“Please read the scene I have highlighted,” emailed a client, sending me a chapter where his protagonist learns about her father’s death.

I read.

“You’re working too hard,” I wrote in my comment. He called.

“What do you mean? I spent weeks writing that scene. I dotted all the Is and crossed all the Ts!”

“Exactly,” I said. “You’ve explained everything is such detail, the reader has no time to feel the emotion!”

This is the trap most writers fall into when writing emotional scenes. We’re so afraid readers will miss the emotion that we over-explain, over-describe, over-announce. We think more words equal more feeling. But the opposite is often true.

The Art of Emotional Subtraction

In Jhumpa Lahiri’s “Interpreter of Maladies,” there’s a moment where Mr. Kapasi realizes Mrs. Das will never write to him. Lahiri doesn’t tell us he’s disappointed or heartbroken. She shows him watching the slip of paper with his address on it fall from Mrs. Das’s purse and blow away in the wind. He doesn’t chase it. That’s all. That moment of not chasing, of watching it go—that’s where the heartbreak lives.

The power of emotional writing isn’t in addition. It’s in subtraction. What you choose not to say becomes as important as what you write.

Before: When Deepa found out her daughter had decided not to come home for Diwali, she was incredibly hurt and disappointed. She felt abandoned and unloved. All those years of sacrifice seemed meaningless now. She couldn’t understand how Rhea could be so selfish and ungrateful.

This tells us everything Deepa feels. But it doesn’t let us feel it with her.

After: Deepa stood in Rhea’s old room, the one with the window overlooking the gulmohar tree. She’d already bought the fairy lights, the ones Rhea liked. They were still in the bag from the market, sitting on the desk. She picked up her phone, put it down. Picked it up again. The gulmohar was blooming early this year.

In the second version, we never name Deepa’s hurt. But we feel it in the fairy lights still in the bag, in the phone picked up and put down, in the detail about the tree blooming—life moving forward whether we’re ready or not.

Tip One: Let Objects Carry Emotional Weight

The right detail at the right moment can hold an entire emotional world. But here’s the key: the object must be specific, and it must connect to relationship or ritual.

Before: After his wife’s death, Mohan was consumed by grief and loneliness. The house felt empty without her. He missed her terribly and couldn’t imagine life without her presence.

After: Mohan still made two cups of tea every morning. The second cup would sit on the kitchen counter, growing cold, until he poured it down the sink before leaving for work. He’d been doing this for three months. The tin of Wagh Bakri was almost empty now. He’d have to buy more.

The habit of making two cups says everything about love and loss and the slowness of grief. The detail about the tea tin running out suggests time passing, life continuing, the mundane persistence of survival. We feel Mohan’s loneliness without being told about it.

Tip Two: Use Dialogue as Emotional Misdirection

Real people rarely say what they mean when they’re feeling deeply. We talk about the weather when we’re breaking up. We discuss train schedules when we’re saying goodbye forever. We argue about who forgot to buy milk when we’re really fighting about something much larger.

This emotional misdirection is powerful in fiction because it mirrors how we actually experience difficult moments—by talking around them, not through them.

Before: “I’m so angry with you for missing Papa’s last days,” Anjali said to her brother. “You were always the selfish one. You never cared about the family. Now he’s gone and you have to live with that guilt.”

After: “The karivepaku needs watering,” Anjali said, not looking at her brother. “Papa used to water it every evening. You remember?”

“I remember.”

“Well, it’s dying now.” She walked past him, her shoulder nearly brushing his. “Don’t think I’m asking you to do it. I’ll do it myself.”

The conversation isn’t about the curry leaf plant. But by talking about it—about their father’s ritual, about the plant dying, about her doing it alone—we understand everything that’s unsaid. The anger, the accusation, the grief.

Tip Three: Trust Physical Distance and Proximity

How close characters stand to each other, whether they make eye contact, what they do with their hands—these physical details create an emotional map of the scene.

Before: Shalini wanted to comfort her daughter but felt the distance between them had grown too wide. She didn’t know how to bridge the gap anymore. Their relationship had become strained and difficult.

After: Shalini reached for Prerna’s hand across the table at Cafe Mondegar. Prerna picked up her water glass just before their fingers could touch. She drank, set it down on the other side of her plate. “More coffee?” the waiter asked. “No,” Prerna said. “I should get back.” Shalini nodded, pulling her hand back to her lap. “Of course.”

The near-touch that doesn’t happen, the water glass moved, the hand withdrawn—these create a physical map of their emotional distance. We see the relationship in the space between them.

Tip Four: Use Weather and Setting as Emotional Echo, Not Symbol

The monsoon doesn’t have to symbolize sadness. The gulmohar in bloom doesn’t have to represent hope. But when you write weather and setting through your character’s specific emotional lens, it becomes part of the feeling.

Before: It was raining heavily, which matched Karan’s gloomy mood as he dealt with his heartbreak. The dark clouds reflected his inner turmoil. Everything felt grey and hopeless.

After: The monsoon had started early this year. Karan watched the rain from his window in Colaba, the way it turned the sea grey and erased the horizon. He’d have to get the ceiling leak fixed now. The bucket he’d left out last year was still at his ex-girlfriend’s flat, along with his copy of Manto’s short stories and the blue shirt she’d said made his eyes look darker.

The rain isn’t a symbol of sadness. It’s just rain. But through Karan’s attention to the leak, the bucket left behind, the catalogue of things still at his ex’s place—the rain becomes part of his emotional landscape without announcing itself as metaphor.

The Paradox

When the client that death scene, he cut two-thirds of it. He removed every sentence that told us what his protagonist felt. Instead, he showed her washing her father’s reading glasses—even though her father was gone—and carefully putting them back on his bedside table. That small, illogical action held all the denial, all the grief, all the love.

I teared up. Not because he told me (his reader) to feel sad, but because he knew I would bring the grief of losing my mother to meet his character’s moment.

That’s the secret. The emotion you leave space for is often more powerful than the emotion you name. Your reader isn’t empty-handed. They arrive with their own losses, their own loves, their own catalogue of small heartbreaks. When you write with restraint and change your focus to show the way emotion is expressed rather than naming the emotion, you’re not withholding feeling. You’re making room for the reader’s heart to enter the story.

Less doesn’t diminish emotion. It amplifies it. Because the ache that matters most is the one your reader feels in their own chest, not the one you describe on the page.

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.