Creating Emotion in the Reader

January 30, 2011 by Fiction Editor Beth Hill

last modified February 8, 2011

I wrote an article on the importance of creating

emotions in readers, but I’ve noticed that writers
are looking for specifics on how to accomplish that.
So, this article complements that first one, presents
practical tips on how to stir the reader’s emotions.

_____________________________________

Readers like to be touched, moved, by story. They

like to imagine themselves in worlds and situations
that challenge them, that give them opportunity to
do and be something other than what they do or
are in their real lives.
Fiction, whether in book or film or games, allows
people to not only step into other worlds, but to
experience those worlds. To do what they can’t in
the course of a normal day. To feel beyond their
normal feelings.

Since readers want to immerse themselves in other

worlds and other lives, what can writers do to make
that experience authentic, to make the fictional
world real for a few hours?

One technique the writer can make use of to create

reality out of fiction is to induce emotion in readers,
make them feel something of what the characters
are experiencing. Writer and reader know the
fictional events aren’t real, but the emotion can be.
Readers can fear and feel joy and be excited and
know grief. They can laugh and cry, shiver and rage.
All from reading a story.
But how can a writer accomplish this? How does a
writer make readers feel emotion?

1. Write in scenes, showing rather than telling.

That is, don’t report that a character is afraid or
giddy or grieving. Show the results of character
emotions through the character’s actions. Show
what fear or giddiness or grief does to him.
Character action and response is a good place to
focus.

This is a major key for rousing reader emotions. No

one gets emotional over a report. They do get
emotional when they can step into someone’s shoes
and experience his or her feelings as if those
feelings were churning inside them.

Delores was afraid to open the door to the

basement steps. She stood at the far side of the
kitchen, debating what to do.

vs.

Delores’s hand trembled as she reached for the

locked doorknob. Tom had warned her not to open
the basement door when he wasn’t around, but he
was due home soon, so what could happen? She bit
her lip and tightened her fingers around the cold
knob. A shiver shook her. She inhaled only a shallow
breath and then struggled for another.

And nearly shot through the ceiling when the

microwave dinged, letting her know her tea was
hot.

2. Make a character sympathetic, so the reader

identifies with her.
If the reader can identify with a character—with her
dreams or habits or choices—he can also identify
with her emotions—pains and joys and sorrows.
(Readers can also identify with the shared human
condition, so sometimes a particular situation will
resonate with readers even before the character
becomes involved.)

Make sure the reader knows/understands/identifies

with the character before trying to connect
emotionally. The reader won’t be affected by a
character’s deep emotions on page one, simply
because he has no ties to the character. By chapter
three, if you’ve put the reader in the character’s
place in the story, what touches the character can
touch the reader. By the novel’s climax, the reader
should so identify with the lead character that the
character’s pain becomes the reader’s pain, his
triumphs, the reader’s triumphs. The reader may
have a physical response—laughter or tears or
shivers—as if whatever happened to the character
had actually happened to the reader.

You know how this plays out in your own life. A

death reported on the nightly news means one
thing when it’s a stranger and something totally
different when it’s someone you know or a relative
of someone you know.

Help your readers know your characters.

Make your character believable and sympathetic so

the reader wants to be that character, wants to go
through everything he goes through for the length
of the story.

3. Make a character unsympathetic, so the reader

feels anger or repugnance toward him.
A character who is hated has already created an
emotional response in your reader. I’m not talking
caricature or stereotype here. I’m talking about
creating a character who is soul ugly or evil or
unfeeling, but one who belongs in one story and no
other.

Your unsympathetic character might be no one of

consequence in another book. But here, in this
particular story, his actions/words are destructive to
your protagonist or to someone close to him.

Cruel characters doing cruel things—cruel in the

eyes of the protagonist or the reader—can affect
the reader. If the character reacts to the cruelty, the
reader can as well. Or, if the reader feels something
because of what a cruel character does, you’ve
already stirred his emotions.
If, however, your protagonist has no response to the
cruel actions of another character, your readers may
feel both bewildered and cheated. Show the
reactions/response of characters to the actions of
another character. Characters must do more than
think about the evil of another character. They must
have a response in terms of action and/or dialogue.

