three highly effective methods to attach your reader with emotion
In college I studied communication and the first thing I learned was that communication is a one-way street – it needs a sender and a recipient. As writers, we are senders and our readers are receivers. But what do we communicate?
Stories are essentially a medium for communicating many things, but the most important of them is emotion. That means one of the best ways to appeal to your reader is through emotion.
In this post, you will learn how to connect your reader to emotions, how people experience emotions through reading, and three tips to cultivate those emotions through writing. Then we'll finish with a creative writing exercise that will help you apply these lessons right away.
Your writing conveys emotion to readers
When reading, you are not passively absorbing information. This is especially true of fiction. As you read stories, you experience events, face challenges, and feel emotions. Although you appear to be sitting still, you are in virtual motion.
A skilled writer ensures that there is tension under every page of the story, attracts and draws the reader with him. With each rise in tension, the reader's need to find out what will happen next increases.
The readers themselves give a huge boost to this tension through the quality of their own imagination and emotional state.
But there are things that you, as a writer, should do to ease the transfer of tension from your words to your mind.
How to better communicate emotions
Here are two ways you as a writer can better convey emotions to your reader:
1. Let readers take care of your characters sooner rather than later
First, readers need to take care of a character before investing emotionally in what happens to that character. Hence, one of your first goals in your story should be to get your reader to care.
I recently saw the first season of The Umbrella Academy. Honestly, if I hadn't had so many friends and family members telling me what a fascinating show it was, I wouldn't have made it past the second episode. Sure, it was crazy and interesting, but I didn't care what happened.
The events at the end of the third episode finally got me emotionally charged, and I ended the first season happily and started the next. I don't know why it took so long to tie me up, but take that as a lesson:
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Let your readers take care of your characters sooner rather than later.
2. Show pain to increase the emotional stakes
"Life is pain, Your Highness."
Are you flashing back to Westley in a mask that makes him look like a raccoon? If not, I suggest you check out The Princess Bride right away. It's a great story that has so many storytelling lessons for the astute observer, including the importance of pain in our stories.
Pain is one of the most powerful ways to increase the emotional stake in a story as both the trigger of the pain and the person suffering from it take on more substance and become more real. One important thing to keep in mind is that your reader will not necessarily feel what the character is feeling. The goal here is to tap into the reader's own emotional well so that he can experience something unique and meaningful for him.
The key is intensity. In his very helpful book Characters & Viewpoint, Orson Scott Card points out: "The intensity of the characters' feeling, as long as it remains believable and bearable, will greatly enhance the reader's feelings – whatever they are."
Note the limits of being believable and tolerable. If you stretch the reader beyond these limits, you can lose them. Also, be reasonable about how you apply the pain to your character. Repetition of the same pain point leads to a decrease in return, and it is often more effective to point out the causes and effects of the pain than to openly refer to it and describe it over and over.
3. Crescendo with a choice of victim
Another effective way to optimize the emotional stakes in your story is through sacrifice. The thing that sacrifices a step beyond pain is that it is made by choice. A character gives up something precious, for example his life, in order to achieve a greater good.
This is heartbreaking. That resonates.
This pain of choice always has a greater intensity and dimension than the pain alone. It usually brings with it the crux of the story conflict – the need to choose between the best bad options or between two irreconcilable goods.
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Pain by choice always has greater significance in a story than pain by circumstances.
Case study on communicating emotions: Les Miserables
I recently saw a movie version of Les Miserables. Few better examples of a showcase for pain and sacrifice than Victor Hugo's epic and heartbreaking story. It begins with the undeserved misfortune of Jean Valjean, who spent nineteen years of hard labor in prison for stealing a loaf of bread to feed his sister's children.
We see his pain as a result of his sacrifice, but that's just the beginning. There are quite a number of characters who make difficult decisions and suffer the consequences. The bishop who sacrifices his worldly property to give Valjean a second chance. Fantine who sacrifices her hair, her teeth, her virtue and her life to take care of her daughter. Eponine, who suffers from the pain of wanting what she cannot have and yet sacrifices her own happiness for whoever takes it away from her.
Marius Pontmercy suffers from the pain of being torn between persecuting the woman he loves and standing with his brothers in a momentous revolution. The common peasants sacrifice their furniture, even valuable pianos, to create a barricade for the rebels. And little Gavroche, who bravely faces the French army and gives up his life for his comrades.
Of course, the hero Valjean brings quite a number of sacrifices in the story, adding to the tension and driving the viewer (or reader) to focus on learning what happens next. And the villain of the play, Javert, acts on his own needs, which require sacrifice and pain, and also involves us emotionally.
Emotions are the key to a reader's heart
Real and intense emotions are the key to a reader's heart. Remember that a story that is effectively presented will communicate that emotion and allow the reader to experience something unique and meaningful.
As much as we hope to avoid them in real life, pain and sacrifice are desirable additions to a story. They add dimension and richness to this two-way process between writer and reader, and make for a thoroughly satisfying experience.
What about you? Have you used the principles of pain and sacrifice to enrich your own writing? Did you experience it in your reading? Tell us about it in the comments.
WORK OUT
Let's practice choosing between the best bad options and incompatible goods. Choose a prompt below and write a scene in which the character wrestles with the selection and makes a sacrifice.
- Jane has to decide whether to cheat on the math exam or to give up her scholarship
- Darren has to choose whether to defend his mother from his rich and shameful father or on his father's side and gain a rich inheritance
- Sven has to choose between marrying the woman he loves and marrying the girl he grew up with and who he always expected to marry
Write for fifteen minutes. When you're done, post your work in the comments and don't forget to give feedback to your co-authors!
Joslyn Chase
