We’re Trying to Break Their Hearts: Exploring the Power of Emotion in Art
By Matthew Norman | July 5, 2024 |
There’s a band from Chicago called Wilco that I’ve been in love with my entire adult life. If you’ve heard them, you know what I mean. If you haven’t, maybe you’ve heard their music pop up in movies and TV shows, like Ted Lasso and, most recently, The Bear.
Back on June 20th, my wife and I gave our kids some pizza and permission to stream as many movies as they wanted and made the trip from Baltimore down 1-95 to see Wilco perform at an outdoor amphitheater in Virginia. They were, as always, terrific.
Early on in the set—their seventh song, but who’s counting?—the band played “I Am Trying to Break Your Heart,” a hit off their album Yankee Hotel Foxtrot. Generally, most Wilco songs are fairly straightforward. Much of IATTBYH, though, at least lyrically speaking, makes very little sense, and that’s a good thing. Here’s how it starts:
I am an American aquarium drinker
I assassin down the avenue
I’m hiding out in the big city blinking
What was I thinking when I let go of you?
You get three lines of poetry here—lovely and random. But then, my god, that fourth line. It’s crystal clear, pitch perfect, and, in lead singer Jeff Tweedy’s voice, it’s an emotional stunner. My eyes welled up as he sang those words in Virginia, and, embarrassingly, they’re welling up a little now as I write this. Damn you, Jeff!
My point—along with humble bragging about getting to see a sick concert—is that emotion is what makes art so powerful, and, as writers, it’s our job to deliver that emotion as much as we can. Here are some tips for doing that and for turning up the volume on all those feelings in your work.
Hit ‘Em in the Heart, Not the Head
As we know, reading and writing are intellectual exercises, practically by definition. But reading and writing are very much emotional exercises, too. Think about the last few books you read that you didn’t particularly care for. Technically, on a sentence-to-sentence level, those books may have been written well and drafted with great effort and care by professionals. I’m willing to bet, though, that in most cases the authors of those books failed to create characters with whom you connected emotionally or failed to create situations or scenes that made you feel something—at least something worthwhile.
So many of the words and sentences we write in longform pieces—fiction or nonfiction—are the equivalent of nuts and bolts in construction. We’re presenting necessary information. We’re orienting our readers in time and space. We’re erecting the metal posts required to keep our plots from crumbling to the ground. While all of that is important and necessary, never forget that there will be an actual person reading it. As you write and revise, constantly ask yourself: Is this making the reader think or feel? Good writing can do both, of course, just as good writing can be intellectual as hell. But if you’re not skewing toward emotional relevance your reader’s attention will eventually drift.
Be Revealing with Your Characters
Your characters need to want things. Duh. Their motivations will propel the engine that drives your plot. However, your characters are also human—let’s assume—and that means that they love some things, too. They fear some things, feel overwhelmingly insecure about at least one thing, and regret maybe five things so much that they can hardly talk about them without having a panic attack. Tap into your reader’s sense of empathy by revealing those things throughout your story. Regardless of your genre of choice, if done well, that work is sure to pay off.
One example that comes to mind is Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. A classic adventure story, the plot is simple and compelling: a father and son make their way across a desolate, apocalyptic United States. The reason I still think about that book twenty years after reading it, though—and I’d argue the reason it won the Pulitzer Prize—is how clearly and beautifully McCarthy presents the father’s love for his immensely vulnerable young son.
<Deep breath> Okay, moving on. I don’t want to get all weepy again.
Pack Your Prose with Emotion
Songwriters are lucky, right? Along with emotional lyrics—and nonsense lyrics that sound cool like Jeff Tweedy’s above—their writing toolboxes include things like devastating harmonies, guitar solos that drop you to your knees, and haunting piano interludes that you think about in the shower when you’re sad. For us, though, all we’ve got are our words…and that means we need to choose them wisely.
There are many, many ways to write any sentence. As you write and revise, find ways to write yours such that they tie back to emotion. Here’s an example from Nick Hornby’s About a Boy that’s followed me around for a couple of decades now.
Marcus was so locked into himself, so oblivious to everyone and everything, that affection seemed to be the only possible response: the boy somehow seemed to be asking for absolutely nothing and absolutely everything all at the same time.
A showstopper of a line, and all Nick Hornby is doing here is having his narrator describe how a boy is walking down the street.
Another trick with emotional prose that Nick Hornby is using—Jeff Tweedy uses it in the song lyrics above, too—is strategic sentence placement. Note that both writers save their best, most emotional lines for the end. The effect is a kind of lulling. Essentially, they’re setting you up to hit you over the head. Here’s another example of that trick executed perfectly in Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried.
…Kiowa carried his grandfather’s feather hatchet. Every third or fourth man carried a Claymore anti-personnel mine—3.5 pounds with its firing device. They all carried fragmentation grenades—fourteen ounces each. They all carried at least one M-18 colored smoke grenade—twenty-four ounces. Some carried CS or tear-gas grenades. Some carried white-phosphorus grenades. They carried all they could bear, and then some, including a silent awe for the terrible power of the things they carried.