4. Don’t hold back. If you want to reach the

reader’s emotions, you need to write
emotion-evoking scenes. Killing or injuring a
character’s child, pet, or loved one can touch the
reader, if the reader has sufficient investment in the
character.

If Sarah gets a phone call, with someone saying her

son has died, readers won’t feel grief, even if you
show Sarah grieving, unless you’ve created a tie
between Sarah and the readers, unless you’ve
prepared for the death ahead of time, showing
Sarah’s love for her son, perhaps her fear for his life
or her dreams for him.

If he’s never been mentioned and we don’t know

how much he means to Sarah, an announcement of
his death will have no emotional impact on the
reader.

If, however, Sarah had been worried for his safety or

has been sitting at his hospital bedside, the reader is
connected both to Sarah and her son, and his death
can shake up the reader.

Don’t be afraid of killing off someone close to your

main characters or of taking away something else
dear to them. If they are crushed, the reader can be
as well. This is fiction; you’re not really hurting
someone if you write them into a car accident.
Death or injury aren’t the only ways to hurt your
characters. Misunderstanding, betrayal, and forced
choices that hurt their friends are all ways to agitate
characters. And when characters are agitated,
readers can be as well.

5. Tease the reader with hints of what’s to come.

You see this in romantic comedies, the backward
and forward dance between a couple just falling in
love. The tease, the delay, the anticipation makes
the payoff dramatic and satisfying.

In mysteries and suspense, anticipation increases

tension and therefore increases the emotional
impact. Fear drawn out to just the right degree gives
a satisfying snap when hell breaks loose.

6. Recognize that word choice can greatly affect

reader emotions. Some words are triggers in
themselves and can be used to set off the reader.

Putting an especially nasty cuss word in the mouth

of a character who doesn’t curse can jolt the reader.
It’s a strong signal that something is very wrong.

Verbs or nouns that are socially loathed or that

remind readers of hated people or abhorrent
practices can be used to instantly rouse the reader.
Of course, you can’t use this technique too often
because the reader will feel manipulated and feel
anger toward you, the writer, rather than with a
character or the story on the page. You can
manipulate readers; you shouldn’t let them feel the
manipulation.

Some words convey lightness or humor or passion.

Other words have little emotional shading. Choose
your words with their impact potential in mind.

Even common actions can be influenced by word

choice. Do characters cross a room or lope or
shuffle? Do they race across town or merely make
their way through traffic? Do they demand or ask
for something? Do they heave or lift or haul or pick
up an object?

Know the power of word choice in eliciting

emotions. Use words throughout a scene to express
your exact meaning so a scene is cohesive and the
emotion consistent. Don’t mix light and fluffy words
into a dark, heavy scene unless you’re doing so for
effect. That is, be aware of your word choices and
what they can do to the scene and the overall tone
of the story—increase tension because you choose
the right word combinations or diffuse tension
because you’ve used ill-matched words.
Note—Even though you want the words to create a
tight scene, one with cohesion and consistency, this
doesn’t mean that all characters in the scene will
have the same agenda and speak to the same end.
That is, you may have a character quite at odds with
the other characters and what’s happening. Your
antagonist may not care that he’s caused negative
events in the protagonist’s life. He might not feel
remorse or pain at what’s happened. And therefore
he may talk at cross purposes with other characters.
This, of course, creates a tension all its own and can
set the reader on edge.

7. Create a situation that’s important, vital, or life

altering, if not life threatening. Make sure there’s
something at stake for the character, make sure his
actions reflect the importance of this something,
and make sure he tries to do something to change
this intolerable dilemma. Produce in the reader
both the emotion from the situation and the hope
that the character can triumph.

8. Put your characters under time constraints to

increase tension, to cause them to make decisions
they might not ordinarily make, to set them—and
the reader—on edge.

