3 Tips to Hook Your Reader’s Emotions
By Anna Elliott | March 12, 2018 |
Probably like most authors, I read as often and as much as I possibly can, but lately I’ve been noticing something about my reading habits: For every book I finish, there are probably five or maybe even more where I download the free sample onto my e-reader, read anywhere from the first page to the entire sample . . . and then set aside, without the slightest desire to read the entire book. Of course, that’s probably not so unusual, really. That’s the entire point of the sample feature after all, so that you as a reader can get a sense of whether or not a book is for you. But it’s gotten me thinking about what exactly it is about the books that I have no desire to read further that leads me to put them down? What is it about them that didn’t hook me as a reader?
I’m not, by the way, talking about issues where a book is rife with editorial mistakes, amateur writing, wooden dialogue, etc. I’ve read the samples of plenty of books that were well edited, had fluent, above-average writing, and even opened with what should have been an exciting “hook” in terms of a plot that jumped straight into fast-paced action. And yet I still didn’t click the ‘buy’ button at the end of the sample. Of course, everyone’s mileage varies, and the books that didn’t work for me may well be another reader’s favorite read of the year. But in trying to analyze what determines whether a book is a must-read or a did-not-finish, I’ve come to the conclusion that for me, it boils down to emotion; I need the book grab me on an emotional level.
So below are my top 3 tips for kicking your reader right in the feels and ensuring they don’t put your book down:
1. Emotions: your characters should have some. This may seem eye-rollingly obvious, but you’d be surprised how many books I’ve started where the first several pages were either pure exposition– explaining where the characters were and how they got there– or else pure action. That second one is a particularly easy trap to fall into if you’re writing in a genre where action is prevalent in your plot: fantasy, distopian, sci-fi, thrillers, mysteries. All of those genres– and of course others as well– very often include big exciting scenes that involve battles or fist-fights, murders, abductions, and other high-stakes action sequences. All of which can work great at hooking a reader, but it can’t be just straight action. I’ve read loads of books that open with a super high-stakes, thrilling action scene, and yet it falls flat for me because I might as well be watching a video-game character running through a demo. What’s missing? Emotion. You can have all the action in the world, but if your character is just moving through the motions like a robot, readers still aren’t going to care. Show your characters’ desperate fear, their pain, their determination and triumph or even their crushing loss.
Even better–and this brings me to tip #2– show at least two of those at once:
2. Dig deep into secondary emotions. Of course, before I even start to mention this topic, I need to acknowledge that our own Donald Maass is the resident expert at it, and he both teaches workshops and has written several fabulous blog posts here on using secondary emotions to take your work to the next level. But it is something I was paying attention to and striving for in my own work even before I read what Donald had to say– and I think it’s such a crucial factor that it’s well worth stating here. People are complicated. Our emotions don’t generally come one at a time with neat little labels like those ’emotional awareness’ games for kids that Pinterest is always recommending to me as a homeschooler, where you see a picture of a little yellow smiley face (or a frowny face, or a mad face) and have to match it to the word ‘angry’ ‘happy’ ‘sad’ etc. I’m not meaning to knock those types of games for those they work for, but in my experience, feelings just don’t work that way. Emotions are messy, all-over-the-place, tied not just to our in-the-moment experiences but to our pasts, our memories, and to our future hopes and dreams.
Just to take an off-the-top-of-my-head example: picture a woman who’s planning a romantic evening and a big fancy dinner for her husband, only her husband is staying late at work . . . again, and he only called to tell her this at the time when he was supposed to already be home. (I realize this example is super gender-role cliched, but like I say it was the first one that popped into my head, so let’s just roll with it). Now, what is the wife’s primary feeling? Disappointment? Anger? Resentment? Suspicion that her husband is having an affair? Any of those could be a believable reaction, and you could play your scene to key into any or all of those. But what else could she be feeling?
