Feelings, nothing more than feelings.

One of the hardest things I’ve had to figure out as a writer is how, exactly, do I manage to get a specific emotional response from the reader?  To a certain extent, it’s the core of what this whole game is about, but rarely do you get anyone talking about it directly.  You’ll see a lot of good advice on how to get people to empathize with your characters, construct difficulties around them, motivate them and so on. . . But the last step, getting the reader to buy into a particular emotion during a particular scene,  not easy.

Here’s what I’ve come up with, over the past fifteen years:

I need to be ruthlessly analytical about what affects me emotionally in a story. If something, any narrative, fiction or non, makes me tear up, scares the bejesus out of me, gets my heart racing, I step back and try and identify exactly what caused that reaction in me. Its an extremely subjective technique, and it seems counter-intuitive, since a dry deconstruction of a scene seems the antithesis of emotion. However, it does work. The hardest part it finding stories that have a strong enough effect to make that kind of reflection and analysis worthwhile. But you do find them in the strangest places. For instance, this blog, which I suggest reading from the beginning.