Donald Maass is the founder of the Donald Maass Literary Agency. He handles hundreds of manuscripts each year and has sold more than 150 novels per year to major publishers. He’s a literary agent, the kind we look for when querying our novels. He has a lot of experience, he’s written several books on writing, and he knows what sells.
[Note: I may draw on this book for more than this one diary.]
Adding emotion to our writing isn’t a gimmick. It can’t be hacked. The best of emotive writing doesn’t lend itself well to manipulation because the discerning reader will know counterfeit emotion, the difference between pathos and bathos. There are techniques and skills we can employ to rouse feelings in our readers, though, and I’m going to address one of those tonight.
When I talk about adding emotion, sometimes I mean a specific emotion, such as love, or hate, or anger, or greed, or. . . Well, check out that list of seven deadly sins. And then look for the seven heavenly virtues. Both lists are well defined in isolation, like the primary colors of emotion.
But emotions as they manifest inside of humans aren’t discreet. They’re messy. They’re layered. You may be experiencing several at once, and they’re mixed up the way the colors from a set of Play-Doh cans get pushed together. You can see the individual colors but you’ll never get them separated. It’s the same with emotional situations. There can be several feelings going on at once, but they don’t pull apart into isolated emotions. These can be the secondary colors, such as sorrow or joy or regret or dread or contentment, stirred together.
So how do we get our readers to experience “all the feels?” Some people can do it in their writing and some haven’t mastered that skill—yet. But it is a teachable skill.
Very recently, just in the last two weeks, I discovered the Donald Maass book. I’ve only read a small part of it but I used that part to analyze things I’ve read and some of my previous writing to find out just why people get all feel-y when they read certain passages.
Writing out what characters feel ought to be a shortcut to getting readers to feel that stuff, too, shouldn’t it? . . . Actually, the truth is the opposite. . .
Here’s an example: His guts twisted in fear. When you read that, do your own guts twist in fear? Probably not. Or this: Her eyes shot daggers at him. Do you feel simmering rage? Meh. Not so much.
Donald Maass, The Emotional Craft of Fiction
What we want to do is not to have the reader feel exactly what the character is feeling, but to create an emotional response in the reader in reaction to the story, a response unique to each individual reader. You don’t say outright what the emotion is. You dance around it, weaving in and out, taking the reader through the emotional journey along with the characters. Remember that you don’t necessarily have one emotion at a time, but you may have one main, central emotion. Write around that emotion without naming it.
I found, in my writing, that I can sometimes convey to the reader the emotion I’m feeling as I “live” my story. I’m not a natural, but more like I’ve internalized techniques I’ve encountered over more than seven decades of reading some truly great (and some not-so-great, and some downright awful) prose. And poetry—don’t leave that out. There’s some mighty skillful word craft in poetry.
A writer here who writes evocative prose is Clio2, whose writing is often lyrical and mystical. I hope Clio2 will chime in to say how much is conscious effort and how much is writer’s natural voice.
This is managing your writing at the sentence level. At some point you may be able to write this into your first draft, or first pass-through. But many people use the first draft just to get the story down on paper (or in pixels; between arthritis and ME, I can’t write even my signature anymore without pain), the second draft to take care of big idea items and fill in gaps, and then, in a later pass-through, they find the scenes that need an emotional boost. All the reader will care about in the end is the journey you’ve taken them on.
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There are examples given in the book that involve long passages. Really long passages. I’d like us to focus here on sentence-level and small scene-level work, the kind you’ll do at the end of your editing-rewriting, just before you get to grammar and spelling corrections, ready to send out to query, so I’m using my home-grown example.
Last month I wrote a scene in response to the challenge. As with many responses here, it was a true ‘first draft’. I was concerned that, at 447 words, it was too long, certainly longer than requested by most diarists in their challenges. Using previous diaries as a guide, I was able to edit it down to a better word count for a challenge.
I’m going to use that scene, newly shortened, to illustrate what I mean about writing around the emotional event rather than putting it in stark words on the page.
Example A:
“The wine is gone now, Biti,” he said. “It is time.” And he held out the flute.
The young Biti across from the man took the flute, letting her hand linger on his until he pulled it back.
“I am ready to die now,” he said.
Biti began playing her flute, to help him leave his life.
He sighed and allowed himself to slump into the cushions, dying.
There’s some emotion but it’s too flat to be considered well written. I can do better at eliciting feeling.
And now I’m going back to what I originally wrote, where I suggest rather than state the emotional journey.
Example B:
“The wine is gone now, Biti,” he said. “It is time.” And he held out the flute.
The young Biti across from the man took the flute, letting her hand linger on his until he pulled it back.
“I am ready,” he said. “It is time for the ritual.”
He closed his eyes and listened as the first sounds left the bone flute. He sighed as the music brought memories. He saw himself as a young child, dancing to amuse his mother. He remembered his wedding day, the day he first met the woman who gave him children. He remembered holding his children, one after another, on the days they were born. He saw himself, greatly saddened, at the grave that held his wife. And then he saw the angels coming through the golden light, and that was not a memory but a vision.
He slumped into the cushions, ready to follow the angels. It was joyous, flying to the light on the breath of the song.
It was an emotional situation rather than a single emotion, like that Play-Doh reference, and many thanks to strawbale, who brought us the idea of using art (in this case music) to evoke a reaction in the character and in the reader.
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Tonight’s challenge:
1. Write a passage, it doesn’t need to be a complete scene, telling directly about an emotion, as I did with Example A. Less is better so try to stay under 100-150 words. In fact, it can be a single sentence.
2. Rewrite the same passage without naming the emotion or emotional situation you want to evoke but giving the details that stir feeling in the reader.
Finally, be aware of your prose, and don’t take this as permission to go “purple.” Draw emotion out of us, don’t drown us in it.
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A note: Consider before you post something from your WIP. Putting it in a public forum like this will limit your publishing options. A publishing house won’t take work that has even a tiny bit of it already freely available. And it will limit your copyright protections. Although you can still copyright the material, you will have to declare that parts have been previously published, and if it’s plagiarized you can issue a take-down notice but you will not be able to collect punitive monetary damages.
Write On! will be a regular Thursday night diary (8 pm Eastern, 5 pm Pacific) until it isn’t.