Well, amidst the disappointment and resentment, she could also be feeling a smidgen of angry satisfaction. Ha! She could be thinking. I accused him of not caring about our marriage and this just proves that I’m right! Or you could give her past abandonment and self-esteem issues, and have her husband’s behavior trigger feelings of despair that underpin her anger: he doesn’t love me, no one will ever love me. Do you feel how much richer and deeper the emotion of the scene would be if you give her something else to feel besides just mad that her husband has ruined the evening she planned?
3. Don’t be too obvious. I once read a list of “rules” for newbie authors to follow, and one of them was “never name an emotion.” Now, I confess that it’s this type of supposed “rules” list that makes me grind my teeth and ask whether the list’s writer is some kind of officer with the writing police. But I do understand what this rule is getting at. You don’t want to spend your entire book saying things like, “she was so mad” or “he felt sad.” Show don’t tell is another supposed “rule” that I think can be implemented in an overly dogmatic way, but there’s no question it’s more compelling to show your characters’ clenched hands and gritted teeth as she grinds out her one-word answer than just to say, “she was angry.” On the other hand, though, there’s a big difference between saying, “I was scared” and “fear stabbed me straight through the heart.” You don’t have to be terrified of ever naming an emotion, but do it in such a way that the reader can feel your characters’ emotion, too.
What about you? What hooks your emotions as a reader?
Anna Elliott is an author of historical fiction and fantasy. Her first series, the Twilight of Avalon trilogy, is a retelling of the Trystan and Isolde legend. She wrote her second series, the Pride and Prejudice Chronicles, chiefly to satisfy her own curiosity about what might have happened to Elizabeth Bennet, Mr. Darcy, and all the other wonderful cast of characters after the official end of Jane Austen’s classic work. She enjoys stories about strong women, and loves exploring the multitude of ways women can find their unique strengths. Anna lives in the Washington DC area with her husband and three children.
Anna-
My favorite topic! Thanks for the acknowledgement, too. I do indeed teach and blog “emotional craft”. Wrote a whole book about it.
There’s a lot I could say today, but you’ve already got us thinking. I’ll just add one thing with respect to characters emotions: Yes, include them. However, it is a misconception that what characters will feel is what readers will feel. That is untrue.
In fact, when it’s primary emotions–shame, anger, fear–it’s pretty much a guarantee that you cannot get readers to feel that by writing the emotion down. “She seethed.” That doesn’t get us seething.
What works is evoking the big feeling in the reader. That can be done with showing, but as effective can be telling…about a *different* feeling. For instance, here is how I would handle your hypothetical wife’s response when her husband scuttles the romantic dinner she has planned:
“He was working late. Again. Fine. She’d wrap the chicken cordon bleu in tin foil and drive it to the shelter downtown. Some other family would enjoy it. Some other husband would look at his wife with love light in his eyes. The idea made her smile. A homeless couple would have more of a home tonight than she. More of a marriage. Happiness. Chicken dinner in foil. So simple. Why was it so hard for her?”
Something like that. Not digging into the big emotion but writing around it; or, as you say, not being too obvious.
Thanks for this post today! For me it’s a chicken dinner.
Thanks for starting this conversation, Anna. Evoking emotion sounds easy-peasy but is so difficult to do effectively. To summarize both your advice and Don’s: the more complicated and subtle the better. A slow-burning anger mixed with resentment, a desire for revenge, guilt for feeling that way and maybe a touch of sadness for a love that has faded–we get hints of all these in Don’s example.
Don, your suggestion to “write around it” is incredibly helpful to me. Thank you.
Absolutely, Ruth, it’s such an important conversation to have, because it is so key to the success of a story, and yet it’s also just plain a hard skill to master! The more we practice and analyze the more we learn.
Yes! Absolutely, Don, and I love the way you’ve given us an example of how to vividly show anger, disillusionment, and despair without ever even using those words!
I picked up an aphorism somewhere: If the character cries, the reader doesn’t have to. It may have even been from you.
My aim is to make the reader cry – and like it.
