THE MOST CRITICAL ELEMENT IN YOUR STORY:
ENGAGING THE READER THROUGH EMOTION
© Linda Style 2019
Many important elements must come together in a story, but the bottom line is you must capture your reader’s attention and make him want to read more.
Studies show various reasons why a reader will pick up a book and then set it back down. There are many reasons an editor rejects a book. But the main reason is “The book just didn’t grab me.” Or, similarly, “I didn’t care enough about the characters.”
What that means is the author didn’t draw the reader in. To me, engaging the reader seems to be a CRITICAL element if you want people to read your books.
So, how do we do that?
You do that by hooking the reader emotionally.
How many of you have picked up a book that wasn’t a subject that really interested you, but somehow found yourself reading more…maybe you even bought the book. I have…and I love when that happens.
My expectation at this point is that the rest of the book will be just as compelling.
When this happens, it’s usually a combination of things that draw you in. The plot sounds interesting, the characters are appealing, or maybe the author’s voice intrigues us. But, while any one of those things can draw us, it’s not enough to keep us reading. When we feel compelled to continue, it’s almost always because we’ve been emotionally engaged.
What we’re talking about is making the reader care. The reader needs to care about the characters. And he needs to care about the outcome. Caring is an emotional experience. And if he doesn’t care, why read the book? Right?
So, as a writer, engaging the reader, making him care on that first page, in that first paragraph, or sentence, is your goal. And then you need to keep him engaged page after page.
Okay… back to how we do that. A couple good things to remember:
All of these things go back to the reader’s emotional engagement.
Creating Emotion in a story is about you, the author, creating an emotional experience in your readers that will rivet their attention and keep them glued to the page.
Creating emotion is about creating curiosity and interest in your story, excitement for your concept and empathy for your characters.
Whether you’re writing a magazine article, a screenplay, a novel or a memoir, creating emotional engagement is by far one of the most important, if not the most important, technique writers can learn.
Digging deeper, it’s important to understand how people experience things…how we take things in that are presented to us. We need to understand how readers take in the words we write.
People, as readers…as movie and TV viewers…experience three types of emotions:
3. The third type of emotional experience is the Visceral Response which is what we feel as a result of experiencing something in person. For our readers, in both fiction and non-fiction, it's about what the reader feels as a result of your skills as a writer. This is where craft comes in. A visceral emotion is our instant reaction when something we see, hear or smell happens.
For example: The mother in the department store realizes her little girl is gone. She gasps, her eyes widen as she realizes the child is gone. She spins around, calls out and tells people her little girl is gone. The gasp is her instant visceral reaction. She has no control over this. It happens almost instantly as she sees something. Depending on the type of person she is, she might have a different visceral response. Her chest might squeeze, her heart pound like thunder in her ears. These are instant physical visceral responses. You smell something foul, your automatic visceral response is to make a face. It happens in a fraction of a second without any thought on your part.
Eliciting these three emotional responses in your reader is the key to maintaining your reader’s interest. Your goal is to make the reader feel something. Anything.
And it needs to happen immediately.
Many instructors advise that the first ten pages of your story are the most important. I disagree.
THE FIRST PAGE is the most important part of your story. Readers are a fickle bunch. If your first page is dull, it doesn't matter how exciting the rest of your story is. Readers… and more importantly editors, are impatient and won’t keep reading until it gets interesting.
Get the first page right, then you do the same thing on the second page, and the third.
Evoke at least one emotion, whether voyeuristic, vicarious or visceral on every page of your story.
And right now you might be thinking, wow, if that’s all I need to do, it’s a walk in the park.
No. That’s not all. Evoking emotion doesn't excuse you from the basics of creating an appealing concept, fascinating characters and a compelling story line.
However, engaging the reader through emotion will help you grab your reader’s attention, and used throughout the story, it will help you keep that attention.
WRITING TECHNIQUES TO ELICIT EMOTIONS
So… once we know how the reader experiences our work, we want to use specific writing techniques to elicit the emotions we desire.
The emotions you want to elicit from your reader are: curiosity, anticipation, and tension. Learning the techniques to elicit these emotions will help you hold the reader's attention for as long as you use them. Let’s look at them individually.
