The Emotional Craft of Fiction

When showing has an impact it is because the action is freighted with feelings in the first place.

Afraid to die.” You don’t get much more direct than that. Direct and plain emotions stated like this don’t often have a strong effect, but they do in this case, I think, because we’re already gripped by an earlier, unspoken emotion: shame.

capture pure emotion

So how does that imagery itself cause us to feel? It doesn’t. It can’t. What causes us to feel something is a blind daughter’s worry over her father.

literary novel. Doerr places high value on language, imagery, and moments

Lying awake at night is not by itself going to cause readers to feel anything. Only when a situation has heavy emotional baggage will readers pick up that baggage and carry it

The experience that Hemingway creates is not a mundane day-to-day washing of dishes or making tea. It’s not just any garden-variety insomnia. This ex-soldier is haunted by a brush with death itself.

creates the experience

As Hemingway intended, he merely

ote the type of showing that Hemingway is using. This isn’t action, per se. This is the inner state of a man suffering from sleeplessness.