So true, Alicia!
How absolutely timely for me. I was brought up in a stoic household. Emotions were kept strictly in check. “You will not make a scene to disgrace the family,” was an admonition I heard early and often.
Getting into the character’s head and heart are difficult. But I’m working at it. Thank you for this valuable post.
I hear you, Judith. My parents are lovely, warm, open-hearted people, but I’m also a New Englander born and bred with all that puritanical stock as my heritage (or at least that’s what I’ll blame it on, ha!), and that can make stoicism kind of the default. It’s so worth it to dig deep and find our characters’ feelings, though.
As a a reader it is often the things not said that make me connect with the character. The emotion emerging from the words not spoken.
As a writer I find creating these in-between-lines especially difficult. I sometimes try to let small action do the telling, like hand movements, but I am not sure how skilful I am with this yet. ;-) (Write and learn, re-write and hopefully learn some more…)
Yep, that’s it exactly– write, re-write, and learn some more! :-)
This post couldn’t be more timely as I’m editing my current manuscript for emotions and trying to take them to the next level. Thank you, Anna, for writing a valuable post!
You’re so welcome! Glad if it was helpful!
Emotion is so central to fiction and your post a great reminder that stresses technique. Thanks also to Donald Maass for his reply that underlines the process of drilling down and revealing secondary emotions.
Thanks, Beth! And yes, Donald is the master. :-)
Nice post, Anna, and proves -again – that sometimes the simplest things to accomplish are the most difficult…
I will be hooked on emotions that are presented in a way that allow me to ride the character’s mental train to the emotional ‘stop’ that gives them the most power, in that moment. And those ‘stops’ arrive at our basest emotions: anger, fear, hope, etc. Anger is often the first stop, because it powers movement. Fear is interesting because it can power movement or paralysis, or both, as in mindlessly running away. Hope powers faith in someone, something or ourselves.
So — showing the battle-hardened warrior resting as the current skirmish dies down, opening his locket to see the strands of his beloved’s hair within, then hearing the final screams of the last man to perish in the fields — and then the sunset falls to streaks of pink and purple. This will keep my mind busy with image-building, but I also want to know what emotion was ignited at each point. Was the beloved massacred by the opposition army, after being tormented? Revenge at play? Does the final scream of a dying man, who cares what side he was one, trigger satisfaction or a growing desolation in the soul over death and killing? And, of course, does sunset bring the feeling of peace and hiding all in the darkness — or — is does it carry hope for a new day that will allow a renewing?
I will read on if the emotions string together to paint a larger picture. And the cause of all those emotions should be presented as facts that the character reacts to…not qualifiers. They already exist, we learn about them from other sources, and then they are enriched by the character’s reactions. That’s how we ‘learn’ who the character really is…
I know what you mean about samples — I have to clear out the losers every month — how depressing!!! :O)
Again, thanks for a fun, thoughtful post — come back!!
p.s.–dint error ck this comment – so am assuming errors — sorry!
I love how you dig into the full emotional process here in your example! So evocative and such a good illustration!
“Never name an emotion” sounds like a good rule of thumb.
Yes, it’s a little pedantic for my taste like I said, but a decent place to start. :-)
Great article.
The struggle of building Characters is real, but its one of the most fun part in the process of writing a novel. Seeing characters comes to life is indescribable feeling. whether its the hero or the villain, the trick is to make them both heroes of their own story. complex yet simple, cold blooded yet compassionate, etc…that fine line exist the question is can you get it??
Thanks for sharing!
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I seem never to have a problem writing a character’s emotions effectively, or tapping in to reader’s emotions. Now if I could just corral all my chaos and cray cray and write a good compelling plot, I’d be off to the best-seller races, right? RIGHT? …. :D
Anna, this resonated with me. I’m a New Englander born and bred, and until a few years ago my characters were extremely stoic. I’m learning to show their turmoil, not necessarily in words, but in gestures, body language and their inner lives. Thanks for a great post.