Three Ways to Grab Your Reader’s Heart
10 ESSENTIALS OF A DYNAMITE STORY
#4 GENUINE EMOTION
Granny Sparrow’s quiet voice got so soft it was almost a whisper. “I took to the closet. There in the beginnin’, I had to. The house was so quiet I could hear my own heartbeat. I’d turn on the television loud as it’d go in the living room and the radio in the bedroom. Then I’d plug in the vacuum cleaner …” She looked a little sheepish. “ … and I’d take it with me into the bedroom closet in Ricky Dan’s room, sit down on top of the shoes, the shirts and coats a-hangin’ down all around me. I’d hit the switch on the vacuum and that little bitty space’d fill up with noise…” There was a beat of silence. “ … and then I’d scream. Loud’s I could, scream and wail ’til my voice give plum out. I’d beat my fists against the wall ’til my hands was black and blue.” Then she was whispering. “I wanted to make more noise than the roar under the mountain, ’cause my hurt was bigger and powerfuler than the ’xplosion that took them from me.”
Black Sunshine
Grief. Rage. Joy. Love. Hate. Fear.
Genuine Emotion. It’s Number Four in the Ten Essentials of a Dynamite novel.
The characters in your novel have to feel.
More important, Loyal Reader has to feel. Engage his mind and he’ll be impressed with your command of the language, perhaps, intrigued by the twists and turns in your plot, interested in the resolution of the conflict. But engage his emotions and he’ll care what happens, he’ll suspend disbelief, step into the story with your characters and take the journey with them. And when he comes reluctantly to the two words centered on the last page, Loyal Reader will not be the same person he was at “once upon a time.” That’s powerful writing, my friend. That’s what you should be willing to swim through ten miles of bat guano to achieve.
And how, exactly, do you do that? The good news is that there are three essential steps. The even better news is that none of them involve excrement or winged nocturnal bloodsuckers.
The first essential step: you must create a plot that justifies an authentic emotional response. There’s little in writing that’s as futile as trying to conjure up emotion in your character when what is happening to him doesn’t warrant it. Make your plot so terrifying that any being with opposable thumbs would be scared spitless. Make it sad enough to elicit real grief. Make it so hopeless that despair is the only reasonable response. Fail in that and your characters will spew hyped-up, disproportionate emotions all over the landscape of your novel. And Loyal Reader will bail on your story in favor of a riveting tale from Farmer’s Almanac or Corporate Tax Law.
Second, you must create characters capable of an emotional response. Cardboard characters have no more emotional capacity than what they are– paper dolls. Stereotypes produce only stereotypical responses. The prom queen whose football-captain boyfriend invites another girl to the prom will suffer that sorrow with the same superficial tears that made her a one-dimensional character in the first place. A simple principle applies—what’s in the well comes up in the bucket.
Third, and perhaps most important, in order to produce genuine emotion in your novel you have to be willing to mine your personal life and soul for your own emotional responses. No, I am not suggesting that if you haven’t felt a given emotion you can’t write about it. But I am suggesting that unless you’ve felt something like the emotion your character feels, you’re shooting at a target you can’t see. Plumb your soul. What have you felt deeply in your life? USE it. Use your pain and your joy and your anger. The more varied the experiences you have faced in life, the richer your capacity to express emotion should be.
I’m not saying that young writers are unable to put emotional punch in their writing. But I am saying that those of us who have years of living under our belts, who’ve traveled many miles through life—mostly on roads that weren’t paved—should bring a depth of experience to our writing that has the clear ring of truth.
Have you ever been scared? No, I mean really scared. The day a tarantula spider crawled across my face, I was so terrified I was literally unable to move. And when I screamed, I could feel its hairy legs in my mouth. So when I write about a character who is frightened, I understand the emotion on a visceral level. My task then becomes crafting the images necessary to translate that emotion onto the page–where it will leap out and grab Loyal Reader by the throat.
Have you known grief. Horror? Rage? The day I watched flames eat up my world and sprinkle its remains in floating sparks across the night sky, I became intimately acquainted with all three of those emotions. You’ll find the grief in Granny Sparrow in Black Sunshine, the horror in Sarabeth Bingham in Home Grown and the rage in Ron Wolfson in Sudan.
My point is simply this: if you want to create authentic, believable emotion in your character, you need to find something like that emotion in your own soul. Then your task is to describe it as accurately and artfully as you can.
Think of emotion as the nuclear material of your novel. Craft it well and your novel will set off an emotional explosion in Loyal Reader’s heart he’ll remember always. Craft it poorly, however, and the puny pop of your firecracker will illicit nothing but a yawn and a bored, three-word response: get over it.
