Adding Emotional Depth to Your Characters

Adding Emotional Depth to Your Characters, guest post by Jessica Redmerski (author of Everything Under the Sun). Includes giveaway!
It is true what they say: If you don’t feel your characters emotions, neither will your readers. Okay, that’s not exactly how the saying goes, but it’s close and true enough. And through first-hand experience, I can confidently say it’s 100% accurate!

Adding Emotional Depth to Your Characters, guest post by Jessica Redmerski (author of Everything Under the Sun). Includes giveaway!
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When I wrote THE EDGE OF NEVER, I felt that story, and every single one of the character’s emotions; the scenes I cried my eyes out writing are the same scenes countless readers mention also crying their eyes out reading. When I wrote that book, I wrote it for myself, not for an audience, or because the genre was popular at the time and I wanted to jump on a bandwagon, or because I wanted to make a quick buck. I wrote it for me. And I believe in my heart that is so important when writing any story. You have to love it and feel it or no one else is going to love it or feel it. On the other side, I have written a book that I didn’t particularly feel, or love, or really want to write in that moment. It was basically forced, therefore the story felt forced to readers.

So, about ‘Adding Emotional Depth to Your Characters’, I think that is the best way to achieve this: write for you; write from the heart; write what you want to read, write what you need to get off your chest, write what you feel most passionate about in the moment, write what you feel like needs to be said.

Never write what everybody else is writing, or what you think everybody else wants to read (because no one will want to read it if you didn’t truly love writing it). This is the way to avoid one-dimensional characters, and the only way to add emotional depth to them. Love them, feel them, become them, and your readers will too. Readers are more attracted to emotion than to description or fads or popularity; they will remember a book that affected them emotionally long after one with beautiful imagery and well-crafted scenes; they will connect easier with characters through emotional lines rather than how ‘interesting’ you think your character is. When it comes down to it, I don’t think anything matters more to a reader than the way they feel after reading your story. You can write about a raccoon digging through a garbage can and the reader will love it as long as he or she feels it.

I’m happy to say that my latest novel, EVERYTHING UNDER THE SUN, was 100% written from the heart. It was a story that needed to be told, one that I went through nearly every emotion imaginable while writing. I became Thais and Atticus, and I felt their pain and their struggles and their love for each other.

I hope you love it as much as I did.

Adding Emotional Depth to Your Characters, guest post by Jessica Redmerski (author of Everything Under the Sun). Includes giveaway!
Jessica Redmerski is a New York Times, USA Today and Wall Street Journal bestselling author, international bestseller, and award winner, who juggles several different genres. She began self-publishing in 2012, and later with the success of THE EDGE OF NEVER, signed on with Grand Central Publishing/Forever Romance. Her works have been translated into more than twenty languages.

Jessica is a hybrid author who, in addition to working with a traditional publisher, also continues to self-publish. Her popular crime and suspense series, In the Company of Killers, has been optioned for television and film by actor and model William Levy.

She also writes as J.A. Redmerski.


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