Introduction

Hey! 👋

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

The first lesson looked at how emotions help us understand the meaning of the events in a story, and how stories can be seen as a series of emotion-behaviour loops.

In this lesson we'll look at different ways we can represent character emotions within a story.

What do we mean by represent emotion?

We mean, what language and patterns can we use to show that a character feels a certain way?

For example, we know when an image represents emotion because we can see it:

We can see emotion in images. What about in writing?

But when we read a snippet like the one below, how do we know what the characters feel?

Then I saw Steve’s face. I’d never seen him like that before. A sudden look of terror, eyes wide open, mouth agape. He saw something behind me that I couldn’t see. I didn’t have time to turn around and look.

Wave(2013)

The snippet above uses a combination of emotional labels, thoughts, and behaviour, and all of which we'll explore in this lesson.

Emotion 2: Representing character emotion