The Emotional Truth of Fiction

 

Fiction is primarily an emotional exchange.

 Readers stay connected to the hero because they feel the story. Readers want to see the character succeed, or at least want to see what happens next, based on this connection. Because fiction is an emotional exchange, a writer chooses words to create a larger emotional impact. For example, the denotative meaning is the explicit definition as listed in a dictionary. Childhood means the state of being a child. However, the emotional weight, or the expressiveness of language, comes from the connotative meaning. The connotation of the word impacts the tone and themes of the narrative. When Dorothy says "there's no place like home," she is referring to the emotional impact of her family.

Two books I’ve revisited of late takes a deep dive into this relationship to the emotional truth of fiction.

In his book, The Emotional Craft of Fiction (Writer’s Digest Books, 2016, Donald Maass explains that human action is driven by need. “That need is sensed in subtext and revealed through what people say and do,” he states. According to Maass, the dynamics of reader responses are complex. And “the language of emotion…also makes a difference to readers’ experiences. Plot, too, can be understood as a sequence of emotional milestones.”

According to Maass, there are three paths to producing an emotional response in readers. 1. Report what characters are feeling so effectively that reader experiences the emotion. (Tell). 2. Imply the character’s inner state through external action. (Show). 3. Establish an emotional dialogue between author and reader by causing the reader to feel something that a character does not feel themselves. In my own writing, I discover the best emotional responses are often elicited when these three modes are combined.

The second book is The Emotion Thesaurus (2019), by Angela Ackerman and Becca Puglisi. As the authors explain in detail, all novels, no matter the genre, have one thing in common: emotion. “(Emotion) lies at the core of every character’s decision, action, and word…Without emotion, a character’s personal journey is pointless. Stakes cease to exist, The plot line becomes a dry riverbed of meaningless events that no reader will take the time to read.”

The challenge becomes, obviously, dramatizing these emotions in such a way as to allow the reader to experience them wholly. Experiencing a novel means “feeling immersed, rapt, caught up in the spell of the story.”

One can either read a novel, or experience it.

Writing a novel is also an emotional journey, says Maass, “akin to falling in love, living together, hating each other, separating, reconciling, gaining perspective, accepting each other, and finally finding deep and abiding love.”

Here’s the truth of it: Writing is brutal work. It’s time-consuming, and exhausting. It’s wibbly wobbly in the best of times, a paradox that lives in a multiverse, a technical marvel that is bigger on the inside, and a creative force that knows no bounds.

Stories are ancient. So old, so intimately connected with language, some researchers suggest that language was created to express stories, that we are hardwired to think in story. And yet, each story is a new creation, and a new experience. At once, old and new. And every storified experience is a paradox in that it seems absolute in the moment, and yet the writing goes beyond itself, even as it never escapes itself. 

This transcending power of a story lies in the emotional experience that encapsulates the universal human experience.

With a nod to Frank Sinatra:

"Throughout my career, if I have done anything, I have paid attention to every (word)  and every (word)  I (write) - if I respect the (story). If I cannot project this to a (reader), I fail."

--Bobbi Miller