Think of some of the best questions in movie history which have maintained reader interest to the end of the film. 'What is Rosebud?' (Citizen Kane), 'Who's Kaiser Soze?' (The Usual Suspects), and 'Will Hannibal help Clarice catch Buffalo Bill?' (The Silence of the Lambs). You can think of almost any movie and probably guess the story question.
Anyone know the story question for the movie Splash? That story question is set up the moment he meets the mermaid. How about When Harry Met Sally… What’s the story question? No, it’s not about what she’s having. The question in its simplest terms is: Can best friends fall in love and find a future together?
Setting a question and withholding the answer automatically creates an emotional need that demands an answer. If you analyze books or films, you'll discover every story answers a central question.
Within the story, every act has its own question to answer, within each act, every scene sets up a question. And within a scene, each beat sets up a question. All these questions, on a moment-to-moment basis, are designed to make your reader ask, 'What's going to happen next?' That’s creating curiosity.
2. Creating Anticipation. Readers become engrossed in a story when there's a promise of important events. As soon as you set up a goal, you create anticipation. The reader eagerly looks forward to something that's going to happen -- the big showdown, a reunion or a feeling of fear if they think something awful is going to happen.
Anticipation should be everywhere at the level in your story. In the beginning…The main character has a goal, so we anticipate what he’s going to do to achieve his goal.
And at the scene level you want the reader anticipating what comes next based the obstacles set up in the previous scene.
An excellent technique to set up anticipation is called the Reader-Superior Position, which means being in on something the characters don't know. Do you remember how suspenseful some of the old Alfred Hitchcock movies were? When explaining his technique, Hitchcock always gave the example of two people sitting at a table in a restaurant with a bomb ticking away underneath. He gave two versions of the same scene.
***One is where, like the two characters in the scene, we don't know there's a bomb. When it goes off, we're surprised and that's it.
***The better version is tilting the camera underneath the table so we know there's a bomb, and the characters don’t. We feel a whole range of emotions as the bomb ticks down. That works equally well in your stories.
The 3rd technique is…
3. Creating Tension. Once you establish anticipation, you can create another powerful visceral sensation – tension. Tension is created by controlling the delay of the anticipated resolution.
Remember the old William Goldman quote: “Make 'em laugh. Make 'em cry. But most of all, make 'em wait.”
That’s exactly what you do to create tension and maximize your readers’ interest. It’s good to create a balance between frustration and reward -- frustrating readers by preventing or postponing the resolution, or reward them when the problem is solved. The longer the delay, the longer interest is maintained.
Drama is a series of problem moments related to the goals and emotions of the characters, which, if conveyed properly, will produce tension in the reader.
Aaron Sorkin, the talented screenwriter, director, producer, and playwright said, “Tension & discovery are what rivets an audience, holds its attention and makes a story absorbing.”
The events we usually associate with tension are any unresolved pressure or obstacle that affects our basic needs… survival, belonging, esteem, our need to know.
We usually think of tension as involving life or death situations, deadlines, ticking bombs, a plane about to crash, a jury reaching a verdict… but every obstacle has the potential to create tension, even if it’s whether your blind date is going to show up…or ditch you like the last one did. If a goal is emotionally important for the character, it will have the capacity to produce tension.
The more there is at stake, and the greater the delay in resolution, the greater the tension, especially if you create doubt as to when or how the problem will be resolved.
Unpredictability will create tension. Think of the unpredictability of a bomb with no clock, which could blow up at any second… or a disturbed character who could snap at any moment. Those situations will create even more tension. Create doubt and unpredictability and you’ll have tension…as long as what’s at stake is important. Remember, if it’s not do-or-die important to the character, why should the reader care?
Successful writers always pay attention to specific emotions, especially the visceral responses of readers. If you infuse emotion at the forefront of your scenes and throughout, your words will disappear, and readers will lose themselves in your compelling story.
# # #
***Note: No one is born a writer. Everything I know about writing came from somewhere or someone else. Information in this article has come from multiple sources over the years and have been compiled from workshop notes, writing books, blogs, articles, and my own writing experience as multi-published author.
Studies show various reasons why a reader will pick up a book and then set it back down. There are many reasons an editor rejects a book. But the main reason is “The book just didn’t grab me.” Or, similarly, “I didn’t care enough about the characters.”
