Have you ever struggled to write feelings into your stories? How your protagonist deals with a certain event? How to get across that something is truly devastating without being melodramatic? You’re not the only one. Many writers find the ’emotional’ side of their protagonists the most challenging to put down on paper.
Image Credit: Jonathan Cohen, Creative Commons.
We’ve taken this week’s writing prompt straight out one of our favourite books for writers: Writing 21st Century Fiction: High Impact Techniques for Exceptional Storytelling by Donald Mass. Any writer who takes their work seriously should definitely have a read. It’s full of incredible insights and useful techniques, here’s what we came across recently:
Who’s your point-of-view character? Open a fresh document. For fifteen minutes let your POV character spew what she’s feeling. Is any of that useful in the scene?”
This prompt allows you to free-write all the feelings your character is experiencing, and then use the best bits. It takes away the pressure of getting everything right in the manuscript the first time round, and it lets you experiment with how far you want to take certain emotions.
Want more? Check out our previous writing prompts here.
Happy writing!