How to Write About Feelings Without Sentimentality
Finding the True Shape of What You Feel
There's a certain courage required to write about emotions honestly. Not the big, dramatic courage of grand gestures, but the quieter kind—the courage it takes to look at what you're actually feeling, not what you think you should feel or what would make a better story.
Sentimentality is emotion's easy understudy. It shows up wearing the costume of genuine feeling, reciting lines it memorized from greeting cards and pop songs. But readers can tell the difference. They always can.
Begin with the Physical
Emotions live in the body before they exist as concepts. Start there. Not "I felt sad" but "My shoulders curved inward like parentheses around words I couldn't say." Not "I was happy" but "My cheeks ached from smiling as the sun warmed my back."
The body knows how to be precise about feeling in a way the mind often fumbles. Trust it. Where do you feel anxiety? What shape does grief take in your chest? These aren't metaphorical questions, your body has literal answers if you listen.
Avoid the First Thought
The first emotional image that comes to mind is rarely the truest one. It's usually something you've absorbed from elsewhere—a line from a movie, a metaphor you've read a dozen times. Push past it.
If your first instinct is to compare heartbreak to a shattered mirror, stop. Wait for the second image. Then the third. Keep going until you find one that surprises even you.
Welcome Contradictions
The most honest emotional writing acknowledges that feelings rarely arrive in pure, unmixed states. Joy can be tinged with melancholy. Anger often masks fear or hurt. Love and resentment can occupy the same space.
Don't smooth out these contradictions in your work. The tension between opposing emotions creates a resonance that simple, one-note feelings never achieve.
Example: Not "I loved watching the children play" but "I loved watching the children play, their energy both healing and exhausting, making me long for their freedom while being grateful for my quieter life."
Use Restraint as a Tool
Sometimes the most powerful way to convey overwhelming emotion is through deliberate understatement. When writing about profound grief or ecstatic joy, try stepping back rather than leaning in.
Consider how we often speak of the most devastating moments in our lives with strange calm, how we notice small details, the pattern on a hospital curtain, the sound of a clock ticking. This isn't emotional distance; it's the mind's way of processing what it can when the full feeling would be too much.
Be Specific About What Matters
Emotional precision requires knowing which details carry the emotional weight of a moment. Not everything deserves equal attention.
If you're writing about the day you learned of a loved one's illness, the color of the doctor's tie probably doesn't matter. But the way your hand felt smaller suddenly in your partner's grip might be exactly the detail that carries the truth of that moment.
Test for Truth
When revising, ask yourself: Is this how it actually felt, or how I think it should have felt? Would I be embarrassed to read this line to someone who knows me well? Does this sound like something I would say, or something a character in a movie would say?
The answers will guide you toward language that rings true.
Allow for Mystery
Sometimes the most honest emotional writing admits what it doesn't know or understand. There's power in acknowledging confusion, in not wrapping experiences into neat packages with clearly labeled feelings.
"I still don't know why I laughed at the funeral" might be truer than any explanation you could invent.
Remember What We Share
For all our differences, human emotions share common ground. We recognize in others what we have felt ourselves. Your specific experience, rendered precisely and honestly, becomes universal not despite its specificity but because of it.
This is the paradox at the heart of emotional writing: the more accurately you capture your unique experience, the more readers will see themselves in it.
Trust that your truth, told precisely, is enough.