“Just Right” Emotional Appeal
By Kristin Hacken South | February 22, 2024 |
I keep three plants in my study. They sit by the window and breathe greenery into my soul whenever I’m nearby. Two of these three plants are of the low-maintenance type I prefer. Like children, they thrive with a bit of benign neglect. They take it in stride (in root?) if I forget to water for a week or two, and only offer some mild crisping around the edges to let me know that they’re thirsty.
The third, though? It complains bitterly. If I don’t water it as often as it thinks I ought, all of its stems and leaves dramatically droop over the course of mere hours, so that the entire plant collapses to half its normal height. On more than one occasion
, I have entered the room to find it flopped like a professional soccer player, or an exhausted prima donna at the end of her starring performance. On those days, I have been known to tell it out loud, “Stop being so melodramatic!”
Thus far, the plant has not responded as desired.
Meanwhile, across the room at my computer, the seedling of my current novel has taken tentative root. It sprouts from the rich soil of a catastrophe in the life of my main character; without careful pruning, the tendrils of its high drama will choke out everything subtle or slight. How do I start from such an opening without writing melodramatically?
I’m not sure. (Hence this post.) In fact, I’m still exploring why “melodrama” is such a bad word in the first place. For all its excess, melodrama taps into real emotion, and people want real emotion. Soap operas wouldn’t make up seven of the ten longest-running shows on television if they didn’t touch hordes of faithful viewers who want exactly what they offer. Romance wouldn’t be the bestselling category in fiction if its readers didn’t want to feel all the feels that it supplies.
Most genre fiction can even be sorted according to the kind of emotional hit it provides: speculative fiction gives readers a sense of wonder; mysteries let them exercise their minds and feel secure in a just universe. Romances provide vicarious love and lust, while thrillers run on the adrenaline of danger. Many book club picks are chosen for the juicy moral and ethical issues they raise: the opportunity to discuss strongly felt opinions about those issues, or to absorb others’ opinions, is a big part of their appeal. I’d even argue that the emotional reward of some literary fiction is the right it confers on its readers to judge others who don’t appreciate it.
So yes, successful books convey the kind of emotion that a given genre promises. Readers want that control over how a book makes them feel. But they also want to choose how much they feel and when they feel it.
Writers benefit from identifying where the dial stands in their intended genre and keep their writing close to that expected value. One notch to the side of understatement means a book is considered quiet, which might earn it praise from critics but fewer readers; turn it too cool, though, and readers won’t engage at all. One extra notch of heat can provide the intensity that many readers crave; too hot, and the melodrama detector alarms begin to wail. Goldilocks, can you help a writer out?
The gratitude my plant displays when I finally do water it is as excessive as its complaints. If I am in the room afterward, and if the house is quiet enough, I can actually hear the rustling as the stems regroup to stand tall again. I don’t begrudge my plant its right to ask for a drink, or to enjoy the water I give it. What I dislike about those dramatic flops and rebirths is that they only allow one kind of response from me. Feed me now, or else! Look how happy I am when you pay attention to me. Do it more often! Part of the problem with melodrama, I suspect, is that it tries to wedge a one-size-fits-all emotion into its readers. Melodrama is not emotion. It’s just manipulation.
If you want to write fiction with big feels, knock yourself out (and make sure everyone can hear your wails as you collapse to the ground). It might mean that you are writing in a genre that will outsell us all. Use all the tools at your disposal to invoke rather than to spell out, to invite rather than to force a response. Your readers will love you for it.
If you prefer a stoicism that would rival that of the British Crown, keep calm and carry on. One is aware of its utility.
But if you’re like me, the Goldilocks balance of “just right” emotional appeal may elude you. If so, watch this space. In next month’s post, I’ll address what I have identified as three ways melodrama can unintentionally stunt a story’s impact.
How do you define melodrama? Do you avoid or embrace high emotion in your writing? What do you consider emotion written well or gone horribly, horribly wrong?
Kristin Hacken South is happiest on the days that she works on her fiction, which to date has included a few short stories, two middle grade detective stories, and two adult novels. She lives in Atlanta, with three independent book stores within walking distance of her house. Her idea of a good time is still a day in the desert with a trowel in one hand and a notebook in the other.
