Crafting The Reader’s Emotional Journey

Part 6 on lessons learned from The Emotional Craft of Fiction

The sixth part of lessons learned from reading The Emotional Craft of Fiction. You can read the other essays here: The Importance of the Emotional Journey in Fiction, Inner and Outer Mode for Fiction Writing, The Emotional Life of Your Protagonist Affects How Readers Experience Your Story, Using Meaning and Arc to Elevate The Emotional World of Your Characters, Developing an Emotional Plot Alongside an External Plot Will Make Your Stories Unforgettable

For the past five essays, I’ve dived into the emotional craft of fiction and why it’s important to make your stories unforgettable.

Now, let’s put everything together and start crafting the emotional journey for your readers. If you’ve read my past essays, then you have infused in your mind that readers turn to fiction to have an emotional experience.

Big emotions are induced by circumstances.

The goal of fiction, then, is to stir the hearts of your readers. You can do that through high moments, symbols, story worlds we don’t want to leave, emotional language, change, seasons of the self, cascading change, and feelings without names.

High Moments

There are certain types of story events that create high moments, and these moments move our hearts.

Forgiveness

Forgiveness can be a touchy subject, but it can be used as a powerful tool for change for the character that forgives.

Sacrifice

There are many forms of sacrifice — small ones can be just as touching as big ones. What makes sacrifice moving is how much it is needed.

Betrayal

The more poignant it is based on who does it, and how.

Moral Dilemma

The choice between two equally good or two equally bad outcomes

None of us, in real life, like to be caught in these scenarios. Dilemmas can create emotional anguish for characters, prompting readers to consider what they would do.

They work best when the stakes are both personal and high.

Death

Under the right conditions, everyone loves a good cry.

A “good” death is the result of making living beautiful.

Exercises for mastering pushing high moments higher (page 144):

• Does your protagonist (or someone else) need to be forgiven? What did he do? Look at the one who must forgive. Work to make that a person for whom this particular act of wrongdoing is unforgivable.
• Keep working with the person who must forgive. In what way is that person someone who needs to change more than anyone else? In what way? Why is that change impossible? What would make that person relent?
• Who is someone is your story who can make a sacrifice, big or small? Work not with that character, but with the other person for whom the sacrifice will be made. Make that someone whose need is tremendous.
• Keep working with the need. Build it up. Tear down other avenues of help. When things are at their worst, the time is ripe for the sacrifice.
• Will your protagonist be betrayed? Work the most with the one who will do the betraying. Make that someone important to your protagonist. What is the worst way for the betrayal itself to come to light? Make the pain acute?
• Find a choice that your protagonist must make. Build the choices until each is so necessary that there is no way to choose, no way to win. Keep working until the choice is impossible.
• Who in your novel will die? Cause use to love that character more. Does death pervade your novel? Make living beautiful. Fill the story with joy, and love.

Symbols

Anything can be turned into a symbol.

Objects, gestures, places, and words. Even stories. Symbols have a powerful effect on readers, their effectiveness further compounded by setup.

If you want to give readers an emotional experience, don’t forget about using symbols in your work. You can make meaning out of anything.

Exercises for mastering symbols (page 150-151):

• What’s a place in the story with heart significance? Burn it down, then build it again.
• What’s a relationship that matters to your protagonist? Damage it, then repair it.
• What’s an object that holds memories for your protagonist? Lose it, then find it again.
• What’s a word with special meaning for your protagonist? In how many ways can you use it in the story?
• Go to your climatic scene. Where is the set? What’s an object in that place that only your protagonist would notice? Plant that same object or others like it earlier in the manuscript, building up its symbolic value.
• In your story, will your protagonist (or anyone else) forgive or be forgiven. What’s the most visible and meaningful way in which that can happen? Earlier, enhance the meaningfulness of that gesture, that place or those words. Take away, in some fashion, when later will be given back.
• For your protagonist, what’s the most significant demonstration of love? What’s the keenest sign of loss? What’s the warmest welcome? What’s the ugliest gesture of contempt? What’s the biggest signal of celebration? Set up the symbolic whatever-it-is earlier in the story.
• What’s an idea or belief that’s the opposite of what your protagonist thinks or believes? Pick or create a character who will embody that opposite. How? Overdo it. Don’t worry about being obvious. It’s unlikely you’ll be told to scale it back.