Blah, blah, blah, blah…boom! Your heart just got broken, and you never even saw it coming.
Tap Into Your Own Emotions
The good thing about writing about humans is that you, too, are human—again, let’s assume. Who and what do you love? What are you afraid of? What are you insecure about? What do you regret? Keep a list of those things in your mind and use the emotional power they generate every time you sit down to write, because you are your own best emotional source material. And because your readers are probably human, too, the deeper you dig and the more vulnerable you get, the more hearts you’ll break. And your readers will love you for it.
- What’s an emotional moment or line from a book that you still think about years later?
- Who are some authors you’ve read who are experts at making their readers feel things?
- Wilco does it to me all the damn time. U2, R.E.M, the Beatles, and lately Taylor Swift, too. Is there a band or songwriter who breaks your heart on a regular basis?
- As a writer, do you generate emotion in your work more through your prose or your characters’ actions?
- Ever cried while reading in public? Man, isn’t that embarrassing?
Matthew Norman is the author of five novels. His latest, Charm City Rocks, is out now from Dell. His debut novel, Domestic Violets, was nominated in the Best Humor Category at the 2011 Goodreads Choice Awards, and his second novel, We’re All Damaged, was an Amazon bestseller. His upcoming novel, Grace & Henry’s Holiday Movie Marathon, will be out in October. He lives with his wife and two daughters in Baltimore and holds an MFA from George Mason University.
[coffee]
Hello Matthew. Thanks for your post. When it comes to putting emotion front and center, you are preaching to the choir at Writer Unboxed. But in my forthcoming novel, my mission calls on me to begin with someone who is skeptical of feelings. As he drives, he is on his cell phone with his estranged wife:
“Judgmental. Hurt. Feel. Bobbing his head to the rise and fall of his wife’s voice, he puts the shift lever in Drive. In Brady’s view, American culture is buried under a steamy compost mound of emotion. Of soap opera feelings and self-pity. If I were God, he thinks, I would create a lexicological delete key. The first word to go? Feelings. Just imagine—he nods in agreement–every reporter denied the word, each and every time he shoves a microphone in someone’s face. Every talk-show host, every right-to-lifer or pro-choicer. How does it–and nothing. Just a blank space requiring thought.”
As the story unfolds, Brady Ritz’s hard-nosed attitude will collapse under the weight of emotion. But for it to matter, I first invest him with skepticism.
Hey, Barry. That’s a very cool premise/jumping off point. I can see that having a big emotional payoff.
Are You My Mother? made me cry happy tears when I was three. A required high school read, A Day in the Life Of Ivan Denisovich gutted me in its final line (about leap years).
I read Angle of Repose while sitting in a rocking chair and nursing my brand-new, perfect, firstborn child. I spent a lot of hours in that chair. It may have been the combination of post-pregnancy hormones and lack of sleep, in part, but the final two pages of that book punched me in the throat and left me gasping. I mean, literally. I felt like someone had knocked the the breath out of me.
More recently, Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow left me ugly-crying. Not in the part where you’d expect it — no spoilers here but I’m referring to birds and strawberry fields — but in the later part, where every single stray thread of story comes together in a fantastical (not of this world, a fantasy setting) virtual reality that shows the real love and understanding between two characters in the book in a way that had been promised, withheld, teased at, withdrawn, complicated, and made to feel impossible. That bit of grace allowed all of the pent-up emotions to release at once and I found it incredibly powerful.
You’re absolutely right that it’s the emotion, done right, that makes meaning. Man, I wish I could bottle that capability and sprinkle liberally in my own writing.
Hey, Kristin. Oh yeah, for sure…Tomorrow was a sledge hammer. I think we’ll be talking about that book for years.
Ditto on Wilco. The Tragically Hip. Traffic. We could go on. You’re talking about the gut punch, which is the set up followed by the emotional reveal. Country Music songwriting specializes in that, if you can tolerate the twang and overlook the occasional reverence for Dixie.
For fiction writers the format is the paragraph: get ready…wait for it…wait for it…boom!…killer last line! It has to be emotional. Loss. Longing. Love. Regret. Envy. Shame. Blame. I’ll try one.
It wasn’t the church basement breakfast so much as the brutality. The phony concern. How’re the kids holding up? Is there anything I can do? My cousin just shot up a grocery store, killed sixteen people, including two kids in a shopping cart in the cereal aisle. Yes, there is something you can do. It’s just that you should have done it last week, last month, or just about anytime in the whole damn stretch of years that you knew him. Thanks for being here, friends. Have some Cheerios.
Bitterness. Bile. Such fun. Thanks for pointing out this trick, Mr. Norman, I’ll be using it now.
Hey, Benjamin. Yes! Well said. “…the format is the paragraph.” It absolutely is.
Yes. And often the text that breaks one’s heart arrives at an unexpected time, like after a love scene, a birth, even just a party. You carry the reader toward the sunlight and then with a sentence you crush their hopes for more. It’s more than bad news…it’s the attack of aching surprise. Thanks for your post.
