How to Add Emotions to Your Writing

When I started writing here, my vision was simple. I wanted to write about skincare, as it’s very popular to choose a specific niche to start writing. I began with formal language, no fancy metaphors, no life, or you can say, I didn’t even know I had to touch the reader’s heart.

And honestly, topics like skincare, we can’t expect much about emotions in this niche. Still, I tried my best, added humor, and penned like I was commanding everyone to take care of their skin.

Nor was I engaging with anyone, and neither could understand what was going wrong. Were those words dull, or was the platform wrong? Though I still thank many readers who showed up, I’m really grateful to them.

What Triggered The Change

As I read other writers on the platform… and Damn! I felt like I had stepped into an ocean while my writing was still on the shore, waiting for tides rippling with emotions to pull it in.

Reading them stirred something in me, a connection I had never felt before. I never knew I could use words like “wove,” “thread,” “stitched,” “tied,” or “knitted” to build emotions, not just clothes. Funny, right?

I was blown away by other writers, but before I even realized it, I sowed the seeds of doubt, low confidence, and emptiness in my own writing.

The Exact Shift

What I understood was that survival was only possible through connections, and connection-building through skincare writing didn’t make any sense to me.

I won’t lie, but even I started to enjoy reading about life and then writing. What I began as an experiment decided to stay with me. I wrote about my life experiences, my hostel diaries, my travel diaries, and people picked it up like fire.

Yet to me, it still wasn’t filled with writing that truly shakes a reader, the way it had shaken me. I could sense it. My gut is always right.

When The Tides Pulled Me In

1. Mindful reading: Reading books every day isn’t my cup of tea. I had so much on my plate: my academics, being an editor, and writing my own articles daily. So, I made my way through reading on the platform itself. I was already reading people’s work, but I wasn’t really absorbing it.

See, people here are overflowing with creativity that you don’t even need to look outside to learn things and then slip them naturally into our writing. I understood the trick. I picked metaphors, words, idioms, phrases, whatever my mind said, “this is really creative and touched me”.

If you are reading this, you must know, back in my senior year of school, I would go through a dictionary simply to improve my English.

So, picking all of the above wasn’t a coincidence; it was something etched in my subconscious. I easily figure things out when I seriously need to learn them. No excuses.

2. Observation: Now comes the practical part; just saving metaphors won’t help. I publish daily, so it wasn’t a big deal for me to experiment with them. I experimented shamelessly. I wrote articles just because I wanted that one figurative word, metaphor, or even a movie dialogue, reshaped in my own language, to fit in.

People tell you to read, read, read, which isn’t wrong. But I’d suggest: write, write, write…

Over time, things began to take a different shape. I let my imagination wander far and wide. The draft isn’t merely a white sheet but a canvas I can paint however I want.

Sadness helped me. I wrote about it with a thought of pouring everything out, using those emotions in my favor and not against me, healing myself and people who read it.

Hey, I’m not asking you to feel sad. For me, it carries a kind of melancholy that gently forces you into the flow of writing. If you know, you know.

It felt as though I was seated in silence while lines kept unfolding across a screen. Even the smallest incidents began to whisper their hidden stories. Life wasn’t just life anymore; I could see words running behind it.

Satisfaction crept in. That void started to fade. Metaphors and phrases held my hand easily. Writing became more like a flow and less like a task.

Surprisingly, I now write poems, prose, and anything I’m inspired to explore.

3. Comparison: I observed that everything is interconnected. Our emotions with nature. The moon, the stars, and the mountains aren’t just a part of nature. It gives you the ability and the creative spark to write with intensity, or maybe compare how intense emotions can be.

Compare your emotions to everyday tasks, natural phenomena. Translate your emotions into chores, seasons, or storms. Don’t tell things outright, make it vivid, let readers sense, discover, and imagine what you’re feeling. This is the real catch.

I moved from formal writing to writing about life, and then to weaving imagination into everything I wrote. I’m no professional; in fact, still learning from everyone. I’m simply intending to share what guided me, hoping it might light the way for you, too.

Books are always a plus if you read them, but this is for those swamped with work or life, with barely a moment to spare. You can try these little practices; they don’t ask for extra time, just let your thoughts run wild and free.

Don’t worry if you’re a beginner. You’ll figure it out, with or without books. Trust me, it’s all in your head. And don’t hesitate to write, even if it feels silly; everything else will feel relatable to all of us.

Thank you for reading!