Bringing Emotion

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…