I Will Give You Hope, Condemnation, Or Even Hate

The emotional connection between reader and character

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How do you make readers cry, scream, laugh, and care about your story? How do you write with emotion and connect with your audience on a deeper, more intimate level? How can you use words to influence an entire generation, change a nation’s perspective, and spread light into the darkest recesses of the world?

The key is finding the difference between telling a story and storytelling.

Characters of fiction can evoke strong emotions in their readers. The kind of involvement is how the reader perceives the story from a character’s perspective while adopting this character’s beliefs, values, and goals. I call this kind of involvement: Integration.

Write people and not Characters

Take a minute to stop and imagine your favorite book in the entire world.

If you’re as avid a reader as I am, you probably won’t be able to pick just one favorite book. But try to focus on one.

Now, imagine the emotion this book made you feel. Maybe anger at points, overwhelming joy, or even sadness.

Focus on that point where you’re reading in the middle of the night, and your favorite character dies, and you have to drop the book and fall back on your bed. Just. Cry. And cry. I do.

Good books make you feel.

Good authors weave agendas and missions into their stories by making readers feel a certain way. A single book can change your entire perspective on life and, depending on the author, can influence you to make a positive or negative change in the world.

What am I saying?

What am I saying when I’m writing? I’m saying:

listen to what I have to say;

believe me; This is how you feel

I’ll tell you why you should change your mind.

If it sounds aggressive, that’s because it is. But you might not realize it because I’ll disguise it with ellipses, qualifiers, evasion, and clauses in a manner of alluding. So if it sounds like I’m bullying you, that’s because I am.

After all, I invade your space, your time — captivate you, an imposition of my sensibility on your most private space.

On the flip side, I give you feelings for which you don’t have to pay; I provide you with love, hope, condemnation, or even hate.

I also give you ideas you experience through or with my characters, and I make sure you feel them deeply. I can only show you feelings and thoughts by showing you how to feel.

I focus my attention and craft by making the narrative moving and vivid, not by the words I produce but through felt experiences.

There’s a difference between storytelling and telling a story; words matter.

But to know how to take those words, show passions and emotions, and weave them into the storytelling.

It’s partly in the details

Details should be seen, smelled, touched, or heard — a sensory tour, and I stay clear of generic sensory information. How often must we be told about a blond, blue-eyed goddess with ample boobs and so on? This is a good example of cataloging without showing a clear picture of who that person might be, except for helping the police find a murderer.

We need to be specific in reporting details to arouse and hold attention. To write and engage the reader, throw out most of your stereotypes with the rubbish made of cardboard.

The same goes for conveying feelings. Simply labeling a character’s emotions as sadness or love will have little effect. I aim to draw out your body’s reaction to the information your senses receive.

In writing, I engage my inner self. My fears, trauma, and happiness by connecting and recall my sensory details to draw out the senses I’m feeling. I want you to feel the scent of singed hair or what my insecurities look like through my characters — all the feelings I feel within my body transformed to you.

I stay clear of labeling emotions. Emotions are not pure. They can be rife with conflicts that lurk in the background with different and opposing emotions relating to unfolding situations. For instance, anger causes blood to flow to our hands, making it easier to strike or hold a weapon. Our heart rate speeds up, and a rush of hormones — including adrenaline — creates a surge of energy strong enough to take action.

In short, I avoid mentioning feelings. Instead, I release them to how the body responds to them.

As a writer, it’s our job to create sensual worlds by painting brilliant pictures from twenty-six letters, drumming out noises with punctuation, infusing smells with paragraphs, cooking flawless tastes in chapters, and touching our reader’s heart with prose, metaphor, simile, alliteration, and composition.