What that means is the author didn’t draw the reader in. To me, engaging the reader seems to be a CRITICAL element if you want people to read your books.
So, how do we do that?
You do that by hooking the reader emotionally.
How many of you have picked up a book that wasn’t a subject that really interested you, but somehow found yourself reading more…maybe you even bought the book. I have…and I love when that happens.
My expectation at this point is that the rest of the book will be just as compelling.
When this happens, it’s usually a combination of things that draw you in. The plot sounds interesting, the characters are appealing, or maybe the author’s voice intrigues us. But, while any one of those things can draw us, it’s not enough to keep us reading. When we feel compelled to continue, it’s almost always because we’ve been emotionally engaged.
What we’re talking about is making the reader care. The reader needs to care about the characters. And he needs to care about the outcome. Caring is an emotional experience. And if he doesn’t care, why read the book? Right?
So, as a writer, engaging the reader, making him care on that first page, in that first paragraph, or sentence, is your goal. And then you need to keep him engaged page after page.
Okay… back to how we do that. A couple good things to remember:
- In order for a reader to be engaged, they need to be actively concerned about the about the main character’s sanity, his safety, or his soul. And… number two…
- A reader connects with a character when the character does, says, and is what the reader wishes he could do, say or be.
All of these things go back to the reader’s emotional engagement.
Creating Emotion in a story is about you, the author, creating an emotional experience in your readers that will rivet their attention and keep them glued to the page.
Creating emotion is about creating curiosity and interest in your story, excitement for your concept and empathy for your characters.
Whether you’re writing a magazine article, a screenplay, a novel or a memoir, creating emotional engagement is by far one of the most important, if not the most important, technique writers can learn.
Digging deeper, it’s important to understand how people experience things…how we take things in that are presented to us. We need to understand how readers take in the words we write.
People, as readers…as movie and TV viewers…experience three types of emotions:
- The first is the Voyeuristic Response, which comes from our curiosity about new information, and the relationships between characters. It is generated by our passions and interests. We are drawn to what interests us.
- The second is the Vicarious Response, also known as empathy. We feel what the characters feel. Empathy in the reader comes from the ability to relate to your characters’ instant emotions, which are created by the events the writer has set up.
3. The third type of emotional experience is the Visceral Response which is what we feel as a result of experiencing something in person. For our readers, in both fiction and non-fiction, it's about what the reader feels as a result of your skills as a writer. This is where craft comes in. A visceral emotion is our instant reaction when something we see, hear or smell happens.
For example: The mother in the department store realizes her little girl is gone. She gasps, her eyes widen as she realizes the child is gone. She spins around, calls out and tells people her little girl is gone. The gasp is her instant visceral reaction. She has no control over this. It happens almost instantly as she sees something. Depending on the type of person she is, she might have a different visceral response. Her chest might squeeze, her heart pound like thunder in her ears. These are instant physical visceral responses. You smell something foul, your automatic visceral response is to make a face. It happens in a fraction of a second without any thought on your part.
Eliciting these three emotional responses in your reader is the key to maintaining your reader’s interest. Your goal is to make the reader feel something. Anything.
And it needs to happen immediately.
Many instructors advise that the first ten pages of your story are the most important. I disagree.
THE FIRST PAGE is the most important part of your story. Readers are a fickle bunch. If your first page is dull, it doesn't matter how exciting the rest of your story is. Readers… and more importantly editors, are impatient and won’t keep reading until it gets interesting.
Get the first page right, then you do the same thing on the second page, and the third.
Evoke at least one emotion, whether voyeuristic, vicarious or visceral on every page of your story.
And right now you might be thinking, wow, if that’s all I need to do, it’s a walk in the park.
No. That’s not all. Evoking emotion doesn't excuse you from the basics of creating an appealing concept, fascinating characters and a compelling story line.
However, engaging the reader through emotion will help you grab your reader’s attention, and used throughout the story, it will help you keep that attention.
WRITING TECHNIQUES TO ELICIT EMOTIONS
So… once we know how the reader experiences our work, we want to use specific writing techniques to elicit the emotions we desire.
The emotions you want to elicit from your reader are: curiosity, anticipation, and tension. Learning the techniques to elicit these emotions will help you hold the reader's attention for as long as you use them. Let’s look at them individually.
