Emotions are the lifeblood of characters and stories. Without characters feeling and exhibiting emotions, you’re just writing events, but you’re not drawing readers into your story. As you become more intimately acquainted with your characters, understand their emotional bandwidth, their highest highs and lowest lows. And, of course, how they react to them. Remember too that emotional intensity builds over the course of your story.

There is no life without emotions and writers need to tap into them. Feeling deep, seething anger? That’s gold. Unbearable longing? That’s another pearl for your story. Write it down. Same with the heaviness of sorrow, the twitteriness of worry, the exuberance of new love, the long winter of grief.