Hey all, Sam here.
Welcome back to another bookish deep dive for Weekend Writer. So, if you’ve been paying attention, I was supposed to spend this month finishing up my deep dive into The Emotional Craft of Writing by Donald Maass…but I just wasn’t connecting to the book and it just wasn’t working for me. So I have abandoned that deep dive and started a new book. I actually read the first couple chapters like two weeks ago, and I am finding this book to be better for me.
And NaNoWriMo started making the updates to their site for the 2023 session of NaNoWriMo–specifically the updating of regions and Municipal Liaisons for those regions…so I can officially announce that I am one of the co-MLs for the Iowa::Elsewhere Region. So I’ve obviously started the prep work for all of that, even though NaNo isn’t until November.
I’m definitely feeling that desire to write, which is pretty awesome…so let’s dive into some information about the craft of creative writing!
Craft an Emotionally Charged Story That Will Resonate with Readers
Emotional impact shouldn’t be dropped into your novel as an afterthought or forced upon your story with a pair of pliers and an iron grip. It should be carefully sewn into the fabric of the story to create tension-filled moments that will keep readers turning pages. In Writing with Emotion, Tension, & Conflict, you’ll learn how to layer emotional moments and deep connections to create a tapestry filled with conflict, pathos, and genuine feeling.
• Create emotional depth, conflict, and tension in your novel by carefully crafting your plot, characters, setting, word choice, and more.
• Learn what makes readers “tick”—and what will elicit the strongest emotional responses.
• Write believable, emotional scenes and dialogue—and trim away the sappiness.When writing a novel, your ultimate goal is to make readers smile, weep, rage, and laugh right along with your characters. Writing with Emotion, Tension, & Conflict will show you how to evoke a multitude of feelings in your readers—and keep them coming back for more.
Introduction
From the very beginning this book felt less dry to me, and I was drawn into it a lot faster. I even found that I was grabbing sticky notes to mark passages I wanted to highlight for the purposes of this blog post.
Probably the most important concept I’ve taken away from any book on writing is from Dwight V Swain’s Techniques of the Selling Writer: A story is feelings. In order for a reader to connect with a story, he must feel that he has a stake in the character’s plight and must care about the outcome. If you can create an emotional connection, you can hold your reader’s attention. You can prompt him to read on and even to buy your next book.
Page 1
Now let’s just ignore the use of gendered pronouns when the singular gender neutral term they/their exists. The book she’s referencing is from 1982…and you know, female readers and writers weren’t a thing back then. Just kidding. Obviously we know that there were readers of all genders even back then, but it was a societal thing to generalize as he/him/his.
I do have to agree though, that I tend to be drawn into a book more and remember it better if I have some sort of emotional connection to the characters. Emotion is powerful and important.So
So how do we create that emotional connection? How do we write those emotional and impactful scenes in our own writing?
How do you master all the various techniques and learn what works and what doesn’t? By writing stories. A lot of them. By being willing to be wrong. By dancing naked on the table.
Page 3
The simple and difficult answer to most things is that we need to write. We learn how to harness our craft better by actually doing it. Writing theory only gets us so far. But writing ourselves into corners and encountering road blocks of plot and characterization is the best way to learn how to get out of those situations …or to avoid writing our way into them in future.
We need to share our stories in such a way that they resonate with readers.
Page 5
Obviously we’re all readers. We love stories and characters and plotting…so we know what we want to see in books. That should give us an idea of what to do for our own projects. Write what we would enjoy, what we want to see in stories. If we succeed on the feels then we can polish up the rest, right?
Feeling tells you what to say. Technique gives you the tools with which to say it.
Page 5
Being able to connect feeling and technique is the goal, or at least I feel like that is the case. We want our books to be technically good, but we also want our readers to care about the characters and the worlds they live in.
Hopefully this book is one that can help with that. I know that even this introduction gives me hope that this will be a useful writing craft book for me.
Okay, Cheryl St. John does recommend keeping a notebook with you while working through this book, and to actually do the exercises included, and to take notes throughout, which makes sense. If we learn by doing, then actually doing the exercises would be a good idea, and having a notebook at hand would mean being able to do it without any digital distractions that may crop up by trying exercises on our phones or computers.
Treat your notebook with importance. Take the exercises seriously. We learn by doing. We learn by discovering things on our own. I can explain conflict to you, but until you dissect it yourself and understand the internal workings, you won’t have grasped how to set it up in your own stories.
Page 6
Do you have your notebook handy? Let’s jump into Chapter 1!
Part 1: Conflict Makes the Story
Chapter 1: Defining Conflict
St. John begins by saying that she will never say that her way of approaching story is the only way of doing so, or that a technique is the correct way and all others are wrong. I like that, because I sometimes like to mix and match my creative advice to form my own system and method. That’s part of the reason why I pick up and try out so many books on the writing craft.
