Storytelling Pillar 6: Emotion

The Sixth Pillar of Storytelling: Emotion

As if getting sliced open a thousand times wasn’t enough.

How did this story make you feel?

Notice that I never told you how you were supposed to feel.

I let you experience it on your own through the characters.

Now imagine if instead I told you this:

Lucas told Kiara he cared about her, but Kiara was angry and hurt. She hated how he always acted like nothing was wrong. She told him to leave and never come back, even though deep down she still cared about him.

Lucas offered to take her to the airport. Kiara felt conflicted. Part of her wanted to go with him, but she was too hurt and too angry to admit it.

Boring, huh?

Or at least it is to me.

I told you exactly how they felt. I spilled it all out.

But you didn’t necessarily feel it with them.

That’s the power of emotion in storytelling.

Don't Tell Me What to Feel

Let’s go back to Kiara and Lucas.

Why does the first example work differently from the second?

The biggest difference is that in the second version, I specifically told you what Kiara felt.

In the first, I let you experience it.

You heard what they said.

You saw how they reacted.

You could feel the contradiction between Kiara telling Lucas to walk away and the way she reacts when he tells her he’s taking her to the airport.

We don’t know everything.

We don’t know exactly what happened between them. We don’t know their entire history. We don’t know what their future looks like.

But we know there’s something there.

And that’s the main distinction between these two examples:

In the second one, the characters feel something.

In the first one, you feel it with them.

Stories Are Experienced

Why are emotions so important in storytelling?

Because stories aren’t just listened to.

They’re experienced.

Especially when it comes to fiction, you’re creating an emotional experience for your audience.

But this goes beyond novels.

Marketing. Videos. Social media.

Whatever medium you’re using, you usually want your reader, viewer or listener to experience something.

To feel something.

Let’s say I’m trying to sell you a pen.

I could tell you:

This is a good pen. It’s green and people like it.

Okay.

Or I could tell you:

Feel this pen in your hand. The weight. The smooth finish. The way it glides across the page.

This pen belonged to my grandmother. She wrote her last letter with it, and everybody who holds this pen gets a little bit of the confidence she always had.

She was a motorcycle rider and a big businesswoman.

Now, do you want it?

Actually, I don’t even know if I want to sell it to you. I think I’ll keep it—unless you raise the price.

Suddenly, it’s not just a green pen.

I made you feel like the pen was precious.

Emotion became part of the entire marketing strategy.

That’s the power of storytelling.

Storytelling sells. Emotions sell.

People want to feel.

People want to experience.

Create the Emotion

Obviously, selling a pen and writing a novel are very different things.

But in both cases, you’re telling a story.

You’re trying to make somebody care.

And your job as a storyteller isn’t simply to communicate the emotion.

It’s to create the circumstances that allow your audience to feel it.

Don’t just tell us that something is sad.

Don’t just tell us it’s terrifying.

Don’t just tell us it’s beautiful.

Make us experience it.

Give us the circumstances.

Give us context.

Give us the details.

Let us fill some of the gaps with our own emotions.

And trust us to feel some of it for ourselves.

Make Us Feel It With Them

So if I had to sum up this storytelling pillar in one idea:

Don’t just tell your audience what the character feels. Create the circumstances that make them feel it too.

That’s the sixth storytelling pillar: Emotion.

At this point, we have almost everything we need to tell a good story.

We have a character. A desire. Conflict. Stakes. Structure. Emotion.

But there’s still one pillar left—and it might be one of the most important.

Because you can have an incredible story and still tell it terribly.

The final storytelling pillar is Delivery: how you actually tell the story.