Creative writing can help us explore and understand how we are feeling. It also helps process and work through our emotions. This is the reason why organisations like Maggie’s hire tutors like me to run writing workshops. Writing is proven to be beneficial to people affected by cancer.

And if writing about your own raw emotion is too close to home, expressing feelings through a fictional character can also help us make sense of our own emotions.

As well as therapeutic value for the writer, writing from an emotional place engages the reader. Whether you’re writing fiction, poetry or memoir, writing from the heart makes for compelling reading.

So how do you write emotion? The important thing is to show not tell. Here’s some ways of showing how a character is feeling:

• Body language: someone who feels small and scared will stand and walk in a different way to someone who feels confident and assertive.
• Description of physical symptoms: breathing, facial expression, heartbeat, sweating, and body temperature all tell us how a character is feeling.
• Speech: both dialogue and inner monologue show emotion.
• Actions: what does the character do? Their behaviour and reaction to a situation indicate how they are feeling.

Exercise 1: show don’t tell

Here is a list of sentences that tell us something about a character. Re-write each sentence showing what the character is feeling through their body language, actions and speech:

• He felt tired
• She loved him
• The children were bored
• Grandma came home drunk

Exercise 2: second that emotion

Pick an emotion – eg anger, fear, grief, joy, confusion, sadness, and show a character experiencing that emotion by describing their body language, speech and actions. You can write from the character’s point of view or an observer’s.

Exercise 3: opposites

Pick two opposing emotions like the ones in the list below and write a piece of dialogue between them. If that feels too abstract, write a dialogue between two people – or two sides of your own personality – experiencing those opposite emotions.

• anger/calm
• joy/sadness
• boredom/excitement
• fear/hope

If you do these exercises in a group, you could ask the rest of the group to guess the emotion.

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