As writers, we want to evoke emotions in our readers. Is there any other reason to write? I enjoy hearing people who read my stories tell me how they were affected. More often than not, my stories disturb people. Hey, I’ll take disturbed. When it comes to writing, I’m like a small child who wants attention, any attention. Gimme gimme gimme. I’m sure I’m not alone. Nothing is worse than when someone reads your story and shrugs. I once wrote an intro to a story in which the owner has a pet Anaconda, and the snake crushes and devours him. My wife read it and said she was going to have nightmares. Success!! One of my stories involved a young woman who was physically abused by her father. A friend of mine said she found it upsetting. I felt bad about upsetting her; I also felt kind of good about it. That was, after all, the goal of the story.
There is an irony in fishing for a reaction, though — you can’t tell your reader what to feel. If you try, your writing comes across as melodramatic. I think most beginning writers fall into this trap, myself included. We write drivel like the following:
“I’m sorry, Mary,” Ted said. “It’s over. Please don’t call me anymore.”
Mary dropped the phone and rolled into a ball on her bed. Her heart throbbed with the agony of love lost, and she wondered if she would ever be happy again. Tears streamed down her cheeks as she went to her closet and dug out a shoebox. It was brimming with old photos of her and Ted in happier times. Looking at them felt like a glowing hot knife to her soul, but she couldn’t stop staring at her old, smiling self and thinking that her life was now truly over.
We don’t know what happened between Mary and Ted prior to this moment; hopefully their relationship was rich enough to lend their break-up a punch. If they just met last week, well then this is more indicative that Mary has unresolved psychological issues than anything else. But assuming their life together was full of promise, this passage is still trying way too hard. The second paragraph’s only purpose is to dig some reaction out of you like a kid digging for the last jellybean in the jar. It’s blatant, it’s corny, and it’s ultimately ineffective.
Why? Because emotion isn’t logical. You don’t feel happy because I tell you that you should, no matter how eloquent my argument. Emotions are the result of life experience. They’re complicated and layered. They can’t be forced. When someone you love dies, you grieve. You have no choice; the weight of your loss, of never seeing that person again, can feel crushing. On the other side of the spectrum, when you marry the love of your life, or when your child is born, you can be overcome with euphoria. These events are the culmination of some of your boldest life ambitions. Do you need to be told how to feel in any of these scenarios? Of course not.
Here’s another strategy, a close cousin to trying to over-explain emotions — having a secondary character explain them instead:
“Is everything okay, Ben?” Susan asked.
“I guess,” Ben said, his eyes cast down to his lasagna, which he was nudging around with his fork.
Susan was worried about her friend. She knew Ben and Andrea had broken up the night before. She couldn’t believe it; they had seemed like such a strong couple. Now Ben looked deflated, and she could only try to imagine the roiling pain that his defeated exterior was hiding. Would he ever be the same?
I’m sure I’ve done this a time or two. Perhaps I thought the blatant emotional goo would be less potent if separated by one degree. Nope. This is just as half-baked as the previous example.
So how do you get those big feelings of terror, waterfalls of tears, or blooms of joy to erupt in your reader? There is no magic bullet. As we’ve seen, if you want your protagonist Billy to be devastated by his father’s death, you can’t simply write: “Billy was devastated”. It doesn’t even help to write: “Grief tore a dark hole in Billy’s soul.” It all falls flat, because it’s obvious. Of course Billy is devastated. Of course his soul is torn open like a dark chasm by this event. It can go unsaid, because the depths of Billy’s past relationship with his father renders Billy’s emotional response unavoidable, so it’s redundant to describe it.
So there is my first tip on rendering overwhelming emotions in your writing — don’t. Don’t spend paragraphs or pages describing your character’s grief or joy over an event; let the resonance of their past do the job. This may feel like flying blind, but understand you cannot force your reader to react to something, you have to trust that your story does that for you.
Now that said, your story has to carry resonance, or there will still be no waterworks or shouts of joy from your reader. To do this, you need to write compelling character relationships. Try to be true to how you know people interact with one another. We have all had a strong connection with someone else, so we know what it is like. Your characters also need to evolve throughout the story, or your reader will not be moved by what happens to them. And it should be obvious now that the big emotions are not going to come at the beginning of the story, when your reader is just becoming acquainted with your characters; they should burst forth most strongly near the end, especially at the big climax. At this point, your reader has taken the journey with your characters. They feel invested, and so it is like the actions on the page are happening to them. By then you have them on your hook; you have earned every one of their visceral reactions.
How will you know you got them? Hopefully they tell you in person. And when that happens, it’s the best feeling in the world.
Happy writing!