[coffee]
Choose your feels, and pick the size they come in! Thank you, Kristin — that’s always worth keeping in mind.
Here’s my definition of melodrama, or the modern meaning of it that’s a negative: it’s when the character’s amount of feeling is bigger than the story has earned. When someone rushes deep into their emotional depths, or gets *loud* about their emotions, or it might be that the plot has pulled something huge that might justify those feelings but the event itself feels forced. Again, any of those work when the story makes them work — the warning is not to use emotional bigness as a quick gimmick.
Yes, I completely agree with your definition! And spoiler alert: this is one of the aspects I’ll talk about next month. :)
In other news, yesterday my husband and I drove past a sign for a store where they had almost, but not quite, succeeded in making a clever pun. My husband proceeded to compare this not-quite-perfect-pun to the tragedy of a favorite team making a particularly bad play in the Super Bowl and thus losing the biggest game of the year. A tad of an overreaction, perhaps?
Kristin, I just LOVE that you can hear your plants!! I’ve been using the term ‘Golilocks Zone’ a lot lately on account of my wood stove. We have a temp gage on the front of the lower stovepipe that tells you how hot you’re burning. Too low or two high and creosote starts to collect. We had a chimney fire in the old stove when we first moved in, which got our attention. So… metaphor alert. Burn too low or too high and you risk burning down the house.
That is a perfect metaphor. The idea is spot on!
As a reader, my favorite books are those that make me feel the most. As a writer, my proudest moments are readers telling me not that they loved a scene but that they felt it.
I don’t read or write characters that act as dramatic as your plant, but some exaggeration, as in characters bigger than life, stretching out the sweet moments, hitting harder with the tough ones, that, to me, is the fun in reading or writing.
My grandmother watched Days of Our Lives all her life. Those characters were as real to her as people in the neighborhood. The episodes, to me, were boring as hell. The sets were mostly limited to living rooms or bedrooms. There wasn’t much action. But when a character died or got married, lost a lover or discovered they had a twin, my grandmother would have tears in her eyes. I’d be proud to have a reader feel like that after reading my work.
Melodrama? I’m not sure what that is. More feels, for the reader (not necessarily for the characters), is always wanted in my book.
Yes, you see my dilemma. Many readers, including me, value an emotional connection to what we read. I really want to provide that, but I know that if I do it wrong, it can backfire. Thank you for the reminder, though, that sometimes it’s important to heat it up a bit in order to make sure it exists at all. Stretching out the sweet moments and hitting the tough ones harder, in my opinion, are not melodrama. They are just effective writing!
I believe romance does all three things you mentioned from different genres, and not all of us write lust.
Absolutely! Romance writers are attuned to their audience’s emotional dial in a way that others could learn a lot by emulating. And by the same token, almost every kind of book gains emotional appeal if there’s a dash of romance in it. :)
Kristin, wow–your plants are drama queens and you have the proof! I love that you can hear them. It reminded me of a beautiful little book: The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating by Elizabeth Tova Bailey, an account of the time the author was bedridden. She had a potted plant to keep her company along with a woodland snail. You can call it the opposite of melodrama, which is my preference. I’ve discovered that holding back the emotion allows the reader to have a powerful release. I liked what Ken said above regarding melodrama–unearned emotion. Thanks for making me think about this more and in such an entertaining way. You did well applying the Goldilocks Principle in this essay. It’s just right!
Haha, thank you Vijaya! And what a fascinating book that sounds like! I am with you: I want to feel All The Things, but the author has to earn them. I’d rather feel the thing myself than be told that a character is feeling it, if that makes sense.
The problem with most manuscripts, and many published novels too, I find, is not that they stir up too much emotion but that they stir up hardly any at all.
A thirty second TV commercial can move me. How disappointing when a three hundred page novel does not very much. I wrote a whole craft book on this topic, The Emotional Craft of Fiction.
Sorry for the shameless plug, but this is an area of fiction craft that I have strong feelings about. And hey, readers aren’t plants. They can absorb a lot more than you think.
One tip: Characters’ emotions do not translate to reader emotions, not even a little. Nope. Sorry. The emotional effect of fiction lies elsewhere.
