readers Feel Emotion: The Key to Powerful Storytelling

September 24, 2018
How to Make Readers Feel Emotion:
The Key to Powerful Storytelling

— a podcast episode —

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Table Of Contents How do you get your reader to truly feel what your characters are experiencing? Formatted & Edited Transcript Talk to Us! Share This Resource How do you get your reader to truly feel what your characters are experiencing? It’s the opposite of what you might think.

Want your readers to feel deep, genuine emotion? The secret isn’t about telling them how your characters feel—it’s about showing them through sensory details. In this episode of Inside Creative Writing, we explore the powerful technique of transmitting emotion through the five senses, a concept championed by acclaimed writer and teacher Alan Heathcock.

You’ll learn why heavy-handed emotional statements fall flat, how details shape a character’s emotional state, and how subtle clues keep readers engaged and immersed in your story. Through a real-world writing exercise and a masterful example from Heathcock’s short fiction, we’ll break down exactly how to evoke emotion without ever naming it.

If you’ve ever struggled with making readers care about your characters, this episode will give you practical tools to change that.

By the end of this episode, you will…
  • Discover why stating emotions directly weakens their impact
  • Learn how subtle sensory details shape a reader’s perception
  • Understand how to use character perspective to build emotional depth
  • See how avoiding clichés keeps your writing fresh and powerful
  • Get a simple but effective writing exercise to practice this skill

Listen to the full episode or skim the edited transcript with relevant links below.

One of the key principles of Inside Creative Writing is practical, hands-on storytelling techniques—this episode is packed with insights you can apply immediately to your writing.

Formatted & Edited Transcript Insight on Emotion in Writing

As I mentioned in the intro, today’s show idea comes to us from writer Alan Heathcock and a resource he shared with us way back in Episode 6 as he was finishing his award-winning collection of short stories, Volt—which, if you haven’t read, you should definitely check out.

He codified his collection of writing advice into what he called the 27 Tenets of Writing Good Fiction. You’ll still find a link to that document in the show notes for that episode if you want to go back and take a look at all of them. One of the tenets that stood out as particularly interesting was Tenet #7, which reads like this:

“Feeling is communicated through the senses. Communicate through images, sounds, scents, and textures—not through words. You will primarily communicate through images.”

I think this is one of his most insightful tenets for a couple of reasons. First, if we’re not trying to communicate feelings to our reader, then what is it we’re really trying to do, right? Getting a reader to feel something should be the highest purpose of our art.

And secondly, I think he points out how we go about trying to get our audiences to feel entirely backwards. I’m going to try to boil Alan’s wise words down here to even more simple language so we can begin to get our minds fully around what I think he’s trying to teach us.

So, here’s how I’m going to boil that down:
Emotions are transmitted to readers through the five senses.

Alan seems to be suggesting that it’s not through clever or overwrought plot lines, it’s not through lines of dialogue, or even through seeing the furrowed brow of a character. Now, all of those elements do play a role, for sure, but they’re not the part of writing that is doing the heavy lifting when it comes to translating emotion.

A Writing Exercise

Rather than explore what’s being claimed here from an academic standpoint, I’d rather tell you about an experience I had a few days ago with my creative writing class. I’d been thinking about this concept of transmitting emotion through the senses, and I ended up kind of making up a writing activity on the spot that actually worked really well to illustrate that point.

Here’s what I did. I took my class in to observe another class in progress. This other class was playing some kind of Pictionary-type game—I’m not even sure why they were playing it—but it was a little bit chaotic, which was actually a nice environment for the kind of writing I was asking them to do.

I simply had my students write for five minutes about what they saw, what they heard, what they felt—not emotionally, but through touch—what they tasted (if anything), and what they smelled. Basically, it was a five-senses exercise: using all your senses, document the environment.

The rules were simple: they couldn’t actually write a story, they couldn’t create characters, they couldn’t do any of that. They were just recorders of details—observers documenting the experience of that place for that brief period of time.

