Using emotion words won't evoke emotion

My favorite authors never use a single emotion word—happy, sad, angry, confused—you know the rest. So many writers think that packing their memoir with emotion words is what will get a reader to feel that same emotion. However, this is not actually the case.

Let me show you why with an example. The text that follows is full of emotion words. But how much do you really feel when you’re reading this text?

Sample 1: 

Hope dying in her chest, Claray turned her uninterested gaze to see three men on horseback crossing the drawbridge. Guests arrived late to the wedding, she supposed, unhappily, and shifted her attention toward the chapel. The witnesses to her doom were made mostly of MacNaughton soldiers and a very few members of the Kerr Clan. It seemed most did not wish to be part of their laird's betrayal of his own niece. 

“The Wolf,” her uncle muttered with what sounded like confusion. 

Claray glanced sharply back at her uncle to see the perplexed expression on his face.
***
Using lots of emotion words is what I like to call “shortcut writing.” This is the kind of writing used in pop thrillers and cheap romance novelists, but it doesn’t work for memoir. In fact, the book I took the previous text from is titled The Highlander Takes a Bride.


Take a look at this second example and notice how it feels different to read.

Sample 2: 

Laced and silent in his small bed, he tried to tie the loose cords in his mind. He wanted desperately to see his own face and connect it with the word “private”—the word the nurse (and the others who helped bind him) had called him. “Private,” he thought, was something secret, and he wondered why they looked at him and called him a secret. Still, if his hands behaved as they had done, what might he expect from his face? The fear and longing were too much for him, so he began to think of other things. That is, he let his mind slip into whatever cave mouths of memory it chose.

***
In sample two, we get a very different kind of writing, the prose of Nobel-prize-wining author Toni Morrison. Notice how Morrison didn’t use words like sad, happy, joyful, or upset. Granted, there are two emotion words in the paragraph—fear and longing—but they’re used as nouns.

These words aren’t shortcut writing because they do not take the place of the character’s thoughts, which is what works to affect a reader emotionally.

Good memoir writing makes us feel like we are inside your narrator’s head. When we read your narrator’s thoughts on the page, we can’t help but have an emotional experience.

(Quick note: In fiction, you can put us inside the head of your narrator and your characters. In memoir, you only want to do this for the first-person narrator.)

So who would you rather sound like? The bestselling author of the Highland Brides romance series or a Nobel-prize-winning author?

Wishing you lots of happy writing. 😁