Articles (Content Library)

Foundation

The Four Types of Writer Emotional Intelligence (And Why Yours Matters) – Have you ever wondered why some writers seem to effortlessly create characters that leap off the page, while others struggle to make readers care? The answer often lies not in technical skill, but in how writers access and channel emotional intelligence in their storytelling.

What Emotional Intelligence Really Means for Fiction Writers – Emotional intelligence won’t get you published, but it will help you write characters who feel real and craft emotional arcs that resonate. Learn how the ability-based model of emotional intelligence—perceiving, connecting, understanding, and managing emotions—gives writers a practical framework for creating authentic emotional experiences on the page.

Perceiving Emotions — Your Body Is Giving You Information – You’re already using emotional intelligence when you write—that gut feeling when a scene works, the restlessness when it doesn’t. The difference between intuitive writing and deliberate craft? Learning to perceive, understand, and use those internal signals as your navigation system through the draft.

Connecting Emotions — Making Sense Across Contexts – You’re stuck in the middle of your manuscript. The plot feels forced. Go back to a scene that’s working and notice what you feel as you read it. That feeling is your tuning fork. It shows you what your story is actually about underneath everything else.

Special Section: Creating Atmosphere with Atmosphere

The following articles were written to show how weather can be used effectively as a literary device. For more, see my book Creating Atmosphere with Atmosphere: How to Use Weather as a Literary Device.

• A Little Experiment with Weather & Emotions I did a little study about weather and emotions. Here are some thoughts on what I found.
• On Clouds and Emotion Clouds and emotion go together when you think about it. We have been trained since birth to recognize signs in the sky, whether we did so deliberately or not.
• On Wind & Emotion Just like clouds and emotion go hand-in-hand (with respect to literature, anyway), so does wind and emotion.
• On Fog & Emotion Like the cat of Carl Sandburg’s poem, fog does not announce itself very well. So how can we use this stealthy behavior as a writing tool?
• On Temperature & Emotion The emotions drummed up by your characters would also be the emotions that you feel when you are in that situation.
• On Precipitation & Emotion There are many forms of precipitation–from snow to rain to ice crystals and more–and therefore many ways a writer can use it for emotion.
• On Thunderstorms & Emotion The way nature uses thunderstorms to restore balance to an unstable atmosphere is akin to the way a plot is intended to resolve a conflict.