After writing for a while, we came back to our own classroom, and I had them switch papers with another classmate. The assignment was to pretend they had just found this piece of writing on the ground somewhere. They didn’t know who had actually written it or where that person had been. Their task was to read the description and try to infer what kind of emotion the writer was experiencing or what kind of mood they were in when they wrote this short observational piece.

Now, I didn’t know what to expect from this little experiment, but the results were pretty profound, at least for me, in what I discovered.

Emotion Emerges from Description

I actually did this writing exercise alongside my students—I do most of the writing that I ask my students to do. I traded my writing with one of them, and what I found in her writing was not just a list of details.

I mean, technically, it was just a list of details, because that’s what I had asked her to do. But in the process of reading and interpreting her list, it became something very different. It became a story with a full range of emotional experience.

She started out describing the students in the room as bright-eyed and said their minds were alive. It felt very positive and upbeat, and I started to build this character in my head—someone who’s always looking on the bright side of life, a very positive and upbeat person.

But then, almost immediately, the tone changed. Suddenly, she wasn’t focused on the group as a whole anymore. She zoomed in on one particular student who was off by themselves a little bit. The mood I had assigned to the writer shifted. She wasn’t completely happy and positive anymore. Something about her had drawn her attention to this solitary student, and I began to understand that perhaps the writer was a little bit lonely herself—simply because that’s what she had noticed in the room.

The next description in her list was of the desks creaking and the chalk drawings crumbling off the wall. She chose that word crumbling, which I thought was really interesting, to describe chalk falling from the board and collecting on the floor.

These two loaded details—creaking and crumbling—felt decidedly negative, especially against all the positive things she could have focused on. After all, chalk drawings are usually bright, vivid, and fun, but what she noticed was the way they were falling apart.

I naturally created a kind of story around her. This was not someone who was simply bright and bubbly. This was someone who seemed to be desperately trying to see the positives in the world around her but was constantly being pulled back into a kind of darkness because of whatever she was going through at the time.

And the most amazing part? When I talked to the writer afterward, she told me that I was exactly right about her emotional state that morning. Simply by listing details—the things she noticed first and the particular words she chose—she gave me a window into her emotions.

She didn’t have to come right out and tell me how she was feeling. But in a way, she did.

Using Subtle Emotional Cues

What really struck me about this experience was how much more powerful it was than if she had simply announced her emotional state at the beginning of her writing. If she had written, “I’m feeling lonely today,” I probably wouldn’t have heard it as loudly as I did through her descriptions. By putting myself in her shoes, seeing and experiencing the world as she saw it, I was fully engaged as a reader.

If she had simply told me how she was feeling, I would have disconnected from it. There would have been no puzzle to solve. And these kinds of subtle puzzles are exactly what readers come to books to experience. Readers want to play a role in figuring things out. They want to be able to discover for themselves how someone feels—not because the writer tells them directly, but because they show them through what they notice, what they focus on, and how they describe the world around them.

This is a powerful kind of magic that only exists in prose. You don’t really get access to this in film or plays—not to the same extent that fiction writers do.

Replacing Emotional Telling with Sensory Showing

So, here’s the hack. Here’s how we take this information and turn it into good writing—or at least, here’s how I use it in my own writing. Maybe it works for you, maybe it doesn’t.

When I’m drafting, I often purposefully write really, really terribly. I know that the detail work of a story requires more intense, slow, methodical thought than I can give when I’m just getting the bare bones of an idea down on paper. So, it’s common for me to write something terrible like:

  • Mike was angry about what Martha said.
  • Phil was feeling disconnected from society.

Sentences like these will never see the light of day in a final draft, because they do all the work for the reader. They leave the reader entirely passive, which is when readers disconnect and put the book down.

But what I’m really doing with these sentences is just leaving placeholders. These are reminders for myself to come back later and do the real work of emotional writing.

