: Re: How can you show that a character is feeling amazing? It's easy to show hesitance, fear or angst, you can have a character smoking 5-10 cigarettes in a row, linger for way too long, act out,

@Phylliss352

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I'm going to disagree with the other answerers to some extent: I don't think it's true that actions / gestures / expressions are the best way of conveying a character's emotions. These things can convey that the character is feeling a certain way but they do a poor job of conveying those feelings. Lyric poetry is a really good example of how to do this. As a random example take Kevin Young's "Crowning" about the birth. Some of the techniques are particular to poetry but I think there are mechanics we can learn from this piece that translate to prose

Part of an effective lyric voice is fluid mixing of inner life and experience, achieved here with metaphors mixed with observation "animal smell / and peat, breath and sweat / and mulch-matter" to judgement and values included with report "driven / by mother's body, by her will / and brilliance". If you are writing in a conservative, 3rd person (limited) omniscient, you can still achieve some of this by being careful in what details you choose to pick, e.g. in this poem with the great closing lines "warming now, now opening / your eyes midnight / blue in the blue-black dawn." (To drive my point home: notice that the poem gives you no information about the character's body or expression and yet we know very clearly what the narrator is feeling in these moments.)

Applied to this case, I think the best way to show the excitement and confidence of this character is to detail his experience in a way that makes this evident: an excited person will notice how the light plays over the surface of the water, will appreciate the splash of an anchor being hoisted, will notice the school of fish darting to the surface before sinking away, will experience the sway of the boat as lively, etc. etc.

To soapbox a bit before wrapping, some writers today are a little too indebted to the screen. With actors and cameras, expressions and behavior are absolutely crucial in conveying the emotion of an experience. These tools though translate clumsily to writing -- it is telling that we often have to invoke an emotion to describe an expression (e.g. "beamed with excitement") -- and we have had much better native tools for eons.

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