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Triggering Human Emotions

Posted on by Brenda Poulos

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Alan’s mother died.

Lara walks her daughter, Lucy, to class on the first day of kindergarten.

Sharon and Scott celebrate their 50th wedding anniversary.

Events of our lives trigger human emotions.

They are the stuff stories are made of, and it is up to authors to use the right words, phrases, descriptions so that our readers will experience these events with all of the emotion as if they were right there, encountering them firsthand. 

Authors do this in many different ways:

  1. By providing appropriate settings- Perhaps using darker lighting, wind/rain, eerie sounds in instances of sadness such as death, defeat/loss of some sort, suspense, and so on. Light, sunshine, puffy clouds, a gentle breeze for scenes of romance, birth, success, etc.
  1. By providing appropriate sounds- Such as laughter, wind chimes, birds singing for happier scenes; screams, heavy breathing, howling for more suspenseful ones.
  1. By providing describing appropriate ‘touch’- Gripping, pounding, scraping are more emotionally charged for suspense; soft touch, patting, tender reassurances for more restful scenes.
  1. By using certain colors- Light pastels are more restful; red, orange, black are often used for scenes with more action… tenseness.

5.  Other things that can be varied, depending upon the purpose of a scene are:    smell, facial expression, voice, vocabulary, description of the characters’ bodies (tense shoulders…) Even teeth—and especially eye descriptions—add  add to the overall emotional feelings of each scene.

Emotions are all about the senses, so everything you would feel, see, hear—and the resulting tastes/sounds/smells (and I’m not talking about popcorn) on a movie screen is fair game for authors.

A quickened pulse or heartbeat… a churning stomach…

A good book to get you started toward creating an emotional journey for your reader is:  The Emotion Thesaurus by Angela Ackerman and Becca Puglisi.

 

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Stand-Alones, Series, or Both?

Posted on by Brenda Poulos

8271351214_7c6f31f870I know of a guy who wrote a Letter to the Editor. His writing was so good that he was offered a position with the newspaper writing his own column.

He started out writing a letter and found himself doing something much more than what he originally intended.

I relate to that guy. 

I started out to write “stand-alone” books.

However, readers liked my characters. They wanted to read more. I was soon hoodwinked into writing a second book—and now a third.

I’m not complaining, though. I’m glad people want to read more about Marcus, Simon, and the others.

An author has choices when writing a series. 

First choice: build successive books on the previous ones and simply continue the story. In this case, the reader would need to read from Book 1 through the entire series for the progressive story to be understandable.

Second choice: continue with the original characters in Book 1, but be careful to use epilogues and/or prologues—and effective beginning chapters—to make sure important information from previous book(s) is passed along throughout the series. Essentially, books like these can be read as stand-alones.    

Each book can be devoted to a different character, keeping them in the same setting (Ex. On the farm).

Or, each book in the series can focus on the same main character, but in different settings. (Think Gulliver’s Travels).

Or, change the characters, but keep the ongoing theme. (Stories about near-death experiences or angel sightings…)

The possibilities are probably endless. You just have to find that common thread and begin to weave it throughout your series.

In the series I am writing, currently, each book is based on a childhood game, thus the titles Simon Says, Truth or Dare, Tug of War, and so on.

The commonality isn’t just found in the games, but—more importantly—in  the way they make their life choices, the result of those choices, and how each one affects their future.

Surveys tell us that readers latch onto a series or a particular author and will follow them until they become tired or disappointed.

So, writing a series can be an effective way for an author to gain a following—and keep them following—if you give each book your very best effort.

Then—and only then—will they keep coming back for more.