  Centrality of emotion for the stories told by humans is underpinned by
numerous studies in literature and psychology. The research in automatic
storytelling has recently turned towards emotional storytelling, in which
characters' emotions play an important role in the plot development. However,
these studies mainly use emotion to generate propositional statements in the
form "A feels affection towards B" or "A confronts B". At the same time,
emotional behavior does not boil down to such propositional descriptions, as
humans display complex and highly variable patterns in communicating their
emotions, both verbally and non-verbally. In this paper, we analyze how
emotions are expressed non-verbally in a corpus of fan fiction short stories.
Our analysis shows that stories written by humans convey character emotions
along various non-verbal channels. We find that some non-verbal channels, such
as facial expressions and voice characteristics of the characters, are more
strongly associated with joy, while gestures and body postures are more likely
to occur with trust. Based on our analysis, we argue that automatic
storytelling systems should take variability of emotion into account when
generating descriptions of characters' emotions.
