How to Let Emotion Guide Your Writing (The One Thing AI Can’t Do)
As human writers, one of the greatest advantages we have over AI is our emotional intelligence.
Dear amazing author,
You don’t just assemble sentences. You feel. You remember these feelings inside your body. You carry longing, fear, hope, grief, desire, tenderness, love, passion, joy, excitement, guilt, and more in your body. That emotional nuance, that lived experience cannot be duplicated. And that’s why emotion is the uncharted world that no aritificial intelligence has (yet) experienced.
Romanticizing your writing life means learning how to channel your valuable emotions and experiences around them into the written world so that you can connect with others who have felt the same way.
Here is how to do that in a practical way:
Step 1: Check In Before You Write
Before opening your document, pause and ask yourself:
What am I feeling right now?
Where do I feel it in my body?
Is this energy heavy, light, restless, tender, excited, or something else?
Don’t judge how you’re feeling. Just notice. This awareness can help you write your next scene effortlessly.
Step 2: Match the Emotion to the Scene
When you feel heavy or sad, work on:
The Dark Moment of the Soul
Tragic backstory
Emotional confrontations
When you feel light and happy and joyful, work on:
Love scenes
Meet-cutes
Reunions
Humorous dialogue
When you feel restless and energized, work on:
Action scenes
Turning points
Plot reveals
High-momentum chapters
When you feel tender or reflective, work on:
Intimate conversations
Healing and revealing moments
Internal realizations
Happily Ever After or The End
This allows you to align with the emotions of the scenes, which gives you realistic, deep characters your readers will treasure for years to come. (Trust me! I still receive fan love for this series.)
Step 3: If the Scene Doesn’t Match the Mood, Fake It
Sometimes you have to write a sex scene when you’re not in the mood. (Just sayin’.). At times like these, or when you’re joyful and have to write the dark moment, or you’re exhausted and your hero is about to run a marathon, you’re going to need to manufacture your mood.
Here’s the good news: emotions are fleeting. So let them rise up, be there, and then choose to move on from them. Inside the Lemmon Society, I taught how to use Abraham Hicks’s Emotional Guidance Scale, and let me tell you—it’s priceless. The PDF I created for that post hangs on my fridge to this day! (You can join here, or do a search to see what I’m talking about.)
Here are more ways to change your mood to match your scene:
Light a candle, curl up in a blanket, and listen to peaceful music to enter a state of calm
Dance your heart out to tap into your hidden energy stores
Laugh. If you can’t laugh at nothing, pull up a few comedians on Instagram and giggle your way into a better mood
Letting emotion guide your writing doesn’t mean you must be ruled by your mood. But using it to your advantage allows your inner world to shape your characters. Fuel your storyline with deep-seated truth that you feel in your bones, and the rest will write itself.
If this resonates, you’ll love the full guide on building your writing aesthetic and romanticizing your creative life.
Read the complete post here:
Writing Aesthetic: How to Romanticize Your Writing Life
xo,
Jessica 🍋✨