SEMINAR | Writing Big Feelings: The Peculiar Art of Evoking Emotions
September 5 @ 2:00 pm – September 12 @ 4:00 pm EDT
Grief on the page doesn’t guarantee grief in the reader. Learn to show how your character feels and make the reader feel it, too.
Live On Zoom | Saturdays, September 5 & 12, 2026 | 2-4 pm Eastern
For Creative Nonfiction and Fiction Writers
As fiction and non-fiction writers, we often want to evoke agony on the page—grief, misery, blinding fury. Yet we get feedback: “What is the narrator feeling?”
Over two sessions, we’ll examine how we, as writers, can do two separate things:
- Evoke emotions within the READER: sorrow, compassion, and empathy
- Effectively show how the point-of-view character/narrator is feeling
These two jobs are often conflated; people assume if they describe how a character is feeling, readers will also feel those feelings. Alas, it’s not that simple.
We’ll focus on why it’s not just important to render the feelings themselves and how we can’t intentionally manipulate the reader with forced or pushed emotions.
In this insightful two-day course, you will:
- DISTINGUISH between evoking emotion in the reader and describing what a character feels—and learn why conflating the two weakens your work
- DIAGNOSE the “what is the narrator feeling?” note and understand what’s actually missing from the page
- PRACTICE techniques for rendering emotion through action, image, and subtext
- RECOGNIZE where emotional writing turns maudlin or overwrought—and how to pull back before you lose the reader
- APPLY these techniques to a piece of your own work across two sessions, with feedback for a selection of students on the second day
Schedule…
Day One—We start with the core distinction the whole workshop builds on: showing emotion versus evoking it. You’ll get a set of practical tips for writing feelings without naming them, look at examples from published work, and break into small groups to hunt for more on your own. Then a short in-class prompt—write an intense moment with the feelings stripped out—followed by open Q&A.
Homework: Find two pages of your own work centered on a character or narrator feeling a big emotion. Revise so the emotion rises naturally from the material rather than being pushed onto the reader. (Extra credit for big feelings that never tip into maudlin!)
Submit 300–400 words of revised work as a Word document to the shared Google Drive by the morning of September 3rd.
Day Two—This session is yours. We’ll screen-share as many submissions as time allows, read them aloud, and workshop each one with about 10 minutes of group discussion.
This seminar is ideal for intermediate writers wrestling with intense material that can feel overwhelming.
Closed captioning is available. ✔
Think you might miss class? No worries, replays will be available 3 business days after the event. ✔
ABOUT YOUR Instructor
Direct, funny, and unsentimental, Peter Mountford is a warm and encouraging teacher. He’s the author of the novels A Young Man’s Guide to Late Capitalism (Washington State Book Award), The Dismal Science (NYT editor’s choice), and his latest, a collection of short stories, Detonator (now out from Four Way Books). His work has appeared in the New York Times (Modern Love), Paris Review, Southern Review, The Atlantic, The Sun, Ploughshares, and Guernica. He teaches at the University of Nevada, Reno at Lake Tahoe’s MFA, and through Mountford Writing.
Student Testimonials
“I’m so grateful to Peter—he’s that perfect combination of sweet and sour, candid but never cruel, encouraging but never ever full of shit.” – Sharon Schindel (NYT, Washington Post)
“Peter has an unerring sense of a story’s center of gravity and the structure that best suits the material. Peter’s expertise & generosity have been instrumental in my writing journey. I can’t recommend him highly enough.” – Hannah C.
“Peter knows how to make a story work & how to make it publishable. ”- Jeremy S.
“In a star rating, he’d get a full 5 from me.”- Robin R.
“I left class seeing how much more I need to write & read and how much more there is to learn, which is humbling and exciting. ”- Michael B.
THE FINE PRINT
We understand that life can get in the way of your plans. We want you to be able to get the most out of your course, and our refund policy is designed to balance your need for flexibility with our deadlines and obligations to our teachers.
Before the class, you may request a refund less a $10.00 processing fee.
Please keep in mind that no refunds or credits will be issued after class begins.
Questions? Please email Info@writingcraft.com
