It’s the emotion, stupid

by Barb, heading out with the grandkids (and some of their parents) to Boothbay Harbor this week

Here we are for the second in my series of posts about what I’ve learned after putting in my 10,000 hours writing mysteries. The first post in the series, about Voice, is here.

As I said in my introduction to the series, “One caveat: Since these are things I’ve learned along the way, you will find as the posts go on that I have violated or neglected every one of them in my work. Don’t bother looking for examples because you will definitely find them.” That is particularly true of this month’s post because it is the lesson I learned last.

I’ve written before about how I started my career at Information Mapping, a company that offers a proprietary methodology for analyzing, organizing, and presenting complex information. I worked there for a dozen very formative years from my late twenties to my early forties. The Information Mapping methodology forms the bedrock of my intellectual approach to everything.

There’s a whole lot more to it but the methodology starts with two questions:

What do you want readers to do? And,What do they need to know in order to do it?

What you want the reader to do can be as simple as putting part A into slot B or as consequential as making a decision that will affect your company for years to come. But you always start with what you want the reader to do and what they need to know in order to do it.

For a long time that way of looking at writing confounded me in terms of creating fiction. What did I want the reader to do? Turn the page, I suppose is one answer, but not a very actionable by itself. I decided my old discipline didn’t apply to my new work and I discarded it.

But then, as I said, late in the game I realized the paradigm was this:

What do I want readers to feel? AndWhat do they need to know in order to feel it?

Once you see this, you realize emotion is the lens through which to view the whole project. What we want is for readers to feel. The books we remember are the ones that make us feel. The books we press on our friends, saying, “You have to read this!” are the ones that resonated in our emotions.

In the crime fiction world we work on the worry/anxiety/fear/dread emotional axis a great deal. As crime writers, we talk about creating suspense all the time. But we also want people to love, or hate, or be puzzled by, or feel empathy for, or to cheer on our characters. We want readers to long to visit our settings and shed a tear at our weddings, and at our funerals. We want them to care. They will care because they have been moved.

Often in panels and interviews, writers are asked if there’s a reader they picture when they write. It just happened in the panel Liz, Edith, and I were on at the Kensington CozyCon in May. Often the question comes in a marketing context–do we have a target demographic? I’ve never found this idea the slightest bit useful and I doubt most other writers do. I always answered this in terms of thinking of a reader giving me their precious time and not wanting to waste it–which is the beginning of an answer but not all the way there.

Now I realize writers should not be thinking of a reader, or a group of readers, but of readers writ large. What do I want the reader to feel right now? And what they need to know, either in the moment, or before we got here, in order to feel it?

When we choose one word over another, when we paint a picture or invoke one of the five senses, what do we want the reader to feel? A slippery piece of seaweed between the toes evokes a different emotion than a slimy rope of seaweed entwined around an ankle. A night so dark you can’t see your companion is different than gazing at his profile in the moonlight. These scenes are clear to us as we envision and create them, but thinking in terms of how we want our readers to feel, and what they need to know in order to feel it, it tells us what and how much to put on the page.

Novel writers work alone. We don’t have directors or actors to interpret, to help the audience find the emotion. This is both the best and the worst part about writing books. But we do have partners. When readers read about our specific wedding between two specific characters, in a specific place, they bring with them every wedding they have ever attended and how they felt in those moments. Then the story belongs to them. Our job is to get them there.

Writers: Do you think about the emotion you are evoking in the readers as you create or edit? Readers, do you agree that the books that stay with you are the ones that touch you emotionally?