I was shocked when I learned that some? many? most? people read for emotion. I read (and write) out of curiosity and to escape from my usual roiling emotion..
I think emotion can be more broadly defined to encompass what you describe: curiosity is an emotion and wonder is its satisfaction (I use the term “wonder” in the way that my first writing teacher, Dave Farland, used it, as a description of the feeling readers get when they enter worlds that are unfamiliar to them. This happens most notably in speculative fiction, but it’s available any time a book takes readers to a place that is new to them).
As for reading to escape emotions, isn’t that kind of the same thing? It’s still reading with the expectation that a book will somehow alter your feelings. We’re in agreement, even if we’re coming to the same idea from opposite sides of the road!
Exactly. There’s a distinction between emotion that is assigned to characters on the page and what readers actually feel as they read. I often find them inversely proportional–the more emotion is “told,” the less I feel–which is not what one would expect when trying to learn how to write.
Creating real emotion in a reader is the holy grail, in my opinion, which is why I recommend your books to everyone and plan to mention your concept of third level emotions [https://staging-writerunboxed.kinsta.cloud/2015/06/02/third-level-emotions/] in next month’s post (which is already written and waiting its turn).
Man, Kristin. With every new post I find myself more grateful that you’re on board as a regular. Oh-how-I need regular doses of this sort of… well, writerly companionship, I guess. I mean, we all need routine boosts to our recognition that, “no, I’m really not alone over here.”
It might sound funny, but one of the things I have going for me in this tricksy quest you aptly describe is the sprawling nature of my debut tale. There are three chonkers, after all, and I have to admit, reading it is sort of like trekking in a blizzard–not only does the accumulation continue to weigh on the traveler, it also makes the trudging forth more challenging. I can see that those who aren’t up for the trial are already falling out. But, damn, those persistent dozen that get to “The End” are really going to feel all the feelings… No doubt including one of accomplishment, lol.
I can support Don’s shameless plug for The Emotional Craft–it’s one of my favorite craft books, and I still consider and utilize several of the tools he provides in there. Thanks for the companionship. Wishing you happy trudging forth with the lightest of headwinds.
Thank you, Vaughn! Your kindness and enthusiasm about my posts are making me feel the feels over here. How exactly did you do that? :)
As you have found, there is so much power in a series (including those on television) because they expand the stories of many more characters, and let us to follow them through more than one cycle of growth. By the end, we’ve been on a journey with so many people we can care about, and we can see a huge range of humanity and its foibles. I think epic fantasy does this better than almost anything else, but maybe that’s because there are few other genres that encourage that continuation of world building across so many words. I’m only halfway through your first one, but I look forward to reading more!
In the hardboiled detective genre, I love the complex world building and emotional lives of the Dublin Murder Squad, by Tana French, where each book gets inside a different member of the murder squad. Over the course of the series we see the characters as they see themselves (rich, complex, usually with sordid backstories) and as others see them (often dismissed with one or two sentences). It allows the author to explore so many different kinds of motivations while staying in one coherent world and in deeply personal POVs.
Oh my! Now we’re all feeling the feels. Thanks a million for reading! And for reminding me to get to French–I’ve heard raves for years. Here’s to being in it for the long haul!
“Many book club picks are chosen for the juicy moral and ethical issues they raise” – but finding the in to book clubs is tricky for SPAs, even when you know your novels hit, as one reviewer put it, “…readers who appreciate literary fiction with a profoundly experienced three-sided love story which never devolves into any kind of sentimentality,” and cover almost every ethical or moral dilemma possible over the length of trilogy.
Emotion is key – but my prep notes have two kinds: the characters (especially the three main viewpoint characters) AND the reader. Each is carefully thought through before the construction of every scene, and I have a written list of prompts to remind me of the fourteen types of microtension Donal Maass mentions in The Fire in Fiction.
To get the maximum emotional effect, you have to plan it in great detail – end then hope you’ve achieved your goal with a variety of readers. It is one of the great pleasures of writing mainstream fiction.
Amen to all that! You are further along the publishing track than I am, but I agree that SPAs can be extremely well written and still remain obscure. It sounds like your book is in that category.