What I can and will assure you is this: the right way–the most effective way to do anything–is the way that works for you. So while I have learned much on my writing journey, I can only teach you to observe, analyze, and study the effective techniques and offer you tools to test for yourself.
Page 9
The way the information is presented, even in these early pages, leaves me feeling like it is very approachable, which I really like. I know I’m no expert when it comes to writing technically, but I have been writing my own stories for most of my life.
A true sign of maturity is a writer who can look at his or her own work objectively and who has a desire to grow and stretch.
Page 10
Yeah, so I know I definitely can look back on my older writing and pick out elements I still do like, while also pointing out places where I could write it better and more effectively. That is a step forward in terms of writing maturity, right? I don’t think that my writing is just wonderful as written. I can see where there are aspects I like, but I can definitely also see those weak places where I still need to work on improving myself and my own craft.
But this book is specifically about emotion and conflict and tension, so we should probably focus on that now
So…what is conflict? According to St. John on page 11, “Conflict is anything that hinders your character’s effort to get what she wants. Conflict is another person or a group of people stopping your character from reaching her goal. It might also be an inhibiting and possibly fatal situation, like terrifying weather or an asteroid hurtling toward Earth.”
Conflict is brought to life by the character’s motivation and reactions. What constitutes conflict for one person may be taken in stride or even considered an ideal situation for the next person.
Page 12
Okay, so conflict can be a bunch of different things, and clearly it changes based on the characters and what they want or need or desire. It is also relative, much like with emotion or tension or pain…what hurts one person might be something to simply shrug off by another person.
When we first start writing, many of us have difficulty giving our characters sufficient conflict. It’s our nature to love them, nurture them, fix things for them–it’s rather like they’re our beloved children. But we can’t fix these story people if they aren’t broken. They can’t grow if they don’t have room to improve. It’s your job to unfold the plot in such a way that your story people are forced to earn their happy ending. In order for the reader to root for them, your protagonists must deserve their happily ever afters.
Page 13
I know this was something I struggled with as a newbie writer. My characters were my babies and I felt bad putting them in tough positions or hurting them. Now, I feel bad but I still do it, because I know if I push them to their limits then I will actually be rewarded with more pushback and growth.
Put your characters into a situation where conflicts are inevitable.
“Conflict must be an intolerable state of affairs; it must be derived from problems or situations that your characters cannot ignore or explain away,” says St. John on page 15. She also mentions the tendency to use incidents to show frustration or to flesh out the story to makes it seem realistic, but even though they are useful, they don’t actually complicate the situation or make it worse, and therefore aren’t really examples of conflict.
Conflict also isn’t merely anger or bickering. “This is probably one of the most widely misunderstood elements and one I see repeatedly in the stories of beginning writers. Beginning romance writers often write page after page of characters arguing and getting ticked off at each other. Getting mad and yelling at another character without reasonable, believable motivation only makes that character childish or just plain mean. This type of behavior is acceptable for antagonists because it characterizes them, but your protagonists must have more depth,” says St. John on page 16.
Misunderstandings are fine and many of the novels we read start out that way, but misinterpretations between adults are easily discussed and cleared up. A story must have conflict beyond the initial misunderstanding, or that misunderstanding must be the catalyst for something more significant.
Page 17
We circle back around to an earlier statement when St. John says “Feelings must be part of every effective conflict. Why? Because a story is feelings.” This happens on Page 18, and then some time is spent with examples from media that showcase this point.
I should point out that in the Introduction Cheryl St. John does give us a list of movies she will reference throughout the book, and she recommends rewatching them as they come up in the book, because even if you’ve watched it over and over, you’ll be watching with a different perspective.
We sympathize with characters in conflict, especially if the conflict is of their own making and they’re doing their best to change it. It’s through their reactions to the conflict that we learn who these people are and see what they’re truly made of. When we see them react, we learn something about them.
Page 19
How often are the problems, whether minor or major, in stories a cause of decisions or actions of the character. Honestly that grounds the character more and makes it so they are an active part of their life, instead of just having problems and conflicts just happen to them, instead of the character happening to the plot and action.
Give your characters agency in their own story. Their decisions and actions should have an effect on what happens next or even what happens later in the story.
When starting your story, consider how you want to present your characters: in their normal lives, before all hell breaks loose, or right in the middle of it.
Page 20
The chapter ends with an exercise, asking that when you watch movies or television to try and recognize the difference between conflict and delay in the plot, as well as to try and pinpoint the main character’s goal and write it down in one sentence. Then note down the obstacles that keep them from reaching that goal.
All right, well that is all from me for today. Thank you so much for stopping by, and I’ll be back soon with more geeky content.
Free State of Geek 