{"id":24889,"date":"2026-06-24T04:32:16","date_gmt":"2026-06-24T09:32:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/maiglobal.org\/?page_id=24889"},"modified":"2026-06-24T04:43:19","modified_gmt":"2026-06-24T09:43:19","slug":"mastering-emotion-and-symbolism-with-diann-mills","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/maiglobal.org\/zh\/mastering-emotion-and-symbolism-with-diann-mills\/","title":{"rendered":"Mastering Emotion and Symbolism with DiAnn Mills"},"content":{"rendered":"
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From our Resource Library<\/h2>\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t
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Emotion builds a story. It’s one of the building blocks of story construction. It ushers in sensory perception and gathers word choice, symbols, body language, and various literary devices to show a distinct character embracing a story world.<\/p>

The core of our story is the character not only embracing but walking through and feeling their world. Our job as a writer is to put that reader into that character’s shoes so that that reader just shuts out the outside world and they become a part of that journey, a part of that adventure. It’s intimacy of a character internalizing and processing the world around them. The various changes in a character’s life produces psychological reactions and responses that are connected to feelings and memories and behavior.<\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t

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To ensure the reader steps into the pages of a powerful story, the writer incorporates various techniques that are related to emotions, not telling but showing. Every word, action, reaction, and internal thought about the world around us breathes emotion. Feeling is what makes us human, helps us to communicate with others and analyze life.<\/p>

Knowing our characters<\/strong><\/h3>

Writing our story requires a thorough knowledge of the character to understand emotions.<\/p>

Our characters process emotions based on their personality, their career, their culture, backstory, education, relationships, DNA, and life experiences. In turn, our reader processes their behavior through their own filters.<\/p>

When I say what we write is an adventure, whether it’s fiction or nonfiction, it is an adventure. It is a journey. Because the readers see themselves in the character, and they are intrigued about how someone else interprets life challenges.<\/p>

Non-verbal communication processes emotion through body language. A character can lie to others, but the internal rips the bandage off the raw reality. Statistics show that communication is approximately 90% nonverbal.<\/p>

Remember when our mother said to us, what you’re not saying speaks louder than what you are saying? This is exactly what we’re talking about.<\/p>

When we as writers decide to learn a little bit more about nonverbal communication, it helps us write stories with emotion that show and don’t tell. Truth services through tones, gestures, and voluntary and involuntary facial muscles.<\/p>

Some people can hide their facial expressions, but a trained person specializes in interpreting unconscious muscle movements. This leads to more twists and turns in our stories.<\/p>

Forcing ourselves, our character and our reader to deal with emotions<\/strong><\/h3>

We don’t want to deal with emotions. It is just too hard and too difficult. And the characters in our stories are the same way.<\/p>

A writer’s challenge is to force the character to reveal the emotions that are often bound in pain. The character doesn’t understand the emotional wound and it prevents them from their full potential and prohibits them from achieving success. We all know others who have experienced some painful experiences and without help, they have a difficult time processing and moving on.<\/p>

Feelings wrapped in physical, mental, or spiritual suffering rise from fear, from grief, guilt, shame, anguish, sadness, sorrow, torture, betrayal, bitterness, depression, loneliness, abandonment, persecution, physical abuse, verbal abuse, and more.<\/p>

Our characters don’t want to relive those events any more than we would. But to be strong and to move forward, it’s something that has to be done.<\/p>

Our characters don’t want to do that. It’s up to us, the writer, to put them in the position to have that courage to work through emotions. And emotions don’t rely on a gathering of information, processing, or analysis, but internal sentiments based on a lot of different events.<\/p>

Showing a legitimate emotion like anger when someone runs a stop sign and hits your car is a logical reaction. The depth and the anger that is shown depends on the character’s life experiences.<\/p>

Seven emotions <\/strong><\/h3>

We’re from a lot of different countries. It does not mean that the emotions I’m going to give you are shown in the exact way in every country, every culture. It does mean that we experience them. According to the culture and the life experiences of your character, that’s how they are expressed.<\/p>

We have surprise, fear, anger, sadness, disgust, happiness, and contempt.<\/p>

I hope while I was giving you each one of these emotions that you were thinking, oh, does that mean that my character has to experience all these emotions in a book? Yes, they do. But how they do it is up to you.<\/p>

We want our characters to experience these things not only just once, but multiple times. It’s all about balance. Balance is emotion in a scene must equal the tension and the conflict of the story.<\/p>

If there’s too much, then the scene’s overdone and readers lose interest.<\/p>

If there’s too little, the scene sort of falls flat because the character is not real to the reader.<\/p>

