Writers on Writing Volume 1-4 Omnibus: An Author's Guide by unknow

Author:unknow
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Writing
ISBN: 9781684187652
Amazon: B017OESWO0
Publisher: Crystal Lake Publishing
Published: 2015-11-05T00:00:00+00:00

FICTIONAL EMOTIONS; EMOTIONAL FICTIONS

James Everington

So, you’re a writer. You’ve written a story. And that story has done its thing, and found itself a goddamn reader. Someone is reading your work (and no matter how successful you become, you should never let that fact cease to delight and thrill you). So what do you hope for, as they turn the pages?

Maybe you hope they empathise with your characters.

Maybe you hope they laugh or cry.

Maybe you hope they feel angry or scared or comforted by what you’ve written.

Empathy; laughter; comfort—whatever you hope for, we’re talking the language of emotion here. Of feeling.

But what exactly do we mean when we say that a book made us feel? And more importantly, what techniques can we use to choreograph and orchestrate the emotional responses of our readers?

I’m not talking about whether you want to make your readers feel happy or afraid or angry or guilty. Those are the basic units of human experience that I don’t need to explain to you. Think of those emotions as different colours; what I want to talk about is the different brushes you can use to paint in any of those hues.

The best way to understand the potential emotional reactions of your readers is to analyse your own as you read. So in this piece I’ve tried to categorise my own responses as a reader. Be warned: These categories are no doubt very loose, blurry, and biased towards my own reading and writing preferences.

Seeing Characters as You: The Reader is the Character

One of the most obvious ways to emotionally manipul . . . sorry, emotionally engage your readers, is to give them a character with whom they are immediately invited to share headspace with. A central character through whose eyes they can view your fictional world, whether those eyes be behind rose-tinted spectacles or black designer shades.

Many contemporary children’s and YA books use this technique; a protagonist is introduced in Chapter 1 and becomes in effect the reader’s surrogate as they move through the story. Readers share this character’s triumphs and feel the sting of their setbacks and reversals. It’s a particularly useful way of approaching fiction set in a fantasy world, for it allows you to introduce the setting through the subjective viewpoint of a specific character, rather than dry recitals of imaginary dates and events. Fictional worlds live when readers experience them emotionally.

In terms of technique you’ve probably already thought this one through: introduce the main character as soon as you can, make them sympathetic with a few adorable flaws, make them roughly the same age as the demographic you’re writing for, use a first-person or close third-person point of view and voila! Emotional connection, right?

Beware, though. The smallest slip, the slightest action by your main character which isn’t in keeping with the reader’s view of them can break this emotional bond. When readers complain they didn’t find a character’s actions believable, what they are often saying is that the character acted in a way that they wouldn’t (or don’t think they would anyway, which amounts to the same thing).

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