But to evoke those feelings, it is often necessary to portray sensory details that the reader may have experienced. Simply labeling a character’s emotion as love or hatred will have little effect, for such abstraction operates on a vague, intellectual level, whereas emotion is the body’s physical reaction to information the senses receive. The great Russian director Konstantin Stanislavski, originator of realistic “Method” acting, urged his students to abandon the grand emotive postures of the nineteenth-century stage in favor of emotions evoked by the actor’s recollection of sensory details connected with a personal past trauma. By recalling such details as the tingling of fingertips, the smell of singed hair, and the tensing of calf muscles, an emotion such as anger might naturally be induced within the actor’s body.

Janet Burroway, Writing Fiction, Tenth Edit…, loc. 121