Emotion in Your Story

Episode 12

Emotion in Your Story

Anne Hawley & Rachelle Ramirez

We've got a little audio sample for you of something from Module 5 of our Story Path course on the importance of premise in your  In this episode, we offer a tiny little slice of what's inside Story Path: a discussion of between Rachelle Ramirez and me about the importance of audience emotion and what you can do to help create specific feelings in your audience.

TRANSCRIPT:

(upbeat music) 

ANNE: Well, hello Rachelle. 

RACHELLE: Hey, how are you today? 

ANNE: I am hot, how are you? 

RACHELLE: I am too, we're both in Portland and it's 100 degrees today so-

ANNE: It's about 100 degrees and, not a lot of air conditioning, but we're soldiering on with module six: Audience Emotion. That's what I wanted to talk to you about today. 

I wanted to ask you 'cause I know you have a good story about how audience emotion was helpful to you. The idea that how you want your audience to feel at the end of the story, it seemed like such a no brainer to me, and I don't know why, but for some reason, although I am not the world's most emotional person, I find it really easy to write emotion, to evoke emotion, to know exactly what I want my audience to feel. For you, there was a quite a different story there. So, tell us a little about that. 

There was. What I had been studying, which there weren't very many resources, but when you and I met, I had been really, really trying to figure out, how do I make my audience feel? This was huge for me. 

All I wanna know is I don't even care what my story is about, but I want them to laugh, cry, laugh, cry. I wanted them to go on a roller [coaster]. That was all I wanted to do was this emotional thing. I had been trying to find resources and trying to find resources. In terms of the writing world at that time, we didn't have Lisa Cron, we didn't have a number of the other books that have come out as a result. 

So I was relying on like my background in psychology which, was like trying to reverse engineer the whole thing. Everything that you're taught in psychology to deescalate things and to smooth things out, I was trying to say, okay, well then how would you escalate? How do I make audiences feel? 

I wanted it to be an exciting story. So that's where I went with. I don't know if I was consciously thinking about this, but I know I was evaluating every story for how exciting is this? How can I speed the pace? I mean, I'm not bragging when I say it. I wrote some exciting scenes. They just weren't a story. They were an entirely different story. I had no ability to pay those off. 

Later on, after you had actually read some of the scenes you were like, "Is someone gonna die? Is there gonna be this... are there real stakes of danger here?"

And I was like, "No, this is about emotion, Anne." (laughs) No but...no, and then I started thinking about it because you asked the right questions 'cause you knew what to ask was, I'm setting up a story I can't pay off. That was the big clincher for me was, I gotta backup backtrack. When you said, how do you want your audience to feel at the end of your story, that was the end. That was the end of the beginning where it was like, I've gotta realign this. This is too, I'm trying to tell two stories and pick one and I can pep tell the other one later if I want, but which one's first? That was hard. 

ANNE: You were trying to write, as I recall the scenes where I interpreted that maybe someone was gonna get in some real light regards trouble. Why were you... what was your thinking that you needed that in your story? About a worldview sort of story? 

RACHELLE: Well, first of all, I didn't know I was telling a worldview story. I had read some stories that, looking back on it, worldview and validation were my favorite stories. But, what I wanted to do was tell those stories and I didn't have a name for them, but tell those types of stories with a lot more action, excitement and immediacy. So I was missing my primary story type entirely, trying to fit it into this, YA fast paced. What I thought of as the genre, that it needed to be. I didn't know what type of story I was telling. So, I opened with a scene where the protagonist is saved by the villain. (laughs) That was a great scene. But, (indistinct). But that didn't have anything to do with the story I wanted to tell which was a domestic drama. 

ANNE: I think, when you think about YA audiences, you think, well, it's natural to think, well, they're young, they're early... maybe not as, engaged or developed readers as, an adult audience. Therefore, it must move like this. But, young readers, young adult, well, teenage readers, like emotional stories about heart and romance and struggles and, in its own way, those things are exciting too. 

RACHELLE: Is this one of the things that you suggested early on too was, tell me about those books that you loved back when you started writing this book and go back and look at those, examine those for pacing. What did you love about them? Why did they work so well? And when I went back and looked at them out, it was like, I see why I have again. I see again why I have two stories. I could see how to pull one out and how to push one forward and how to make it work in a way that I could actually pay it off, which meant I could finish the dang book. I wouldn't go back and say of those stories that I loved, that they weren't engaging, intriguing. At times exciting, I wouldn't say that. I don't know what I was thinking, but it was really important to me to hit excitement. 

ANNE: Well, stretching for a larger audience because we see it around us all the time that the biggest hit movies, the biggest popular thrillers and so forth are in that action category with, they have, and it's true, they have the widest market. That doesn't mean that's the story we should be writing. 

