An emotion is one thing: It’s the feeling one has in a moment. An emotional state is another: it’s the condition one is in for a more extended period of time. It’s the difference between, I’m so happy right now and ah, life is good. It’s the difference between that makes me sad and I’m depressed.

Notice, however, that in neither case does reading those words cause you, the reader, to feel any of those things. To effectively convey either an emotion or an emotional state to a reader, it’s necessary not to proclaim it or name it, but to evoke it.

Having said that, I emphatically do NOT mean show don’t tell. Please, let’s get rid of that outdated rule. Show can work, but it can also—for instance as a steady diet as in dry literary writing—become flat and empty. Tell can also work, although regurgitating what is already obvious—as in hand-wringing worry—has the opposite of the desired effect.

My topic today, though, is rendering a character’s emotional state and, more importantly, causing the reader to experience it too. How is that done?

The word evoke comes from the Latin evocare, meaning to call forth or summon. As first used in English, it meant to literally summon spirits and entities. Looking at it in that sense is useful, for it suggests not capturing an emotional state but creating it. Not freeze-drying it but growing it. Not taking a picture of an emotional state but building it in the reader.

A variety of literary and rhetorical devices are available. To evoke an emotional state, you can say what it is not. Contrast is a step more complicated but similar: it’s not like that, but more like this. Analogy is another technique: experiencing this is akin to that. Think like or as.

Still another method is the accumulation of suggestive details: When the sun breaks through, the rain puddles evaporate, and children’s shrieks and laughs once again drift from the playground, all’s well with the world.

Emotional States are Specific

Another difference between a momentary emotion and an emotional state is that a state is a particular and specific condition. For instance…

• Feeling the satisfaction of a job well done.

• Feeling sufficiency, having enough.

• Feeling melancholy.

• Feeling a nostalgic recollection of another time.

• Feeling humbled in the presence of greatness.

• Feeling helpless in the presence of evil.

• Feeling rebellious or contrary.

• Feeling alone.

• Feeling free.

• Feeling disbelief when tragedy happens.

• Feeling that something matters.

• Feeling that something isn’t worth caring about anymore.

• Feeling patriotism or loyalty to a cause.

• Feeling love of home or the land.

• Feeling deep regret or being unable to forget.

• Feeling the security of wearing your boyfriend’s sweater.

• Feeling the pain of seeing your wife’s half of the closet now empty.

None of those feelings flash and die in a moment. They linger. They dwell inside. They feel permanent, although of course they aren’t and it is the changes in and progression through such states which constitute the unfolding of a novel’s emotional plot.

Building an emotional state for the reader in a sense challenges the reader to process it. The reader searches in the reader’s own emotional warehouse for experience that is analogous, which in turn results in association and acceptance, or potentially other responses such as amusement, disgust, detachment (further thinking about it), or outright rejection. All are good because the reader is not indifferent, but engaged.

The protagonist in Christopher Buehlman’s The Blacktongue Thief (2021) is Knich Na Shannack, a thief who owes a small fortune in back tuition to his school, the Taker’s Guild. Kinch doesn’t let that bother him a whole lot. He’s a confident guy, cock-sure of himself and endlessly certain that things will go his way. Why? Because he can sense when he’s lucky, as he tells us as he sits down to play cards in a tavern…

Luck is very real, and anyone who tells you differently wants all the credit for their own success. Luck is a river. I can actually feel when I’m in it and when I’m out of it, too. Think about that for a moment. Most people try something difficult or unlikely with very little notion of whether it’ll work or not. Not me. When I feel the inner sunshine of good luck under my breastbone, I know that, yes, I can snath that woman’s pouch and that it’s got a diamond and three gold lions in it. I know I can make the far jump to the next roof and that my foot will miss the loose tiles. And I know when I sit down to shuffle a Towers deck, the other fellow’s going to drown in Bees and Shovels and probably get a visit or two from our old friend Death.

Playing games of chance wakes up luck in me, and soon, it’s running out of control.

Did you ever feel that luck is running your way? It’s a good feeling, isn’t it? Shame that luck doesn’t last! But for the period of time that it does, it’s a high. You’re invincible. Well, until you’re not. Snake eyes!

Did you ever volunteer for something, show up, then feel out of place and uncertain whether you can make a difference? That’s self-doubt. It’s how the main character of Patrick deWitt’s The Librarianist (2023), Bob Comet feels. After helping a wandering woman with dementia back to her senior center Bob, a retired librarian, is moved to volunteer. On arriving on his first morning, he finds himself in an emotional state…

Bob had not been particularly good or bad in his life. Like many, like most, he rode the center line, not going out of his way to perform damage against the undeserving but never arcing toward helping the deserving, either. Why now, then? He himself didn’t know for certain. The night before his first official visit to the center he dreamed he arrived and was greeted in the same garrulous, teasing manner as the man with the big beret had been. The scene or group acceptance was heady, but when Bob stepped into the center the next morning no one acknowledged his presence. “Hello,” he said, but nobody so much as glanced at him, and he understood he was going to have to work his way toward visibility, to earn the right to be seen by these people, which he believed was fair, and correct.

Have you ever felt inadequate? Unproven, as yet? The new member of the team who is out of place, not yet accepted, yet to earn the trust of teammates? They you’ve been where Bob Comet is. You can relate to his emotional state because you’ve been there too.

When to Build a State (in the reader)

So, when in your WIP is your protagonist or any other character in the grip of an emotional state? In many manuscripts, never. There are only flashes of emotion, little lightning strikes of feeling that hit the page but don’t produce much jolt, or any at all.

A sustained emotional state requires space. A pause, if you will, to pin down something which is sometimes inchoate, always specific, generally unnecessary to advancing the outward plot but utterly essential to telling the story of a human being. (Or a being whom we relate to because they feel human.)

How many emotional states do you find yourself in on any given day, week, month or year? If you’re like me, quite a few. And as they occur, they feel important. Because they are. They may be triggered by circumstances, but they aren’t factual. They’re emotional, inner, and to us just as substantive and significant as any objective reality or visible event that may be happening.

Therefore, there are times in a manuscript when it is worthwhile to pin down a character’s emotional state. It’s one way in which readers engage, and it’s lack is one reason that rejections are sometimes framed as I didn’t connect as much as I wanted to. Emotional states are needed on the page if readers are going to fully experience the story.

How much, then? How often? That depends on your story style, genre, protagonist opacity or openness, but I think the most reliable gage is your own gut. When in writing what is going on with a character, you feel yourself entering an emotional state, that may be a good time to get an emotional state down on the page.

And hey, if you’re overdoing it (unlikely), you can always cut later. Regardless, it’s an aspect of your novel that is worth paying more attention to. It’s not the plot, but it’s part of the human story.

(Appeared on Writer Unboxed, August 5, 2026 - Reprinted with permission of Donald Maass.)