About this lesson

This is the first lesson in our series about emotion in narrative.

Emotion is fundamental to narrative:

Stories represent the emotions of people and characters, which helps us make sense of the events in the story.
Stories evoke emotional responses in us as readers, which is a large part of the reason why we read or consume stories at all.

We'll talk about how emotions affect us and the purpose they serve in narrative.

To do this, we'll take a step back from writing and instead look at a lot of photos and snippets from graphic novels. 🖼️ 👀

We'll ask you lots of questions about how you feel and what you notice, and we'll give you opportunities to capture your thoughts. 📝

Scratch notes and fragments are fine for these questions

You don't have to write a lot! Just a couple of words or points is enough to make yourself aware of your own thoughts.

However, you need to put something down to complete each page

Writelike won't let you complete a page unless you've written something in each text box, so you you need to put something down! ✅

In the second half of this lesson we'll rewrite a passage from Grace Lin's fairytale adventure Where the Mountain Meets the Moon.

This will be a long passage, but it should be pretty easy and fun to write: we're going to come up with the opening to a story about someone who gets offended and wreaks a terrible revenge! 👺

To begin, let's look at what emotions do in stories.

Emotion 1: Emotional cause and effect