Story worlds we don’t want to leave

To make your fiction worlds magical, you must make your readers feel it.

You do this by creating hope. And the fear that comes from your protagonist and their world not achieving that hope. That’s the easiest way to create an emotional experience for your readers, and a desire to stay in the world you crafted.

Exercises for mastering story worlds we don’t want to leave (page 154):

• Think about the world of your story. Now think about how your protagonist feels about the world. Is the world basically good and governed by right principles, or is it basically hostile and a place from which you can expect only pain?
• If the former, what or whom is your protagonist’s bedrock of goodness? If the latter, how does your protagonist find humor, comfort, or refuge in the hostile place? In a paragraph, write how your protagonist experiences the element of goodness, or write a passage where we see goodness in progress.
• Who is on your protagonist’s side? Create a moment in which that care, understanding, and support are shown. How close to the opening of your novel can you place this moment? Page two?
• Whom does your protagonist love? How quickly can you bring this in? If that love is returned, show it. If that love is unrequited, how does your protagonist keep it alive?
• Apart from people, what in your story world is something that your protagonist loves? What warms your protagonist inside? Find a way for us, your readers, to hold, smell, taste, or feel that pleasure, comfort, security, or delight right away.
• Setting aside the plot problem or goal, what does your protagonist hope for? What is human, specific, real, and achievable — something we can visualize? How will we know this drives your protagonist? What’s the biggest clue?

Emotional Language

What helps make stories beautiful is how the words to craft those stories are arranged.

Words gain power when we set them in patterns. You don’t have to be an academic to keep things simple. Use parallels, repetition, and reversals. Be brief. Place strong words at a sentence’s end.

Just strive to make your prose sound good. Manipulate words for effect.

Exercises for mastering emotional language (page 158-159):

• Go anywhere in your manuscript. Pick any piece of description. Use the arrangement of words, not imagery, to mimic what is being described.
• Pick any single piece of dialogue that is long. Make it eloquent, a speech to the nation, a sermon from a mountaintop, folk wisdom, a rant without pause, a whispered confession, a poem.
• Pick any piece of action. Convey the action not through the action itself but through its effects: wreckage, reactions, instant changes, long-term implications. String them together in a montage about everything around it.
• Fill a memory box, one character’s memories of another. Use only images and short-burst sentences. Surprise us with pictures that suggest stories, but don’t tell them. Run the memories backward through time, mix them up, or show an evolution. Organize them around a theme like father’s many hats and the occasions on which they were worn. Say everything there is to said in capsule form, images only.
• Pick anything your protagonist cares about. Write out everything your protagonist does not feel about the thing. Make the list long enough to fill a paragraph. IN one simple sentence, at the end, reverse it all: Tell us what your protagonist actually does feel about the thing.
• For a character, create a list that conveys everything that “I am”; e.g., a mom, a nurse, worn knitting needles, nobody’s fool, the first line of defense, the court of last resort, a baker’s convection oven, a retired seductress, a quick-dry hairstylist, a connoisseur of sweatpants, a Julia Child of the lunchbox.

Making Changes

Change is one of the most powerful ways to stir feelings in readers.

It’s a universal experience. We can empathize with characters that need to change because we have experienced that ourselves. The moment when we know we need to switch things up.

No matter how small or big, change is good for crafting emotion in your stories because it can knock us off balance.

It’s boring to read about a stagnant character that never changes because the true ending of any good story involves change. Any good story squeezes the character between two opposing modes and forces them to make a choice. Adapt or die.