I love the idea of your prep notes. As a fellow writing nerd, I will confess to you that I have a file of actual physical index cards, each of which lists one emotional note (a motivation or a backstory or some other kind of entanglement of feeling). Most of these come from WU posts or lectures given by The Don. I have found a lot of wisdom on this site, and I hope, with you, that these nuggets of writing gold will help me to write with maximum emotional effect!
Hello Kristen. Melodrama and sentimentality are two sides of the same coin. It’s being committed when the reader becomes aware of being manipulated or brow-beaten into feeling something out of proportion to what’s happening in the story. Apparently, some people never feel manipulated. Others like me feel it all too often.
(1) Out of proportion and (2) manipulated are central to my definition of melodrama as well. Your point about sentimentality is an interesting one. I suspect that one’s recognition of sentimentality is even more subjective than that of melodrama. What’s cloying to you (and me) is just right to someone else. It’s one of the reasons no one can write for every audience, I suppose.
Melodrama sometimes results from readers not engaging with a character. Unless they feel personally invested in the character’s story, even an “earned” reaction, may feel overdone.
I hope it won’t seem a pointless quibble to say that unless readers are engaged by or invested in characters, no such thing as an “earned” reaction is possible.
@Christine: Yes. I wonder what it is that makes it hard for readers to engage with that character. We have to recognize something real in them, even if they are not like ourselves. I will (hopefully) never face a firing squad like the POV character in the first line of One Hundred Years of Solitude, but I was instantly gripped by the description of his experience.
@ Barry: I think you are talking about this same thing, in recognizing that an earned reaction is one that portrays or suggests meaningful emotion in the character, commensurate to his or her situation, AND elicits heightened emotion in the reader. That one-two punch is what I aspire to do!
It’s a circular, chicken-or-the-egg thing. Failure to connect with a character renders that character melodramatic, and melodrama, in turn, makes it harder to connect with the character.
Yes, I see what you mean. Emotions that we observe but do not share can feel overwrought (and somewhat embarrassing to the observer). Good insight.
@Kristin. Here’s an example of sentimentality/melodrama taken from daily life. We’re in Cape Canaveral, and yesterday we visited the Kennedy Space Center. After MouseWorld, this is arguably the most important tourist venue in Florida. I made my first visit several years ago. I was alone, and I was awed and inspired by the sheer scale of things never before seen except on a TV screen. What I felt was earned by what I saw. This time, I was with my wife, and I looked forward to sharing the experience with her. But this time, things were different. Now, the whole campus, every shed or site with demonstrations and displays was immersed in nonstop crescendo-laden waves of John Williams-inspired music. In the years since my first visit, those in charge had decided that visitors could not be trusted to have their own experience. They all needed to have the same one. The intention was to rev up the visitors, to amplify and control their experience by bludgeoning them into a melodramatic, patriotic frenzy with a soundtrack. So, the real grandeur and resulting respect earned by the reality of the Space Center was spliced into Star Wars. Except the soaring music was relentless, non-stop. And repeated as a tape loop. So, the day was devalued by an attempt to squeeze the last ounce of sentimentality out of what should have been a praiseworthy experience.
Fascinating example! I see what you mean. So sentimentality, in this instance, is the tool by which melodrama is achieved. Excellent insight.
I used to have that same thirsty plant! It died. :(
Thanks for exploring character emotions. I read somewhere that melodrama is undermotivated emotion. That cues me to make sure my character emotions are clearly motivated in the text.
I fear that may be the fate of mine as well…
Melodrama is undermotivated emotion. That’s great insight. Written that way, it points toward what we as writers can do to avoid it.
‘Melodrama is not emotion. It’s just manipulation.’ Wonderful. I must remember that. Who wants to feel manipulated? And sometimes that feeling comes right at the finish, when the twist ending leaves you with the bad taste in your mouth that you’ve been conned. You don’t read that author again. But this article is for me as a writer, and I need to take it on board and give my readers what they want. Too often, I’m told, I shy away from leaving the safe emotional shallows to plunge into the rolling surf, taking my readers with me.
Yes, I didn’t even think about those twist endings. You are so right. I hate that.
Why, upon reading your last line, am I now humming “Rolling in the Deep” by Adele? :)