A manuscript I worked on almost a decade ago was about a family saga spanning three generations.

Multiple characters, all bristling with opinions and never shy of calling a spade a spade. A super charged story arc and an emotional roller-coaster of a ride. Oh, I loved the story.

The author was excited, nervous, proud. But when I asked what concerned her most, she didn’t hesitate: “I’m worried it’s too much emotion. Like I’m hitting readers over the head with feelings.”

I’ve heard this worry a hundred times.

There are stories stuffed with the emotions of characters in excruciating and exaggerated detail. Or there are those wooden stories where the tiniest hint of emotion would be an impertinence. Both extremes are undesirable.

Writers fear their emotional scenes will either fall flat or come across as melodramatic. They oscillate between overwrought prose and clinical detachment, never quite finding that sweet spot where emotion resonates without overwhelming.

Writing emotion with depth but restraint isn’t about dampening your story’s emotional impact. It’s about trusting your reader to feel what your character feels, without having to spell it out for them.

The Problem With Emotional Telling

When we’re desperate to make readers feel something, we tend to announce emotions rather than evoke them. We write “She was devastated” or “He felt overwhelmed with joy” and expect readers to experience those feelings alongside our characters.

But here’s what actually happens: readers register the information without experiencing the emotion. It’s the difference between someone telling you they’re heartbroken and watching their hands shake as they try to light the diya on the morning after.

Before: Meera was completely devastated when she found out Arjun had been lying to her for months. She felt betrayed and angry and hurt all at once. Her heart was broken. She couldn’t believe he would do this to her after everything they’d been through together.

This tells us Meera is upset, but we’re kept at arm’s length. We observe her pain from the outside.

After: Meera stood in the kitchen, Arjun’s phone still in her hand. The messages glowed up at her, timestamps stretching back three months. Three months. Her fingers found the edge of the counter. She’d made him chai that morning. His favourite, with elaichi and ginger, the way his mother had taught her.

While her hands were bruising the ginger and elaichi in her tiny mortar, he had been grinding her trust to paste. The thought ignited something deep within her. She nipped her lip, hard.

Now we’re inside the moment with Meera. We feel the disconnection between the mundane intimacy of morning chai and the betrayal she’s just discovered.

Tip One: Ground Emotion in Physical Sensation

Our bodies respond to emotion before our minds can name what we’re feeling. Anxiety tightens the chest. Grief makes us heavy. Joy feels expansive, light.

When you write emotion through physical sensation, you bypass the reader’s analytical mind and speak directly to their body. They don’t just understand what the character feels—they feel it in their own chest, their own throat, their own hands.

Before: Vikram was extremely nervous about the interview. He was so anxious he thought he might be sick. His fear was almost paralyzing.

After: Vikram sat in the waiting room, his kurta collar suddenly too tight against his neck. He swallowed once, then again. The receptionist’s voice seemed to come from very far away, and when he stood, the marble floor tilted slightly beneath his feet.

Notice how the second version never names the emotion, yet we know exactly what Vikram is experiencing. We might even feel our own collar tighten in sympathy.

Tip Two: Let Action Reveal Emotion

What we do when we’re feeling something often speaks louder than the feeling itself. People rarely express emotion in neat, obvious ways. We displace, we redirect, we perform small actions that betray what’s churning underneath.

The character who’s anxious might rearrange the spice dabba. The one who’s grieving might laugh too loudly at a joke that isn’t funny. These contradictions and deflections feel true because that’s how humans actually process overwhelming emotion.

Before: Kavya was furious with her mother. She was so angry she could barely speak. The rage inside her felt like it might explode.

After: Kavya picked up her mother’s steel tumbler—the one with the dent from when it fell during the move to Delhi—and set it in the sink. Not hard, not dramatically. Just precisely, carefully, in the exact center of the basin. Then she ran the water, watching it pool around the metal. “I should go,” she said. “I have that thing.”

The restraint in Kavya’s actions makes her anger more palpable, not less. We sense the control she’s exerting, and that control tells us how close she is to losing it.

Tip Three: Use the Environment as Emotional Mirror

Your character’s emotional state colors how they perceive the world around them. The same park bench at Lodhi Garden looks different to someone in love than to someone freshly heartbroken. Don’t just describe the setting—filter it through your character’s emotional lens.

Before: Rohan felt empty and alone as he walked through his childhood home in Pune. The sadness of his father’s death overwhelmed him. Everything reminded him of what he’d lost.

After: Rohan moved through the rooms slowly, one after another. In the kitchen, someone had already cleared away his father’s steel glass, the one he’d drunk his morning nimbu paani from for thirty years. The absence of it sat heavier than the furniture his uncles were discussing in the next room.

By focusing on one specific, telling detail—the missing steel glass—we convey the weight of loss more effectively than cataloging Rohan’s sadness.

Tip Four: Trust White Space and What Remains Unsaid

Sometimes the most powerful emotion lives in what characters don’t say, in the pauses between words, in the conversations they avoid having.

Before: “I can’t believe you’re leaving,” Anjali said sadly. She was devastated that her best friend was moving away. “I’m going to miss you so much. I don’t know what I’ll do without you.”

After: “So,” Anjali said. “Bangalore.” “Bangalore,” Shreya confirmed. Anjali picked up her filter coffee, set it down without drinking. “That’s really far.” “Yeah.” They sat with that for a while, the afternoon crowd at Koshy’s moving around them like water around stones.

The grief of separation lives in that white space, in “that’s really far” and the silence that follows. We feel the weight of their friendship and the enormity of the coming distance.

The Balance

Writing emotion with depth but restraint means trusting that less is often more. It means understanding that readers are active participants in your story, bringing their own emotional experiences to meet your characters’ moments. Your job isn’t to explain or insist. Your job is to create the conditions for feeling, then step back and let it happen.

The author of my manuscript cut every instance of “felt” and “was overwhelmed by” and “couldn’t help but feel.” She grounded her character’s emotional journey in sensation, action, and the world around them.

When she sent me the revised draft, I didn’t just understand what her character was going through. I felt it in my own chest, sharp and real and true.

Which is what story ‘telling’ is about… not telling but showing so vividly that the reader feels it!

Mother of three adult humans. An idealistic, outspoken woman of scrupulous integrity, in love with words. A storyteller who enjoys crocheting tales. And a passionate bibliophile, of course.