So, when I’m revising and rewriting, and I come across one of these heavy-handed announcements of emotion, I know that I have to slow down. I have to put myself in the shoes of that particular character and spend time seeing the world the way they would see it.

For example, if a character is feeling lonely and isolated, would they notice the vast blue sky overhead? Or would they instead focus on the single tree left standing in an area of clear-cut forest?

And here’s the key: You don’t even have to write something like, He felt as lonely as that isolated tree left standing in a swath of clear-cut forest. Your reader is smarter than that. They’ll do the work of interpreting how that character feels simply based on what they notice.

They don’t do this consciously, by the way. Readers aren’t stopping to scratch their chin and analyze your imagery like a high school English teacher breaking down symbolism in a poem. But their brains are wired to solve these little emotional puzzles. Every time they put a detail together, they get a little jolt of engagement. They feel the emotion because they are actively participating in constructing the meaning.

Another Writing Exercise

I recommend trying the exercise I did with my class. You don’t even need a partner. Just go somewhere with people or some kind of activity happening. Write what you see as descriptively as you can. Don’t try to tell a story. Don’t try to be overly emotional. Just document what you see, hear, smell, taste, and feel.

Then, after you finish, have someone else read it and ask them to guess what mood they think the writer was in when they were documenting these details.

I promise they’ll be able to do it. And you’ll discover how even the smallest details—things you didn’t even realize had emotional weight—can create a real impact on a reader’s experience.

And here’s the key: Live in the tiny things. Don’t write about what everybody sees—the sky, the grass, the road. Live in the details that most people don’t notice as they go about their day.

These are the things that hold real power in your readers’ minds. These are the details that will cause them to stop and wonder, Why did that character notice that particular thing, out of all the other possibilities?

Avoiding Cliché

Now, a quick warning. It’s easy to get caught up in a single sense—usually sight—because we’re such visual creatures. If we’re not careful, we’ll write as if vision is the only way we experience the world.

Screenwriters are limited to visuals (with some use of sound), but as prose writers, we have an entire sensory arsenal at our disposal. So, make sure to incorporate all five senses into your writing: touch, taste, smell, hearing, and sight.

Another major pitfall: clichés.

When we describe something using a cliché, it’s because it was the first thing that popped into our head. And why? Because we’ve heard it so many times before.

For example:

  • The air smelled like fresh flowers.
  • His breath smelled like a grave.

These might not seem cliché at first glance, but they’re not doing anything interesting. They’re too easy. We’ve heard them before.

A great exercise to break this habit is to force yourself into unexpected connections. Instead of writing, The morning sun was golden and warm, try something like, The morning sun tasted like burnt toast and honey.

It forces you to wake up to new sensory possibilities.

Alan Heathcock’s Volt

I can’t say for sure that what I’ve been talking about here is exactly what Alan Heathcock meant when he wrote his seventh tenet. But I can tell you that I see this kind of work happening in his writing all the time.

Let’s take a look at a short excerpt from his collection Volt—specifically, the opening paragraphs of the story The Staying Freight.

Dusk burned the ridgeline and dust churned from the tiller disc, setting a fog over the field. He blinked, could not stop blinking. There was not a clean part on him with which to wipe his eyes. Tomorrow he’d reserved for the sewing of winter wheat, and so much was yet to be done. Thirty-eight and well respected, always brought dry grain to the store, as sure a thing as a farmer could be. This was Winslow Nettles.

Right from the start, we feel something ominous. Heathcock doesn’t tell us that Winslow is feeling apprehensive or anxious. Instead, we feel it through the details:

  • Dusk burned the ridgeline.
  • Dust churned from the tiller disc, setting a fog over the field.

These words—burned, churned, fog—carry emotional weight. We sense that something is coming, even though we don’t yet know what.

And when the tragedy does strike—when Winslow unknowingly runs over his own son—Heathcock still doesn’t resort to heavy-handed emotion. He simply describes Winslow cradling his son as the tractor rolls on, tilling the field.

