Every writer reaches the scene where a character has to come apart at the seams, and the words on the page feel thin next to what you know the moment should be. Writing emotions like desperation, exhaustion, or exasperation isn’t about reaching for bigger adjectives. It comes down to one question I ask myself every time—the same question a method actor would ask before stepping into a scene. In this video I’ll walk you through how I write any emotion realistically, why a single line from E.L. Doctorow changed the way I think about it, and why your own experience of an emotion matters more than any list of synonyms. The goal is always the same: make your readers feel it, not just read about it.
The question is, how can I write desperation, exhaustion, exasperation realistically? Those three are especially interesting because they are more complex emotions, but the answer I’m going to give applies to all emotions The answer is to ask yourself what it feels like. When you feel desperate, what does it feel like I mean, I’m just I’m thinking right now and I’m putting myself in a situation, perhaps like a method actor. What does it feel like?
And the answer for me is what does it feel like? It feels like tension, like I’m in a vice, and my brain is going in a thousand directions at once, and I cannot The synapses aren’t connecting because I’m too frazzled. So I know I need to calm down. And to do that, I take a couple of deep breaths.
And you see what I’m doing? I’m experiencing it myself. And I’m doing it overtly. And now I would turn and take some notes for myself.
The vice, the frazzle, the synapses not connecting And then I would see if any of that works with my particular scenario and go from there. Exhaustion You know, there’s different kinds of exhaustion. There’s mental exhaustion. There’s physical exhaustion.
I’m gonna say there’s emotional exhaustion too. Where I mean, I had a best friend and we had a falling out, and I did everything I could to salvage the relationship. Everything. And at the end, I was emotionally exhausted.
I was out of ideas. I was out of energy. And all I wanted to do—look at my body language—I just wanted to sit, and close my eyes, and begin to grieve, because it was over. By the way, a decade later we’re back.
We needed, I guess, to you know, I always think of friendship as a Venn diagram, and we spun apart, and now we’re spinning back together, which is a beautiful thing. In terms of exasperation by the way, just physical exhaustion would be that you’re bumping into things, you can barely keep your eyes open. And how does that feel? It feels like.
I would do anything to just lie down and shut my eyes. But make sure it’s experiential You know, it’s Doctorow who said, E. L. Doctorow. Readers don’t want to hear about the rain hitting the body.
They want to feel what it’s like to be rained on. Yeah, experiential, immersive. And same with exasperation. There’s an irritation, a tension.
There’s a I am an articulate person, and you’re not getting it. What do I have to do to get you to get it? So that almost becomes intellectual as I’m describing it now. But that’s me.
You may experience exasperation quite differently, and exhaustion, and you may find words for desperation, metaphors, that I did not. That’s what makes each of our experiences so important, because that’s our us-ness, our uniqueness that we bring to writing, and that’s what gives us our own voice, our own take, our own perspective. It’s important and it works. I look forward to hearing how you treat emotions on the page, how you describe them without the telling element.
Make it experiential and immersive. If this tip had value for you, would you like it, would you share it? Would you subscribe to the channel? That opens up features that make these videos even more valuable for you.
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