Free Creative Writing Exercises: Prompts to Write With Emotion

Download this free PDF worksheet with five prompts for how to convey emotions in your fiction or nonfiction

We connect with stories through how they make us feel—a character’s reactions often guide us through a narrative, whether it’s a song, poem, short story, novel, or even a letter. So for many writers, the question of how to write emotions effectively is key.

Tom Bromley (@tom_bromley) has published his life writing as novels, memoirs, and more, and for him every biographical story is like a painting of someone. He’s an expert at expressing and exploring character emotions in writing, and here shares a downloadable PDF worksheet to help you create satisfying arcs and write emotional scenes in your book, that will stay with readers forever.

Why are emotions so key to writing?

“One of the secrets of life writing is learning to put yourself in the picture,” Tom explains. That means telling events as you think they were really experienced—by yourself or someone else. Even when it’s uncomfortable or painful, it will pay off through a deeper connection with your reader.

Even in the case of real historical events, the facts are only part of the bigger picture. A shared collective experience is actually made up of all of our smaller reactions to a big event. So writing with a unique, human connection is key to making your story feel emotionally real, and not like a history textbook or a news bulletin.

3 top tips for bringing emotion out in your writing

1. Once you’ve established the basic events of a scene (real or imagined), you can start by identifying the overall moods and emotions involved. Even if the answer is vague, like “sad” or “relieved”, this is your foundation.

2. Next, you need to consider how the big emotions would appear physically (i.e. in your character’s body) and psychologically (in their thoughts). Try to find more specific ways to convey sadness, relief, etc.

3. For really abstract emotions, you might also think about whether there’s a metaphor or image that would suggest the impact on the character to your reader. Is the sadness like sinking through water, or the relief like sunshine on their skin?

Download the free worksheet of creative writing exercises

Ready to take readers on an emotional journey they won’t forget? After clicking the download button, you’ll find a PDF file titled Free Worksheet to Write with Emotion by Tom Bromley in the Downloads folder on your computer.

Think of this worksheet like a safe, personal space, where you’re getting your thoughts onto the page. In the PDF, you’ll find five questions you can ask yourself whenever you want to connect with the emotions of an experience. Remember, you can tidy up the writing in your final drafting process. For now, you’re just trying to get all of the raw and unfinished thoughts on the page.

Sign up for Tom’s course, Life Writing for Beginners: Telling Your Own Story. You’ll learn effective writing techniques to research, draft, and edit a narrative piece based on a memory that engages your reader until the very last sentence.

Develop your writing craft with these resources

1. Try two more writing exercises to beat artist’s block.

2. Watch six free tutorials on different creative writing techniques.

3. Learn how to write engaging character dialogue in this course by Jimena Eme Vàzquez.