Skip the Tear

The Physicality of Emotion in Great Writing

During my first semester at Columbia, one of my professors noted that in great fiction, characters are rarely ever shown crying—even in the most devastating moments, when they almost certainly would be.

I wondered why. After all, isn’t a character crying exactly what writers are told to do—show (“she cried”) rather than tell (“she was sad”)?

Still, tears on the page often fall flat. I think the reason is that tears are the product of grief, not the grief itself. In a sense, skipping to the crying avoids addressing the actual feeling.

So I studied how different writers approach grief, and how they approached writing about the emotion instead. I noticed one thing in common: they all depict the body’s reaction to the emotion. Feelings may be abstract (which makes them so difficult to write about), but they declare themselves through the flesh. And even a single emotion like grief can manifest in several different ways in the body.

Let’s look at some of them:

Grief as Nausea — Annie Proulx’s Brokeback Mountain

Within a mile Ennis felt like someone was pulling his guts out hand over hand a yard at a time. He stopped at the side of the road and, in the whirling new snow, tried to puke but nothing came up. He felt about as bad as he ever had and it took a long time for the feeling to wear off.

This passage is simply heartbreaking. It wouldn’t land half as hard if we were only told Ennis felt “as bad as he ever had.” What moves us is how his body registers the loss as poison, a sickness to be expelled—his gut pulled out “hand over hand.”

Grief as Collapse — Homer’s The Iliad

And they all together beat their breasts, and all the women’s knees gave way.

The image of the body collapsing under the weight of grief is as old as storytelling itself. In Homer, sorrow doesn’t arrive as an abstract sensation, but seizes the body, forcing mourners to the ground. It’s a gesture so primal that it survived millennia, as seen in so many films even today.

Grief as Disorientation — Toni Morrison’s Beloved

She was spinning. Round and round the room. Past the jelly cupboard, past the window, past the front door, around the table of four, past the tin basin, past the stove—round and round and round.

Morrison renders grief as vertigo, a body caught in endless motion. The repetition of “round and round” mirrors the dizzying disorientation of loss, where even familiar objects—the cupboard, the window, the stove—become part of a blurred carousel. It’s not only the mind, but the body itself unraveling, unable to find balance or stillness.

Grief as Suffocation — C.S. Lewis’s A Grief Observed

No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear. I am not afraid, but the sensation is like being afraid. The same fluttering in the stomach, the same restlessness, the yawning. I keep on swallowing.

This one is perhaps my favorite because it is both so original and so relatable. Isn’t this exactly what grief feels like in the long term? As if you just “keep on swallowing” but nothing changes? It’s not the catharsis of tears but the stifling of them, an emotion trapped inside the body with no release. It’s a kind of choking.

Taken together, these passages show that grief manifests in countless ways—it is a physical event, one that seizes the gut, buckles the knees, fractures the link between mind and body, and clogs the throat. Writers who move us don’t stop at “she cried”; they show us how grief inhabits the body.

I believe that’s why writers are so often told to “go out and experience the world.” It isn’t just about gathering plot material—you can use your imagination to come up with plot. What’s much more difficult is faking the way emotions feel in the body. The body is the archive of feeling, and paying attention to its reactions gives writers the vocabulary to render emotion with precision and originality.

Of course, grief is only the beginning. In the coming months, I’ll be exploring how other emotions—fear, desire, anger—manifest in the body, and how great writers captured those sensations on the page.