- Creating Curiosity. Curiosity is the intellectual need to answer questions and make sense of things. We love stories because we long to know what happens next. So the easiest way to arouse curiosity is through the power of questions.
Think of some of the best questions in movie history which have maintained reader interest to the end of the film. 'What is Rosebud?' (Citizen Kane), 'Who's Kaiser Soze?' (The Usual Suspects), and 'Will Hannibal help Clarice catch Buffalo Bill?' (The Silence of the Lambs). You can think of almost any movie and probably guess the story question.
Anyone know the story question for the movie Splash? That story question is set up the moment he meets the mermaid. How about When Harry Met Sally… What’s the story question? No, it’s not about what she’s having. The question in its simplest terms is: Can best friends fall in love and find a future together?
Setting a question and withholding the answer automatically creates an emotional need that demands an answer. If you analyze books or films, you'll discover every story answers a central question.
Within the story, every act has its own question to answer, within each act, every scene sets up a question. And within a scene, each beat sets up a question. All these questions, on a moment-to-moment basis, are designed to make your reader ask, 'What's going to happen next?' That’s creating curiosity.
2. Creating Anticipation. Readers become engrossed in a story when there's a promise of important events. As soon as you set up a goal, you create anticipation. The reader eagerly looks forward to something that's going to happen -- the big showdown, a reunion or a feeling of fear if they think something awful is going to happen.
Anticipation should be everywhere at the level in your story. In the beginning…The main character has a goal, so we anticipate what he’s going to do to achieve his goal.
And at the scene level you want the reader anticipating what comes next based the obstacles set up in the previous scene.
An excellent technique to set up anticipation is called the Reader-Superior Position, which means being in on something the characters don't know. Do you remember how suspenseful some of the old Alfred Hitchcock movies were? When explaining his technique, Hitchcock always gave the example of two people sitting at a table in a restaurant with a bomb ticking away underneath. He gave two versions of the same scene.
***One is where, like the two characters in the scene, we don't know there's a bomb. When it goes off, we're surprised and that's it.
***The better version is tilting the camera underneath the table so we know there's a bomb, and the characters don’t. We feel a whole range of emotions as the bomb ticks down. That works equally well in your stories.
The 3rd technique is…
3. Creating Tension. Once you establish anticipation, you can create another powerful visceral sensation – tension. Tension is created by controlling the delay of the anticipated resolution.
Remember the old William Goldman quote: “Make 'em laugh. Make 'em cry. But most of all, make 'em wait.”
That’s exactly what you do to create tension and maximize your readers’ interest. It’s good to create a balance between frustration and reward -- frustrating readers by preventing or postponing the resolution, or reward them when the problem is solved. The longer the delay, the longer interest is maintained.
Drama is a series of problem moments related to the goals and emotions of the characters, which, if conveyed properly, will produce tension in the reader.
Aaron Sorkin, the talented screenwriter, director, producer, and playwright said, “Tension & discovery are what rivets an audience, holds its attention and makes a story absorbing.”
The events we usually associate with tension are any unresolved pressure or obstacle that affects our basic needs… survival, belonging, esteem, our need to know.
We usually think of tension as involving life or death situations, deadlines, ticking bombs, a plane about to crash, a jury reaching a verdict… but every obstacle has the potential to create tension, even if it’s whether your blind date is going to show up…or ditch you like the last one did. If a goal is emotionally important for the character, it will have the capacity to produce tension.
The more there is at stake, and the greater the delay in resolution, the greater the tension, especially if you create doubt as to when or how the problem will be resolved.
Unpredictability will create tension. Think of the unpredictability of a bomb with no clock, which could blow up at any second… or a disturbed character who could snap at any moment. Those situations will create even more tension. Create doubt and unpredictability and you’ll have tension…as long as what’s at stake is important. Remember, if it’s not do-or-die important to the character, why should the reader care?
Successful writers always pay attention to specific emotions, especially the visceral responses of readers. If you infuse emotion at the forefront of your scenes and throughout, your words will disappear, and readers will lose themselves in your compelling story.
# # #
***Note: No one is born a writer. Everything I know about writing came from somewhere or someone else. Information in this article has come from multiple sources over the years and have been compiled from workshop notes, writing books, blogs, articles, and my own writing experience as multi-published author.