How to Make Emotions Authentic in Fiction

consistency is a huge part of making emotions authentic. What a character is feeling from one scene to the next has to feel like it's all coming from the same place and from the same character. And if they change tracks too abruptly and the reader can't follow them, then all of a sudden, those emotions seem very forced and like the author's just making it up. But by one definition, at least melodrama is the sort of fiction where each character has only one emotion,. you're only seeing one face of them.