Authors who connect with their audience emotionally are more likely to have repeat readers and recommenders. In some ways, it’s significantly more reliable of a precursory indicator for success than the content itself. Extremely few people are passing around copies of Fight Club to their friends and family raving about its insight into how soap is made.
Building a narrative with an emotional connection to its audience is about more than plot structure or having a twist in the final act. Instead, it is often about the details of the writing that can be felt but are difficult to pinpoint for readers. Here’s how to build them in from the beginning so as to avoid pushing them in after the fact like a pincushion.
Get in Touch with Your Own Emotions
Authors are like backward, sadistic therapists. First you must cull your own experiences, desecrate them, and then artfully paint your pages with them. The next time you are feeling an overwhelming emotion like envy or anxiety or anticipation, try to quiet your thoughts and acknowledge the feeling. This is envy. What does envy feel like in your body? What makes it so overwhelming? Maybe it’s a tightening in your throat or a hollowness in your stomach. This is envy. Use those feelings and give them to your characters. Your readers know them instinctually too and will be drawn in by your attention.
Read Right
Surprise, surprise. Each reader has an author that reached into their soul and pulled out their greatest insecurities, height of pride, and saddest truths. For me, one of the greatest examples of overwhelming emotion is Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time. I remember crying so hard one morning on the Red Line train on my way to work that I doubled over with stomach pains, and I have since revisited the novel to see how he built that feeling in me. Read emotional writers in your genre, but I especially suggest reading books with the mood you’re hoping to achieve across other genres as well. For some emotions, certain genres have the mechanics down pat.
Here are some of my favorites:
Regret: Atonement by Ian McEwan Joy: To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before by Jenny Han Resentment: Fates and Furies by Lauren Groff Nostalgia: Landline by Rainbow Rowell Curiosity: The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafón Anxiety: Turtles All the Way Down by John Green Grief: Grief is the Thing with Feathers by Max Porter, accompanied by Crow by Ted Hughes
Use Pacing, Not Adverbs
Choosing to use an adverb to show emotion is telling a reader how the character feels as an afterthought. But utilizing proper pacing and earlier context clues instead of an emotion word helps the reader naturally apply the feeling and fill themselves up with it. This is especially true for dialogue:
“You should listen to me more often,” Ella said coyly.
v.
“Hell-lo?” Ella said with a smile. “Is anybody listening to me?”
See how much more effective the second is than the first? As the audience reads the character’s quote, they will naturally put an inflection on it. In this case, they may think Ella is angry before they get to the tag, and then they’ll need to make a mental note that their first inflection was wrong. But the early context of the smile and playful inflection-teasing spelling of hello in the second option set the tone before the reader arrives upon the meat of the quote.
Own Your Authorial Voice, Then Grow Its Range
Similar techniques can be used in prose to convey a wide variety of emotions. A long paragraph with many staccato sentences will be read quickly and can induce anxiety, fear or excitement. A single-sentence paragraph can feel like an epiphany. A lot of this can be defined in your authorial style, too. If you tend toward complex sentences, a short one will naturally have more emphasis. If you keep language simple, a flowery passage will dominate a page. Examine your personal writing style to fully take advantage of these techniques and more to keep readers engaged and turning pages.
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