Many stories are a journey of feeling for a story's audience. As characters overcome or pass through various obstacles to get what they want, they pass through stages of feeling, and readers who identify with these characters or become invested in what happens to them, share these feelings.
This makes a story different than real life, where some people struggle to access their true feelings, feel a need to take drugs to mute or control their feelings, or feel unable to express or experience feelings.
Some writers struggle with writing about feelings because they tend to be thoughtful and reflective, waiting until after an experience to process their feelings. Writers who deal with their feelings with detached reflection tend to create story characters who deal with their feelings with detached reflection, often off-stage and out of sight of a story's audience. The story's audience gets an objective report about a character's feelings, but does not get to share those feelings in their most immediate and potent form.
The very creative process that helps fuel storytelling, thoughtful reflection and an ability to visualize the creation of a story world, lends itself to storytelling being an objective process (watch the movie in your head and write down the details). The trap for some writers is that when they draw on their own experiences from life to create objective portraits of characters, they experience these objective portraits subjectively. Think of this in the context of someone else's home movies. To you that collection of stills of a Hawaii vacation might include some great shots of beaches but, since you aren't on them, so what? But, to the creators of these home movies, each picture helps them relive, re-feel, the experience.
It's the job of the storyteller to help his or her audience experience that beach in Hawaii, what it feels like, and to suggest a story-like purpose to being on that beach (that something is in need of resolution and fulfillment).
I'm not suggesting there isn't a place and purpose for objective writing. Hemingway, for example, appears to be writing in an objective fashion, but he is always direct and immediate about creating a sub text for what the action of a story means, both to a character and to a story's audience.
Writing feelings that connect with actions and suggest a dramatic purpose is a skill that some writers need to study and learn.
It's also important for new writers to understand that in many stories, the feelings story characters experience also allow readers to access those characters. Character who go through scenes with no shifts in feeling allow readers no way to understand what a scene means to that character. Or, it conveys that nothing that happened in the scene had any impact. If the action of a scene doesn't impact the character, why should it impact the reader?
I've heard literary agents when commenting on this type of character that it creates a void running down the middle of a novel. Action that has no impact.
A recent movie demonstrates how even a movie from the popular super hero genre can generate this journey of feelings.
In the new Spiderman film, to protect MJ, the love of his life, and his best friend, their memory of Peter Parker/Spiderman has been erased. Peter spends his every waking moment fighting major to minor crimes to fill his lonely days. When a new villian appears, MJ is again at threat. The movie allows the audience to fully experience what this feels like for Peter.
Complicating everything, Peter/Spiderman is aging into a new type of Spiderman, which he must learn to manage, complicating his life. Just as many viewers have also experienced difficult life transitions and can identify with what Peter is experiencing, how it feels.
During the course of the film, Peter buys flowers for his recently deceased mother's grave, and remembers something she told him that helped him manage his life as Peter Parker/Spiderman.
Then comes a powerful switch about the villian. Peter allows the villian to experience that deeply felt moment with his mother, which changes the perspectie of the villian. She finds release from her own grief.
As a member of the audience, I was allowed to share the emotional journey of Peter and the other characters from the beginning of the film to the end. The movie is designed to allow me that experience.
If you are writing a novel, a play, or a screenplay, are you creating a journey of feelings for your audience?
Can you look at a scene and point to the shift in feelings for your characters?
If not, what do you expect your audience to experience?
Give your audience a reason to care. That is the path of successful storytelling.
©2026 Bill Johnson
Check out Bill's writing workbook, A Story is a Promise, available on Amazon Kindle. A Story is a Promise explains the mechanics: what you set up, you owe the reader. Spirit of Storytelling explains what fills that promise: a character with a life of their own, not a stand-in for the author. Read together, they cover both halves of what makes a story work — the structure and what it's structured to carry.