The bigger the action that prompted the reaction or the emotion, the more intense the response.<\/p>

A character doesn’t experience one distinct feeling or emotion, but a collection and on different levels. We are complex humans and we don’t fit an established pattern. We want to show the emotions with different responses and reactions that fit the circumstances and the character’s traits.<\/p>

A writing challenge for participants<\/strong><\/h3>

Here’s a challenge for you. I want you to write down this prompt and in your spare time, I want you to write down the most painful, excruciating experience of your entire life. Who was there, what did you feel, what was said, how did you react, and how do you feel about that today?<\/p>

This exercise is not only good for you to process those emotions, but consider if you took that same exercise and you pose that to your character with their own set of traits and life experiences\u2014imagine the power in that scene.<\/p>

Creating emotional arcs<\/strong><\/h3>

Consider an emotional arc for your point of view characters.<\/p>

Record how your character will grow emotionally from beginning to end. If your point of view character is an antagonist, they may not grow to become a better person. Most likely, their problem will increase.<\/p>

The emotive conflict of dealing with life’s pressures must challenge and change the character as they journey through each scene and on to the conflict.<\/p>

Novels are about confrontation. Usually it’s a little tension, then it moves to stress, and then it moves to conflict. These necessary ingredients are impossible to incorporate unless the writer fills the pages with character emotions constantly in conflict.<\/p>

A writer scrapes the scabs of the character’s heart to expose raw emotions. The technique connects the reader to the character in ways that defy reality.<\/p>

When a novel fails, usually the cause is the lack of emotions in conflict. Every scene should contain clashes. Without emotion in conflict, the reader doesn’t find much value in the story. It’s unrelatable.<\/p>

The conflict can be another person. It can be nature. It can be a spiritual group. It can be a social group or technology. All require the character to work through a situation that is potentially catastrophic.<\/p>

Some negative emotions are more difficult to process and, according to the character, build conflict like fear, anger, contempt, betrayal, confusion, jealousy, rejection, and more.<\/p>

These happenings trigger the character into potentially explosive behavior. Sometimes a hint of negativity can conjure hidden emotions that result in a crisis reaction.<\/p>

Have you ever been with someone and they just exploded and you really did not know where that explosion came from? That’s exactly what I’m talking about with our characters. We have to deal with those emotions or there comes a time when those emotions deal with us.<\/p>

Using emotive conflict to engage readers<\/strong><\/h3>

How does a writer use emotive conflict to engage readers? Here’s a few examples:<\/p>

\u201cI love you, but I hate you. You asked me to marry you, and that made me the happiest gal on the planet. No one could love you more, and I thought you felt that way about me, but after we married, I discovered you still had a girlfriend who’d given birth to two of your children.\u201d<\/p>

\u201cI love my parents when they’re sober, but I despise their abuse when they’re drinking. This time they fought and hit each other and broke furniture. I must move out of my home to keep my sanity.\u201d<\/p>

\u201cMoving across the country to take on a new job is exciting. The pay is great, and it’s a step up in my career, but I’m scared to death. What if I fail? What if I’m fired?\u201d<\/p>

We don’t enjoy confrontation, but we insist upon emotive conflict in the books we read and write. Questions fill our minds about how the characters will resolve their differences. Will the differences lead to more relational difficulties? Is the turmoil internal, external, both?<\/p>

We are engrossed in the character’s conversation with our own solutions.<\/p>

Mastering emotive conflict is the secret to writing a best-selling novel. Without it, we are simply penning boring conversations.<\/p>

For those of you who are writing non-fiction, think about the power of emotion in your topics. How can you use that to continue your story and have that reader grasp what you’re talking about?<\/p>

Point of view: the most to lose or gain<\/strong><\/h3>

A point-of-view character paves the way for the reader to embrace the story. This character not only has the most to lose in this scene, but they also have the most to gain. That’s how we choose a point-of-view character.<\/p>

Our story players differ in culture, memory, role models, education, life history, ethnicity, and personality, and those qualities help determine how emotions are relayed and processed, positively or negatively.<\/p>

Our characters aren’t limited to one emotion when life happens, but several beyond the predictable or expected. The mix confirms the complexity of personality and life experiences tossed into a plot where emotions dictate behavior, distancing point of view.<\/p>

An important key to writing emotive conflict is to evaluate how deep we want the reader to feel the emotion. If our stories are tragically dark, scene after scene, we may lose the reader simply because it’s depressing.<\/p>

We want to walk the reader through continuous physical, mental, and spiritual pain\u2014but we don’t want to do it in such a way that they close the book because it’s just simply too dark. We want to vary the distance of point of view to control that emotional intensity.<\/p>