ANNE: I mean, I think I saw that I could, write that story, but it simply wasn't the story that I wanted to tell. It wasn't gonna have the emotional impact that I wanted, which in the end, I wanted people to say, I cried three times in that story. I laughed, I cried, it was better than cats. That's what was gonna go on the back of my book. I mean like, I really wanted to take them on an emotional journey and that wasn't gonna happen with an action story. 

ANNE: I had a client for a while who had kind of the opposite problem where he had...he was writing a clearly an action story, very straightforwardly an action story. There was no question in either of our minds about that. But he was drawing inspiration from some things that he had read when he was in that age group. 

He remembered feeling very strongly about those particular books. I don't know exactly what they were. When he was, kind of, working on scenes that he drew the inspiration for from his earlier reading in life. He put in all of these feelings. He said, the character, felt this in the pit of his stomach and went through...I can't quote but, there were feeling words all over the page. He was anxious, he was worried, he was elated. There's nothing inherently wrong with any of that, but there was a lot of it. Instead of showing me what this guy was doing, this boy who's the main character or, through dialogue or action or reactions of the people around him getting those feelings out, he had these words.

So I said, go back to your favorite book from that childhood era and find the book or the chapter that you remember just feeling the most about and go analyze that chapter and come back to me with what you find. So he did. He sent me an email message saying, "Oh my God, there's not a feeling word on the page. It's all in there!" It's all shown rather than told and all of that. He knew he wanted lots of feeling in his action story, the action was great, but he didn't know any other way to evoke feeling except to just write it down on the page. And that doesn't usually work. 

RACHELLE: I have a client that I'm working with, which is, every other client. I mean, this is just super common. Is I wanna get more emotion in there so I'm gonna talk more about the emotion. I'm gonna put you in my characters head more, so you can hear and feel and think her thoughts. You need to understand her thoughts. So what it does, it slows the pace, pulls me out, has me analyzing her feelings rather than feeling my own because, I may or may not feel the same thing she feels when the character feels when certain thing happens. But you are as the writer evoking emotion in me. So if you cut her description of, I'm mad, I'm angry, I'm sad, I'm frustrated and show me, what makes her mad, sad, and frustrated. It goes a lot, a lot farther. But again, I didn't know that this... that didn't make any sense to me before, until...till somebody actually pointed out and said, hey, you wanna evoke feelings and emotions in your readers, stop telling them how your character feels. 

ANNE: There's a huge difference between he was really angry and, he slammed his glass down on the bar. I mean, granted, you can't guarantee that everyone reading that he slammed his glass down on the bar is going to interpret that as anger. But if to you that's an indication of anger, you grew up with someone who slammed glasses down in anger. I mean, that's a very vivid and real advocation of emotion. That may, depending on your reader, result in, they're not, may not be angry. The reader might not be angry even though the character is, but the reader might be frightened or sort of activated by that from past experiences. Or they may just be like, you go get 'em, guy. It depends on the reader, but you are not telling anybody what to feel. You're just evoking what to you as the author is a good image of the feeling. There's a real craft to that. 

RACHELLE: Maybe one of the reasons why this is easier for you is because line by line writing is such a talent of yours. A strength you really seem to understand by having read a lot. The line by line implications of how to show emotion. For you a lot of it is now knowing it really good structure for stories, but the ability to do it line by line. 

ANNE: So any tips for the students of the course? 

RACHELLE: The biggest thing we've talked about is stop labeling those emotions stuff (laughs). Get us out of the head of the character and into the scene. I think one of the great things that you taught in this lesson, was, write the story that you want to read. You have the basics, know the structure, know what you're aiming at, with all the things that we've talked about in this course so far, and then, write something that resonates for you. I think that's really important. If you notice, when we're having our... whenever we are in high emotional states, we're rarely labeling our emotions. If I am, some guy yelling at the supermarket clerk, I'm not, I'm so mad at you. (laughs) Really stop saying. But that's a tough one and it's something worth evaluating every scene for. Am I telling those emotions or am I showing those emotions? Is this the emotion that I want to evoke? 

ANNE: You have no power over what the audience reads or gets. Some writers tend to have more trouble in this area than others. But I believe that in order to evoke emotion on the page and evoke it...invoke it on the page and evoke it from your audience or your reader...you have to be willing to feel it yourself. You can't pretend or hold it at arm's length and say, well I think what a person might feel here is... You gotta kind of go there to find it. It comes, even though it's words on the page, it comes from pretty deep down. 

At least that's where I get it. I think, there's a vulnerability in that that's risky and dangerous and it's kind of the...a bit of the love story arc. Where you have to be vulnerable and show your feelings on the page. (upbeat music) That's a tough call for some people, it's one of the things that's the most challenging, I think, about writing good fiction. (upbeat music)