How to communicate a sensation in your text

All feelings have their clues in language. They can be shaped and intensified using writer’s tools, such as:
-Ways of building phrases: word order, repetitions, inversions, and other means of “verbal architecture”...
All feelings have their clues in language. They can be shaped and intensified using writer’s tools, such as:
-Ways of building phrases: word order, repetitions, inversions, and other means of “verbal architecture”.
-Choice of descriptive words and expressions.
-Intonation.
If you know these clues, you can master any feeling in your reader or listener.
Reading good literature gives you this power.

For example, what makes a horror story?

Using certain writing elements, you don’t need to describe horrible events to make your readers feel scared. Just putting words in a definite order is enough.

“There was movement within shadow.
Something was standing about fifty feet away and ten feet above”.
(...)
A woman, an impossible woman.
Absolutely impossible”.

Then she begins to trap the narrator. She invites him to climb higher and higher, again and again, and he does. The dialogue repeats:

"Come down," I said.
"No, you come up."

Though nothing bad is happening yet, we are scared by the suspense, by the very anticipation, by the scent of trouble.

See how it is done:

-short sentences, which follow the short breath of a hero climbing up the rocks to reach the impossible woman;
-repetitions, which give the scent of a crazy focusing illusion: he can’t remove his gaze, he is hypnotized;
-implications and hints, like here, when he asks her about her name:

"What's yours?"
"..." Her lips seemed to move, but I heard nothing.
"Come again?"
"I don't want a name," she said.
August 09 / 2023

Curious to get more details about the creative reading & writing programs for you and your team?

Contact us: info.linguacom@gmail.com

Call us: (+972)525707005


Text author: Tanya Rozanes Olevsky


© All Right Reserved. LinguaCom
e-mail us: info.linguacom@gmail.com