As writers, we yearn for our readers to feel while reading our words. We want to move them to happiness, sadness, anger, and everything in between. The problem is…
Nothing we write can force anyone feel anything.
As much as we wish we could, all we have to work with is words on a page and we can’t use them to inject our readers with the exact emotions we want them to feel. But we CAN guide them into feeling something akin to the emotions our characters are experiencing.
In The Emotional Art of Fiction by Donald Maass, he explains that “Artful fiction surprises readers with their own emotions.”
I emphasize: Their OWN emotions.
He continues, “Creating big feelings in readers requires laying a foundation on top of which readers build their own towering experience.”
In order to deeply move your readers, you have to guide them into creating feeling for themselves.
Maass suggests that details can do this through “the power of suggestion. Suggestion evokes feelings in readers, drawing them out, rather than pounding them with emotional hammer blows.”
This is tied to the writing technique of ‘showing’ rather than ‘telling’, but the skills of using specific to achieve ‘show’ go deeper than that.
Stating “she desperately studied for two years,” doesn’t make anyone feel anything. We’re just being told that someone else felt something.
Showing “for two years, she studied every hour, of every day, until she’d wake up in the night shaking, shirt soaked with sweat, her head spinning with facts,” is good in that it allows us to feel a character’s embodied emotion: what ‘desperation’ feels like in their specific skin.
Yet, even with that trick of ‘show’, your reader is unlikely to really feel desperate… You have to go an extra level further to guide your readers into creating their OWN sense of desperation to truly achieve the deep emotional journey you’re aiming for.
You can use SPECIFIC details to achieve this.
Let’s look at this example from, The Poppy War by RF Kuang.
In the excerpt below, we find Rin—a war orphan—studying for a test to enter a military academy. The academy is her only way out of an arranged marriage in which she will essentially become a slave. It is life or death stakes for her, but the author can’t just TELL us that and expect us to feel desperate. Instead, Kuang guides us into developing a sense of desperation for ourselves.
Let’s see how she does it 👇
INFODUMP VERSION
Unlike with logic and mathematics, Rin could not reason her way out of Classics. Classics required a knowledge base that most students had been slowly building since they could read. In two years, Rin had to simulate more than five years of constant study.
To that end, she achieved extraordinary feats of rote memorization.
She recited backward while walking along the edges of the old defensive walls that encircled Tikany. She recited at double speed while hopping across posts over the lake. She mumbled to herself in the store, snapping in irritation whenever customers asked for her help. She would not let herself sleep unless she had recited that day’s lessons without error. She woke up chanting classical analects, which terrified Kesegi, who thought she had been possessed by ghosts. And in a way, she had been—she dreamed of ancient poems by long-dead voices and woke up shaking from nightmares where she’d gotten them wrong.
Do you FEEL that desperation!?
Kuang masterfully makes us become desperate through the specific details shared about exactly how Rin studied and the lengths through which she was willing to go to succeed.
Note how Kuang never SAYS Rin is desperate, she SHOWS us the nuance of exactly how desperate Rin was. This is technically an excerpt of exposition — Kuang is summarizing a passage of time, but the way she writes it ‘shows’ so much about who Rin is and how the reader should feel about this two-year jump in the story.
How to do it!
Struggling to dig into / show the emotion of a scene? 👇
Ask yourself: What does the character feel in this moment?
Then ask:
- Given their emotions, what specific details do they notice in the world around them?
- What specific actions do they take that show that emotion?
- What specific memories might their situation call up, and what specific details about those memories can you use to show how they feel about the present moment?
- How can you use these specifics to evoke emotions in your reader?
Specific. Details.
They’re literal magic.
PS—Details were just one of the many, many tools for ‘showing’ that we broke down (with examples!) in our Tenacious Writing masterclass Demystify ‘Show’: What it actually is and how to do it. The recording is now exclusive to Tenacious Writing members, but it’s never too late to join us and get in on the fun! Check out the program here.
xo,
Leave A Comment