A word about explaining emotions to the reader. Showing them is so much better. People love to pick up on the codes from the signals we all put out—we spend many of our waking hours doing it—and in literature it’s one of your strongest forms of reader participation. So the less you explain things to your readers, especially characters’ emotions, the more intense their involvement. There will be times when an explanation will be unavoidable or even desirable, but as a general rule, when you catch yourself explaining how a character feels, first see if the reader can’t discern the emotion from what you’ve already written. If you’re sure he or she can’t, try to find a way to make that possible. In the example I quoted, interior monologue would probably be the way to go.
