Workshop: Hidden Emotion & Subtext

Thanks so much for joining me for a session on hidden/repressed emotions and subtext. I hope it gave you lots of ideas for getting your character’s emotions onto the page!

Some additional resources
you might find helpful:

Determining Your Character’s Emotional Range
Fight, Flight, or Freeze: What Is Your Character’s Go-To Response?
How to Show a Character’s Repressed Emotions
MASTER LIST: How to Write Emotion
The Emotion Thesaurus: A Writer’s Guide to Character Expression

An Emotional Baseline Worksheet:

Here’s an additional tool for you on Understanding a Character’s Emotional Expressiveness (PDF download). Feel free to print it out and fill it in, keeping track of your characters’ baselines and emotional cues.

One Stop for Writers Resources:

Some of you may know that in addition to our books, we also have a story development web app filled with tools and resources that help you as you plan, write, and revise. A few of the resources you might want to investigate include:

Emotion and Body Language Checklists & Tip Sheets (<– Gold mine alert! You’ll also find many others on emotion, love languages, conflict, and more.)

One Stop for Writers Character Builder Tool (<–This is a tool that will help you create an Emotional Baseline for your character. Everyone expresses emotion differently based on personality & comfort zone, so it’s important to know how your character will act on the page.)

If you would like to try the Character Builder tool, sign up for One Stop for Writers’ free trial.

This two-week trial gives you access to everything on the site (like the descriptive thesaurus database), and you can create ‘one of something’ with all the tools, including a character profile.

The Character Builder is for people who want to create layered, memorable characters, and will help you create one step-by-step. So if you want to understand your story’s cast more deeply than you ever have before, give it a spin. The accurate Character Arc Blueprint it produces makes plotting a million times easier, too. To see it in action, watch this short walkthrough video.)

If you need more time than the 2-week free trial allows, use the code HIDDENEMOTIONWS to get 50% off your first month (choose the 1-month plan, cancel anytime).

Thanks for spending part of your day with me, and happy writing! If you need anything, shoot me an email!