If you want to convey a message in writing and want to be read, you cannot avoid the issue of emotions. Emotions, in fact, are the glue that will keep your reader attached to your text from beginning to end. And notice, they don't have to be just good emotions; The bad ones also hook the human being.
You are constantly having emotions; you could say every second of the day. In fact, your automatic emotional reactions to everything that happens are what dictate your actions (usually also automatic). However, we tend to be very disconnected from emotions, which causes continuous blockages and prevents us from processing them properly. So writing and reading is a very effective way to process and release your emotions.
The reader is like a shipwrecked person in the middle of a rough sea who is eager to get on the boat of your emotions so that you can take him with your speech to dry land.
The reader is like a shipwrecked person in the middle of a rough sea who is eager to get on the boat of your emotions so that you can take him with your speech to dry land.
But for that you must first be willing to make that trip, to captain the ship with all your readers on board. You can't let your ship hit an iceberg, you can't throw your crew overboard, you can't turn off the engine or try to go too fast.
Here are some tips for you to manage emotions in your stories:
1. Identify with your character
You may be disconnected or overwhelmed emotionally, and therefore find it difficult to introduce emotions into your stories. But it’s not you who is going to feel them, it's going to be your characters. So you, as a writer, do not have to force yourself to feel what you do not feel (that would lead to blockage), but all you have to do is relax, encourage identification with your protagonist and delegate to him or her. she _ From there, yes, you will feel on safe ground (remember, it is not you) to allow yourself to feel.
In turn, the reader will do the same: he will identify with your character from the beginning, and will release his own emotions through that new shell that you have created for him.
Many times problems in hire a memoir writer come because you try at all costs to preserve yourself, thereby transferring all the blocks you have in your real life to fiction. If you don't give up on yourself (or what you think is you) you will be unable to navigate the emotional storms that you will encounter along the way, and you will wreck the ship and, with it, your readers. However, your characters, precisely because they are not "you", are well equipped for the journey, you can trust them (through identification) to take the emotional helm of your stories.
2. Use the narrative voice well
Another vehicle for emotions is the voice that narrates. In this post you have more information about the narrative voice, but basically you have to keep in mind that the voice, along with the character, are the main hooks for the reader to go beyond the first paragraph of your texts.
The familiarity, the tenderness, the humor with which the narrator treats the protagonist allows you to identify with him and get involved in his conflict.
Let's imagine a possible beginning for a story:
Fermín was a fisherman and had embarked many times. He lived in a poor neighborhood, and every morning he headed to the port to go fishing.
We are given information about the character, but the text lacks emotional nuances, so it does not capture us or invite us to identify with that somewhat robotic fisherman who does nothing but fish every day.
Now, let's look at the authentic first paragraph of the story "A Shirt", by Monardo Frailer:
Fermín Ulna, poor and all—from his poor neighborhood—had already traveled, if not the seven seas, at least two or three. The thing is that his neighborhood was on a slope and between the windows of the houses the clothes were drying on weak halyards that had exchanged the sail for the shirt and the diaper. The thing is that in his neighborhood there was bustle at dawn and the dawns were broken with lanterns. Fermín was a fisherman. He went, every day, to that great cod liver oil factory: to the sea; to that great phosphorus factory.
Here we have a voice that lays out a red carpet for us to invite us to enter the fictional world. He immediately makes us empathize with that fisherman with a first and last name who goes every morning not to just any sea, but to that great cod liver factory, and makes us part of that neighborhood where there is hustle and bustle at dawn and the dawn breaks with lanterns We want to continue reading not so much because of the information that is given to us (which, after all, could be summarized in what I have shown in the first example) but because of how it is given to us. The familiarity, tenderness and humor with which the narrator treats the protagonist allow us to identify with him and get involved in his conflict.
3. Introduce a conflict
And, if the narrative voice is the ship and the character is the captain, the conflict would be the emotional engine of your story. It is not enough to excite the reader, you have to add fuel to the fire to ensure that the energy becomes a transformative and cathartic fire that really manages to free the character, you who write and whoever reads.
In the story by Monardo Frailer whose first paragraph I quote in the previous section, the conflict will be announced to us immediately, in the second paragraph: "But Fermín Ulna, traveler of the unfathomable, of the mysterious, knew nothing about love." And bang, between the voice, the character and the conflict, we are already trapped and surrendered without remission to that great little love story.
The conflict implies an internal struggle in the protagonist, which is what leads him to act, try to resolve it and get what he wants. Fermín Ulna was a fisherman, he liked his job and he was happy in his poor neighborhood full of lanterns and broken dawns, but... something was wrong in his life: he didn't know love and that, somehow, made none of the above make sense. So the reader—already moved—has no choice but to continue reading, because he, like everyone else, has surely had difficulties on the subject of love, and wants to experience, through Fermín, how the hell he is going to know love. true and, above all, what will happen when you find it.
4. Follow a line of action
Because if the narrative voice is the ship, the character is the captain, and the conflict is the emotional engine of the story, the action would be the rudder that will take you and your passengers to a safe harbor.
The conflict sets in motion the action that, in turn, will evolve the conflict until its resolution, in the climax of the story, which would be when the restorative fire occurs that will release all the accumulated emotional energy and produce the transformation in the character., which will never be the same again. Nor you. Nor your readers.
In the case of the story "A shirt", our Fermín sets out through that internal conflict caused by not having known true love, and that takes him to Dover, where he will find Mary, with whom he will have a brief but beautiful love story without words... who will be left behind when he has to return, which will complicate things, because if not having found true love is a conflict, even more so is having found it and lost it. How can you stop reading after having witnessed the scene in which Mary buys Fermín a shirt with the colors of a "The Tiny Tech" in the Moderns Almacenes, where "the saleswomen longed for past refinements and were only waiting to die for them?" "will they pierce the thorn of a rose bush"? It is impossible, we cannot leave Fermín alone with his unfortunate fate, we have to get to the end of all this, unravel the mystery of love and, above all, of absence and loss.
I'm not going to destroy the ending of this beautiful story by Monardo Frailer, so I'll let you read it for yourself here. I just wanted to show you the essential parts that make up the emotional scaffolding of a story, so that you don't forget any of them when you write.
It is very common, when one begins to write, to put oneself as the protagonist and forget about the character, to waste the potential of the narrative voice, to omit the conflict or to get lost in abstract dissertations without things happening or a line of action being visible. All of this affects the emotional waterline, which will lead the reader to become detached from the story and lose interest.
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