Red Flags for Telling, part 2

The second red flag that lets you know you're telling instead of showing is EMOTION words.

Emotion words are words that tell you how a character is feeling.

They include: happy, sad, scared, hopeful, overwhelmed, grouchy, shy, funny, humiliated, jealous, relieved, unsure, confused, terrified, excited.

What other words can you think of that tells how someone is feeling?

I think emotion words are one of the easiest means of telling vs showing.

Example:

Telling - I was sad when he didn't pick me up.

Showing - For the umpteenth time, I stood at the window, staring at the empty driveway waiting for a car that never arrived.

As with hedge words, emotion words aren't bad. They can be useful, and are even needed, in your story, as long as they are used judiciously and with intent.

I follow the same process when checking my story for emotion words that I do for hedge words. I first look at the word count to see how many times I used each word. Some I don't use at all. Others, too much. For those words, I need to reduce or eliminate them, and I do that by searching for each word through the entire book and determine what to do with each one.

Sometimes, an emotion word is used in dialogue. Example, "You're grouchy today. Why?" I tend to leave them in dialogue since that's something someone might actually say.

Not only that, but to show how someone is feeling while in dialogue might be awkward for the reader. Example, "I noticed you standing at the window staring at the empty driveway, waiting and waiting. Are you okay?" Would someone say this? No, he or she would more than likely say something like, "You look so sad staring out the window. Are you okay?"

Let's look at an example from Treasure & Treachery with the word 'Happy.'

In both cases, happy is used in dialogue, two sentences that people might say. However, I probably should have changed one of them since they were used so closely together.

For example, I could have changed Kent's response. Maybe he doesn't say anything at all. He could have just squeezed her hands before placing his arm around her shoulder. There are any number of ways I could have changed it. I either missed this or had been searching out words for a long part of the day, was tired, and just left it in. The funny thing about this is that in the entire book, I only used 'happy' 5 times...2 of those times right here. LOL!

As you read your next novel, pay attention to the emotion words being used. Does the author show how a character is feeling instead of telling it so you can experience the emotion with the character?

In my next blog, I'm going to talk about the 3rd red flag in telling, namely filtering words.