Connecting Your Emotions to the Story

 A lot of us write because we have something to say. The themes that we include in our books are often themes we are interested in, issues that affect us directly in our real lives, and problems that we want to solve. Writing is as much an exercise in self-discovery and finding an answer as it is a creative endeavor. 

Storytelling has been a key method to get people to emotionally connect with a message. Think advertising and marketing - those great campaigns that make you feel something are the ones you probably remember best. And for good reason, too! One of the most effective ways of making your readers feel what you feel is to connect your emotions as a writer writing something you feel strongly about to the story that you are writing.

How you do you connect your emotions to the story to send a powerful message to your reader?

There are several ways to do this, and whatever options you choose should ideally work together to pull at the reader’s emotions, at their heartstrings, and make them see what you want them to see. At some point (or several points) in your story, the reader should have a strong emotional reaction to something they are reading. In this Tipsy I’m going to focus on just three ways that you can do this:

1. Use your characters’ stories and arcs.
2. Write what you have experienced.
3. Don’t shy away from the truth.

Let’s look at each of these more in-depth.

1. Use your characters’ stories and arcs. Your characters are you biggest sources of emotion in your story. Whether it’s first person narrative or third, you can find ways to get into your character’s head - to get the reader under their skin - and use them as a vehicle for your message. 

A character who overcomes adversity caused by social inequality, for example, will resonate with most readers. It’s not just because most people around the world have endured inequality in some form or another - it’s also because we like to see the smaller person achieve bigger things. We root for the underdog, not the person who has it all. We follow their plight and understand their story and want them to show everyone why they deserve to get what they want in the end. The end doesn’t have to be brought on by big, universal changes, either - change is slow and small victories are not to be overlooked. Think Hidden Figures, Rocky, Remember the Titans, Erin Brockovich, The Pursuit of Happyness, The Blind Side, I Am Sam, Slumdog Millionaire, Gattaca, and hundreds more.

Or maybe you have a character who is, by all means, an antagonistic, unpleasant person - but throughout your story you redeem them, slowly but surely, and give them opportunity to change into a better person than they were at the beginning. Even here, you have to keep in mind that small steps are better than no steps at all - a character doesn’t have to do a complete 180 in order for the reader to understand that they are turning a new leaf and becoming a better person. Something as small as one act to show that their mind is changing should be enough to let the reader know that this person might not be the bad person they started out as, and that maybe that means that we can learn to forgive them, or perhaps even accept them because they have reformed. Popular characters with redemption arcs that come to mind are The Grinch and Ebenezer Scrooge. One story that does this is American History X, where the main character is a racist neo-Nazi who later reforms after a series of events make him see his faults. Another example of this is Helen Harris from Bridesmaids, who starts off (through the eyes of the main character, as we see her) as this terrible person who is getting in the way of the MC’s friendship and upstaging her at every turn.

Adversely, you can bring your characters to a bitter end in their stories, presenting the reader with a jarring, grim finality that, while unsatisfying, seeks to uncover the realities of the hardships people around the world have gone through. Some examples here could be To Kill a Mockingbird, The Bluest Eye, and to a certain extent, even The Great Gatsby.

And, finally, even if they are an antagonistic character and are not willing to change their ways, a good rule of thumb is to give them some humanity - some reason for being the completely disagreeable and unpleasant person they are. Here you can take the example of Miranda Priestly from The Devil Wears Prada  - we’re given peeks into her private life, which helps us understand her character, and she does something nice for the protagonist at the end of the story, but she is still a person who is portrayed as being generally beyond change. One of my all-time favourite books, Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier, has as its villain a Mrs. Danvers, who continuously sabotages the MC’s desire to be happy with her husband for reasons that shed some light on her character when revealed, though she does not change for the better in the story. She is, in many ways, the quintessential female villain - manipulative and cunning and heartless, or so it would seem. 

In any case, your character should have some kind of arc - and the arc shouldn’t be chosen arbitrarily. What does how your character ends up mean to you? Is it important to you that you show readers the grim reality of the world in which we live, and give your character a “bad” ending? Is it important to you to represent hope with a happy ending, even if it is through small gains? 

2. Write what you have experienced. By now we all know that adage - that you should write what you know - and it can be very, very true. There is a very large rift between experiencing something first-hand and experiencing it second-hand. There is an even greater rift between experiencing something second-hand and not having experienced it at all. 