That’s it. No gushing tears. No clutching his chest in agony. Just an image: his tractor continuing to work as his world collapses.

And that’s how you do it.

Vladimir Nabokov on Scent and Memory

Today’s wise words come from Russian novelist Vladimir Nabokov:

“Nothing revives the past so completely as a smell that was once associated with it.”

And isn’t that true?

The Power of Scent in Writing

For me, it’s the smell of a Marlboro cigarette. I’ve never been a smoker, and almost nobody in my life smoked, but my grandfather sure did. And every experience I had with him was garnished with the smell of a Marlboro cigarette.

The best times I had with him, the times we were the closest, were sitting together in his fishing boat on Lake Ai in eastern Oregon. He taught me how to put a worm on a hook, cast a line into the water, jig the bait just so, and reel in a shining, shivering crappie—all to the smell of a Marlboro cigarette.

The smell of any other cigarette makes me sick almost immediately. But a Marlboro? That smell takes me straight back to when I was a kid, plants me right next to my grandpa, and suddenly, I’m there again—fishing with him, learning from him, feeling that bond.

That is the power of the senses.

Yes, our sense of sight is vital. It might even be the most important sense in some ways. But the other senses—especially scent—can connect us on a far deeper level to emotion and experience.

So, let’s take it from Nabokov: Use scent in your writing. Make it unexpected, make it personal, and let it transport your reader in a way that only the senses can.

Weekly Challenge: Breaking Free from Clichés

Our weekly challenge this week could have been to try the sensory description exercise I described earlier in the show. And I hope you’ll do that—I think it’ll be a fun and insightful experience.

But for our official weekly challenge, I have something else in mind. This one is about breaking away from the clichés that so often dominate our creative minds.

This week, I’m going to give you a handful of prompts to help shake up the way you think about sensory description. These come from a fantastic book edited by Sherry Ellis called Now Write!—a collection of great writing exercises from some incredible writers.

These aren’t necessarily meant to be used as is in your writing. But they’ll challenge your brain to think in new ways.

So here’s what I want you to do: Complete the following sentences in unexpected ways.

The morning sun tastes like… Her voice smelled like… The music sounded as heavy as… The color green feels like… The color red tastes like… Seeing him walk was like hearing… Tasting the night’s dinner was like watching… Touching her dying father’s hand was like seeing…

See what these do to your brain? They force you to break cliché. You can’t fall back on overused comparisons because the structure demands something fresh.

I love using exercises like this with my creative writing students because they interrupt our default habits. And what’s tricky about clichés is that they feel like genius when we write them.

You’re writing along, searching for a metaphor, and boom—something pops into your head, and you think, I’m a genius!

But almost always, that’s because it’s a cliché. It was easy to think of because it’s been used a thousand times before. That’s why these exercises work so well—they force you to dig deeper.

Wrapping Up

That’s going to wrap it up for us this week. I’d love to hear about your experience with our weekly challenges. What’s working for you? What’s not? What are you learning about writing through these exercises?

Actually, I’d love to hear from you about any aspect of the show. You can get in touch with us by going to InsideCreativeWriting.com—you can shoot us an email, connect with us on Twitter, or even leave us a voicemail. Who knows? Maybe we’ll even feature your voice on a future episode of the show.

Until next week, remember: the best way to improve your craft is by writing. That’s what I’m off to do, and I hope you’re off to do the same.

Let’s get some words on paper this week, and I’ll meet you back here next time for another episode of the Inside Creative Writing podcast.

Thanks for listening to Inside Creative Writing with your host, writer and educator Brad Reed. We’ll be back next week.

Want more in-depth writing techniques? Head over to our How to Write a Novel page for more insights into crafting compelling, immersive stories.

Talk to Us!

We’d love to hear from you! If you have a question, a comment, a suggestion, or just want to tell us about your work-in-progress, give us a shout!
info@insidecreativewriting.com

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