Exercises for mastering making changes (page 163):

• Think about your protagonist. What is the big change he must go through? Whom will he become? Describe that new self.
• Now work backward. Define the old self, the one we’ll meet at the story’s beginning. What key behavior will we see? How will we know that your protagonist is happy with her old self? Who validates and encourages that old self? What’s good about being stuck?
• What’s the first glimmer of the need to change? Find that moment. If it is an observation, that’s fine. If possible, turn it into an event. How does the old self fail? What tells your protagonist that there must be a better way?
• Add a mentor character, one who sees the new self in your protagonist before your protagonist does. What can this character do to open a door, point the way, walk the path for a while with your protagonist?
• Add a devil, a character who draws your protagonist back toward her old self. How? How can your protagonist backslide?
• What would show your protagonist that staying the same is insupportable, that change must happen? What does your protagonist lose that he cannot get back? What joy remains out of reach?
• What is the most dramatic way in which your protagonist can become his new self? What’s the least expected moment, an occasion when the old self ought to reign supreme? When is your protagonist most tempted to go backward? Whom would that slip backward, please?
• What triggers the commitment to change? What has become more important to your protagonist than sticking to the old ways? How will we see that? Enact the change symbolically.

Seasons of the Self

To make your characters feel real, create their personal history and then grow it.

You want your protagonist to gain self-understanding over time and at stages as the story progresses, allowing the reader to witness that growth. It is beautifully human to change, and to be aware of and celebrate that change.

Exercises for mastering seasons of the self (page 167-168):

• What have been the periods, to date, of your protagonist’s life? What events began and ended each one? What were the highlight and the low moment of each? What did your protagonist learn (or fail to learn) in each era? Give each era a name.
• How does your protagonist measure time? Create a system. Watch the clock as the novel’s events unfold. What hour is it now? And now?
• As your story opens, what phase is your protagonist leaving behind? Detail it. What phase is your protagonist heading toward? List the worrisome questions in his mind.
• At any point in the middle, stop. A change in self is being forced upon your protagonist right now. What makes your protagonist aware of that? What is good about changing? Why does your protagonist want to stay the same?
• At the end, define the new self that your protagonist has become. Detail it. What is familiar about this new self? What is entirely new? What’s one thing in your protagonist’s world that this new self sees differently? What’s one thing that will never change?

Cascading Change

Your protagonist will hit obstacles if you set them in motion.

So if that other obstacle is a person, that person should push back or move. When your protagonist changes, they exert a force on others and vice versa, just like in real life. Since change is the true ending for stories, conflict follows.

Exercises for mastering cascading change (page 171-172):

• Look at your current scene. Who are the two principal actors, and how are they at odds? Who wins, and who loses? Go deeper. Win or lose, how is your POV character changed inside in this scene? Get that down in words.
• Create a chart. Who are the many characters with whom your protagonist interacts? On the chart, detail how each of those characters affects your protagonist’s view of self, the other, problems in the plot, people in general, anything at all, from how to live to something as simple as strategies for Monopoly.
• Pick three of those other characters. Write down how each one a changed, in turn, by encountering your protagonist. Work out a consequence for each. What will each character do differently because of knowing your protagonist?
• What is one unexpected result of your protagonist’s overall journey? How does it ripple outward in the pond, affecting many? Show that.

Feelings without names

There is no greater (and sometimes frustrating) art of evoking a feeling with no name within your readers.

But when you find the words to do just that, you allow the reader to wonder. When your reader wonders, they become more engaged in your story. The trick is to use techniques that are not as obvious.

Exercises for mastering feelings without names (page 175):

• Find a point in your story at which your protagonist is stuck, stymied, undecided, overwhelmed, or in some other way suffused with inner need without having a means to move ahead.
• Now find something in the vicinity for your protagonist to obsess about. This obsession may be positive or negative or hopefully both. Detail your protagonist’s gripes and delights in whatever it is. Observe what is good and bad, beautiful and ugly, meaningful and empty. Be specific. Keep the focus off your protagonist and on this whatever-it-is.
• Finally, be sure this in this moment nothing changes. Leave discord unresolved, messes untidy, beauty overlooked, grumbles unheard, truths ignored, and your protagonist helpless to do anything but notice what others do not. Whatever is, simply is.

Final words

Utilize any of the techniques talked about to stir your reader’s hearts. To create an emotional experience from them so that they remember your story for years to come.