An Emotional Connection
I was reminded last weekend to think about the emotional connection between my characters and the reader.
What was it that reminded me? The Washington Post Business section, oddly enough. There was an interesting article on the clothing design company FUBU (For Us, By Us). The man who started the company knew that there needed to be an emotional connection between people and the clothes they bought, so he set out to create a clothing company that catered to and created that connection.
Reading about the importance of an emotional connection between consumers and a product got me thinking about my own product—my book. I’ve always known that there needs to be an emotional connection between my reader and my characters. If there isn’t the reader isn’t going to be compelled to read about the character or care when they go through the ups and downs of the story.
So I thought hard about my characters in the story I’m writing right now, Bridges. Was there a strong emotional tie to my characters?
Well, my heroine, Elizabeth, is in a horrible situation where she has no opportunity to do anything with her life (the book is set in the Regency, the only way for an upper-class woman to do anything with her life is to get married. Her aunt is never going to present her to society, ergo, she’s never going to meet a man and get married. She’s in serious trouble facing a life of servitude). Two of the other main character's (can't quite call her an antagonist, although she does at times play that role) children are deathly ill with tuberculosis--um, yeah, there’s an emotional connection there. She is doing everything she possibly can to try to cure her children even though the doctor has declared that there’s nothing that can be done for them. She is now turning to magic to cure her boys. And, finally, my hero… hmmm…. Well, I love my hero. He’s one of the main secondary characters of my Children of Avalon series, Sir Dagonet. He’s a funny knight. But is he in danger in Bridges? No. Does he have any problems. Not anything major or life-threatening... Uh oh!
The character who I love the most has NO emotional connection between him and the reader! I’m in trouble!
So I sat back and did some hard thinking. I had to figure out exactly why my reader should love my hero, aside from the fact that he can be funny (even though he hasn’t really shown that side of himself in this book so far – another uh-oh) and he's a knight so he does the damsel rescuing thing a couple of times.
Luckily, with some minor tweaking of this character and what it is that he is doing and has done with his life, I could create a reason for my reader to feel for my character – he’s been alive since the middle ages (going on 1000 years old). To put it simply, he’s tired. He doesn’t want to live any more. In fact, he hasn’t for some time, but he was given the “gift” of being able to become young again at the end of the Children of Avalon series. The problem is that living forever isn’t all its cracked up to be. He fell in love and she died. He was forced to go on. His children have died, as have his grandchildren and great-grandchildren. Everyone he’s ever loved has died. He’s lived a full life, many times over, and is really ready to call it quits--but he can’t. He’s tried to kill himself, and isn’t able to because of the magic that resides within him, compelling him to become young again, and again, and again. He’s now devoted himself to travelling the world to try to find someone who can take away this “gift” which has now become a curse.
Was this easy for me to take a character I love and make his life a living hell? Goodness no! That’s probably why I was so easy on him when I started plotting my book and figuring out the characters and their problems.
But you can’t have a book without problems. You’ve got to make life difficult for your characters--even the ones you love the most. And so I’ve now made my poor hero's life horrible so that he can grow and develop. So that when he falls in love, it won’t actually be a good thing, but it’ll make him happy nonetheless.
Through reading this business article, I’ve turned an average, ho-hum book and character into something nuanced, exciting and, most importantly, emotional. The book and character are now filled with dichotomies that don’t go together easily. Will this make it more difficult to write—you bet! But it’ll also make so much more fun and interesting.
Emotion. It’s the key!