9. Force your character into making a decision

between a bad choice and a worse choice. This kind
of situation pulls the reader in whether he knows
the reason for those bad choices or not. The reader
feels for the character, for him having to make bad
decisions that both character and reader know will
cause even more problems.

10. Move the story. Don’t dwell so long on an

event that the reader loses interest or the urgency
wanes.
11. Write realistic scenes with realistic problems,
problems that are conceivable for the characters
and world you’ve created. Events, characters, and
setting must be logical for your world. Don’t give
your reader a reason to doubt the truth and
possibilities of your story and story events. Don’t
give them a push out of your fictional world.

12. Surprise the reader by turning the story in an

unexpected direction. Keep the reader off balance,
unsuspecting, so he can be blindsided and thus feel
more unsettling emotions.

13. Write conflict into every scene. Conflict can be

character to character, character to himself,
character to events, and character to setting. An
agitated character can pass that agitation to the
reader.
14. Adjust the pace for the emotion you want to
create. Use short sentences and paragraphs to
speed the pace, to encourage suspense and fear.
(Readers read faster and feel the story is moving at
a faster pace when there’s more white space on a
page.) Use longer phrases and paragraphs to slow
the momentum, to ease off the forward rush, to
create a sense of relaxation or calm.

15. Choose words with deliberation. Use harsh or

sharp words for the harsher emotions,
soft-sounding and soft-meaning words for gentle
emotions. (Or, cross up your words and emotions to
create confusion. But remember that you want the
reader confused in the same way the characters are
confused, not unable to follow what you’re saying.)

16. Reduce the use of unnecessary and unrelated

detail to keep the focus on one emotion. Characters
involved in chases don’t notice the flowers or the
store fronts decorated for Christmas. Lovers in their
first sex scene don’t notice every object in the
room; they’re far more interested in one another.

Stay in the moment and only turn the reader’s

attention to what’s important for this moment and
this scene and the characters involved.

There are, of course, exceptions to this piece of

advice. Yet, when you’re trying to build emotion,
don’t dilute it or distract the reader with unrelated
details. Use your details in other scenes, when it’s
appropriate to introduce them.

Do use detail that will heighten emotion.

17. Use setting to influence the reader and

deepen his emotional response. Paint your rooms,
put sounds in your outdoor spaces, add smells to
your attic. Imagine how these elements would
influence your readers—dark rooms, dark colors,
enclosed spaces, echoing spaces, wide-open fields,
silence, the living room of a house where someone
was murdered, the living room of the house owned
by the lead character’s enemy, a courtroom, a
boardroom, back stage during a concert, back stage
three hours after the concert-goers have all gone
home.

Play with setting so you put your characters in the

best locale for each scene. Need to ramp up
unease? Move the scene to a deserted office at
night. Need something lighter than the bedside of a
comatose patient? Take the scene to the hospital’s
cafeteria. Or chapel. Or business office.

18. Use sense details to mire readers in the reality

of the scene. What can the character hear and
smell? What does a change in sound mean? What
does the absence of sound mean for the character
and the reader? When a character reaches into a
dark hole and feels something brittle, does the
reader break out in goose bumps? What if the
character felt something soft and silky, something
like springy curls? Does the reader’s pulse jump?

Play with all five senses to keep your readers

involved, maybe off balance, but always interested
in what’s coming next.

*******

Use each of these methods, not just one, to raise an

emotional response in your reader. Touch the
reader often, noting that each scene doesn’t have to
register higher on the emotional meter than the
scene before. (Though emotions do rise through the
climax, the rate of the climb isn’t consistent and
emotional impact can be variable; both character
and readers need variations in intensity. Downs are
as important as ups.)

Don’t hesitate to mix emotions. A heroine in a

suspense thriller can’t be frightened all the time.
Use humor or lust or exasperation or anger or joy to
change the type of tension for her and for the
reader. Take the reader up and down and then up
again. Readers like ups and downs, not a flat line of
no emotion, of zero affect. Keep the reader engaged
by making her feel. Stir up your readers.

Tap into emotions to give your readers a read that

satisfies on all levels.