For example, I can write about the plight of my countrymen throughout history, even if I have not experienced any of the difficulties that they had to go through, mostly because I see the after-effects of those struggles every day (and I experience those after-effects myself). My writing would hold emotion, because I am having an experience, and I am witnessing this - even feeling it to an extent. Still, my writing probably wouldn’t hold the same level of emotion that something written by someone who actually went through it would. Moreover, if someone from the other side of the world were to write about this, not only would they risk losing yet another layer of emotional authenticity, they may also bring to the table a great deal of bias which would take away from their story.

Now, I am not saying that you can’t write about Ancient Egypt if you aren’t Egyptian or an Egyptologist, or that you shouldn’t write about online bullying if you’ve never been bullied online. You can, and if you so desire, then you go right on ahead! What I am saying is that you probably want to make sure that you’ve got the right information - that you’re not making assumptions with the information that you include in your writing - and that you’ve researched your topic deeply.

This is also not to say that your story must be fully dedicated to what you have experienced. Perhaps your experience is transmitted through only part of the story, and the rest of the parts are all topics that you have never experienced yourself. I can write a story about a family of vampires that tries to accustom themselves to the daily life of a normal, quite suburban neighbourhood, and in which the main character is betrayed by a very good friend. Now, the vampire thing and the suburban neighbourhood thing? No personal experience (or, at least, extremely limited experience in one of those). The betrayal? That’s where my experience would come in. So it’s not an all-or-nothing concept! ^^

Some great examples of people writing about what they have experienced can be found throughout the annals of great literature. Leo Tolstoy, who wrote War and Peace and Anna Karenina, wrote about the society and issues of the time in the Russian Empire, which he could see and experience first-hand. JD Salinger wrote about what he experienced as a soldier in WWII - and the results of that experience (PTSD, a general loss of innocence, social isolation and exclusion, depression, etc.) - in stories like A Perfect Day for Bananafish and The Catcher in the Rye. 

Nathan Englander does a great job of explaining the entire idea of “Write What You Know” as an emotional endeavour in this article. Also in that article, check out Ursula K. Le Guin’s advice, because it’s awesome for fantasy and fiction writers! The very essence of fiction, in the end, is that it’s not real, and it doesn’t all have to be some literary masterpiece criticizing some aspect of the world we live in. Sometimes you just want to write something light, and that’s to be encouraged too! 

3. Don’t shy away from the truth. When I was writing my thesis paper for my Bachelor’s, I used a lot of statements that didn’t make my supervisor very happy. Things like “I believe that” or “It may be that” or “I think that” and other such shaky phrases. It wasn’t until he told me to stop waffling about and just state things outright that I started being more assertive with my writing. I didn’t just “believe” that something meant something - it did. You have to be the same with your writing.

There are certain experiences that aren’t very easy to describe. Take your pick of any one of probably thousands of historical examples, and you’ll know what I mean. Genocides, racism, ethnocentrism, colonialism, imperialism, sexism - the truth is, for humans, we’ve been doing extremely inhuman things for a long time. If you’re writing about something like that, you can’t shy away from the truth. You want the reader to understand - to truly understand - what your characters have gone through, and what their descendants are going through, and how that is affecting life today. You want them to not only understand but feel, as much as you can convey, the extremely powerful emotions that are linked to such topics. 

For example, in The Pirates of Sissa, the main conflict is a violent intra-state conflict in which has been raging for decades, mainly fueled by racism and ethnocentrism and discrimination on both sides. There are some extremely disturbing topics broached within this novel, and not a single one of them is something that I’ve made up. These are all things that humans have done to other humans. 

When you force someone to look - to truly see - they cannot turn away from that emotion. Don’t forego the nitty-gritty details just because you’re worried you might make readers uncomfortable. They deserve to know the truth. Hopefully, they’ll see it for what it is and understand the message behind your writing. Of course, that being said, please do keep the age of your intended audience in mind. You don’t want to depict graphic violence if your story is meant for elementary school kids - and perhaps not even for middle school children, either.

Now, this one doesn’t apply to all stories. It’s true that some writing will not be about topics quite as horrifying or difficult to read about as what I’ve mentioned above. There are plenty of stories that really pull at your emotions without having to force you to look at extremely uncomfortable and unpleasant things. Examples include The Catcher in the Rye by JD Salinger and The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald.

Note: This advice is only meant to guide you - none of these are hard and fast rules - and hopefully through your own experimentation and the feedback you obtain from others, you’ll be able to see which emotions were really conveyed in your story and which were not quite as potent as you would have wanted them to be. 

This article was originally posted on my Tumblr blog.