Quote from Joseph Jaubert

The importance of emotion in our writing comes from us writers. If we don’t feel emotional when writing our stories, there’s little chance the reader will feel emotional when reading them. It’s important for us to write stories we are passionate about, stories that mean something to us for this reason.

Creating this emotion in our stories can come from many elements. Characterisation, setting, conflict and plot are just some. Characterisation can create emotion in the way that values and morals can create stress and pressure in a character, eliciting anxiety in our readers. Setting can prove an amplifier to emotion, such as a rainy day can amplify sadness or longing. The plot is the obvious source of emotion. Characters get killed, people get hurt, couples break up. But plot alone isn’t enough.

This is just a brief overview of how emotion can be conveyed, but all of this can come across as trite if the author’s heart isn’t in it themselves. We'll delve deeper into creating emotion in different elements of our writing at a later date.