When I first started writing, I was told that if my character cried on the page, my reader wouldn’t. If I wanted to bring tears to my reader’s eyes, my character’s eyes needed to be dry while they were completely torn up inside. As with every “Rule” of writing, you can take this one with a grain of salt. But there are still things you need to think about when you’re writing something so emotional—the first and most important, of course is how to get your reader there—crying, or laughing, or screaming mad.
How do you bring out the emotion?
First, let’s discuss emotion for a moment and its role in fiction. There are a great many books in the world which do not elicit any emotion. They don’t mean to. They don’t necessarily want to.
A good mystery doesn’t have you crying over the dead body. A urban fantasy doesn’t necessarily have you laughing in hysterics at a vampire’s antics—because there usually aren’t any. Now, if a book is deliberately meant to be funny, that’s another thing, and I sincerely hope that the author gets the laughs they meant to get. But for the most part a good number of novels simply don’t try to bring their readers along on an emotional journey.
But should they?
I believe so.
I think they best books are the ones that make you FEEL. They’re the ones where you fall in love with the protagonist, scream, cry, or get angry when they fail, laugh and do a little happy dance when they succeed.
Emotion is the life-blood of most human beings. We want to feel it in our every day lives, so why wouldn’t we want to feel it when we’re reading?
But how do you, as a writer make your reader feel all those wonderful feelings? How do you bring out the emotion in your reader?
Number One answer: Deep point of view. In order to truly feel what your character is feeling, your reader needs to become your protagonist.
Number Two and Three: The reader needs to identify with the characters, and the reader needs to feel empathy.
If none of these things are there, there will be no feelings transferred.
I’ve written before about how to write in deep POV (hint: they key is method writing). The thing about getting your reader to feel what your character is going through, is for you, the author, to feel it as you’re writing it. If you’re not feeling it, the odds are your readers won’t either. Does that mean you should be bawling your eyes out as you write? Well, some authors do—or at the very least, they shed a tear or two.
Now, what about this identifying with your characters? That one’s pretty easy. If your character is a well-fleshed out human being with flaws as well as virtues, there’s a good chance that many readers will be able to identify with them. Because we are all human beings (yes, even the fairies and people from Mars), we all have the same basic desires. There’s a good chance that what your character desires (their internal goal) is going to be something your reader has desired as some point in their life or they are close with someone who has. With that human connection, we can find some way to identify with your characters.
Empathy can be brought about by some very basic things. If your character is in trouble, or there is a threat of trouble, there’s a good possibility that we’ll empathize. If your character has a sense of humor, is kind, or is powerful in some way, we are more inclined to like the person and empathize. Or if they character is a normal, every day sort of person—someone who we might see while walking the dog or on our way to work—we’ll associate with them.
But most importantly, bring us inside of the character’s head. Allow us to see how they think, how they process what’s happening, how they understand the world around them. If we empathize—become one with their thoughts, ideas, and feelings—we will care. If we care, we’re more likely to feel what they feel. The entire book will take on more meaning. And when the character attains their goal (or fails, depending on the type of book you’re writing), the reader will celebrate right along with them and be able to finish the book with satisfaction, eager to go on to the next book written by the author.
In my opinion, emotion is essential to a really good book. And if you don’t believe me, just take a look at “Book Toc” where people make videos of themselves reacting emotionally to books. It’s incredibly popular and amazingly powerful.