Thanks! Unexpected times are the best. I always like to try to plant little things that lead up to those moments, so when they happen the reader thinks back and is like, “Ah, that bastard was leading me on the whole time.”
Wilco is a dandy band. I was writing elsewhere about how writing rhythms can carry and extend emotions, and you mentioned “The Things They Carried,” so I’ll quote myself on that subject:
The rhythms of Maclean’s “A River Runs Through It” are hypnotic to me, and have that frisson of understatement and restraint while carrying deep emotions. Same thing happens when I read something like Tim O’Brien’s “The Things They Carried”: some of the stories are almost like songs, though songs that blow you apart. Marilynne Robinson’s work feels that way to me too, as well as Kent Haruf’s. Directness with layers. Wish I could write a tenth that well. Thanks for the thoughtful post.
Hey, Tom. Very cool that we both turned to Tim O in writing reflections. I met him once at a reading in DC. He was very nice and funny.
Matthew, thanks for this post. I’m a huge Wilco fan. I’ve seen the band in concert five times and I have all their albums, as well as Jeff Tweedy’s solo albums. Jeff Tweedy is a superb songwriter. If you haven’r read it already, I’d recommend Tweedy’s book, “How to Write One Song.” In the book, Tweedy discussed his process for writing songs, which incorporates many of the habits of fiction writers. He also lays out some techniques and exercises for writing lyrics, such as word ladders. He suggests making a list of ten verbs that are associated with a particular word, and then right next to it make a list of ten nouns that are within your field of vision. Then take a pencil and draw lines that connect words from the verb column and the noun column. He used that technique to write the lyrics of the song, “I’m Always in Love,” which produced such lines as:
“When I let go of your throat, sweet throttle
When I clean the lash of your black-belt model”
Thanks again for this post. It’s packed with great tips about how we can use words to tap into emotions.
Hey, Chris! A fellow Wilco fanatic! I love it! “I’m Always in Love” is my favorite Wilco song. And they played it in VA! I’ve seen them live a bunch of times, too, and it doesn’t always make the set list. I absolutely love Jeff’s lyrics, but his books are amazing, too, like you said. The “word ladder” thing is so great because it puts a method to something that you could easily, as an outsider, assume simply flows out of him because he’s so talented. Art can be methodical and technical.
I know The Time Traveler’s Wife hasn’t aged well — in part because of some failed adaptations — but reading Niffenegger’s novel after the initial book release wrecked me. The emotional moment: seeing Henry (our time traveler) lose his feet following hypothermia/frostbite after an unfortunate time jump, deep in the novel. The story had built in a certain understanding of Henry’s need to move after a time jump to ensure his survival, and so the impact of losing his ability to move packed a huge emotional punch even before Niffenegger made me sob at 2 a.m. in my living room. And this is why I watched only one episode of the latest failed adaptation of TTTW; the writer of that adaptation chose to end the first episode with the revelation that Henry would lose his feet. Let me repeat: the first episode. Rather than build tension organically, this writer undercut it all for a meaningless shock shot. (When you know your protag’s feet aren’t in good hands…)
Knowing how to wring emotion out of a situation is important for a writer. Just as critical is knowing when to do the wringing for maximum impact.
Thanks for a great post, Matthew!
Hey, T. Thanks. Absolutely…the slow build it critical. Generally speaking, I think that’s something that screen adaptations often get wrong. What I’m saying is, basically: BOOKS ARE BETTER! :)
Two thoughts in response to your questions: You asked about songwriters who can be depended on to “wreck you” with a line or two–and I have a couple– but my first thought was of the time I was sitting in a bar with a woman I barely knew, and for reasons I have forgotten I was telling her the words of Leonard Cohen’s “Suzanne.” And I suddenly fell apart. I started crying. I was not a big Cohen fan (at that time) and it wasn’t the lyric. It was the sudden glimpse into the past I had loved but could never visit again. Songs can do that to you. Alcohol helps.
As for lines you can’t forget: Huckleberry Finn has come ashore from the raft in order to find out where he and Jim are. To explain his appearance in town he’s pretending to be a survivor of a riverboat boiler explosion. A woman says, “Good gracious! anybody hurt?” And Huck says, “No’m. Killed a nigger.” And the conversation goes on.
Twain wasn’t being mean, he was shining a light on exactly what the country was like in the mid-19th century. He could have gone on and on, but that line does it for me.
Love me some Wilco!
I love being torn apart by a song, a poem, a great read- it’s the catharsis, being shredded to the elemental core of self, the heart and all the hurts and hopes stored within.
I think of a song that came out when I was 18 and had all that hope and hurt burning within the story of the lyrics: Tracy Chapman’s Fast Car, which had a moment recently with Luke Combs brilliant cover, breaking me open again as I crested 54 when it hit the airwaves- all that I’d lived in those intervening decades making the original that much more poignant.
The most recent book that left me with hitching sobs is Rene Denfeld’s Sleeping Giants. If you haven’t read Rene’s work, do. It’s dark, revealing the worst of humanity (by day she’s a death row investigator), and yet so full of grace and compassion. She takes the reader to the depths and then brings them back to the light with perfectly rendered redemption.