What I mean by expressing, I mean in the way of what you have in your mind and explaining it to readers. I am kind of finding it a challenge since I am a first time Arther to find words to explain what my character is feeling, and expressing it to the reader in a way that is very personal. I want to bring connection, I want them to feel what he feels, it just seems like a challenge to do that. I am not going to give up on it but what are your views on it?
Trying to make the reader feel what the character is feeling seems to me like aiming too far. As readers we can feel sympathy or disgust with what a character does or what happens to them, but I think it ends there. The key to achieving that "empathic link" is to make the reader understand why they do what they do -- real people have their motivations come from a complex pool of personal experiences, chemical balances, hidden hopes and fears, upbringing, etc... Fictional characters often need a bit clearer motivations, so it won't take a psychologist 3 months to figure out why they act like they do. Like Mark Twain said: "It's no wonder that truth is stranger than fiction. Fiction has to make sense."
I find that part comes quite easily to me, actually I think it's the part I struggle the least with and according one friend who read a piece of a novel I made him feel the characters rather than just seeing them, which I took as a compliment. I guess I'm good at comunicating feelings and thoughts... but I haven't had that confirmed by more than one or two people so far... I'm worse with dialogue, my dialogue often gets a little boring and I want to improve that part of my writing. I'm also bad at showing and tell way too much instead. about expressing the characters, it helps if you are trying to write a feeling you have experienced yourself, go back and try to remember how it felt, feel it with every part of your body and then write it down. I just wrote a part of my novel where my character had some kind of anxiety attack and I took one of my own experiences as a reference, recalled every part of it and then I had no problem writing about it. If you write about something you haven't experienced yourself try to put yourself in their position and try to imagine what it would be like. plus try and do some research about it, if you can, or use another book or article for reference.
