5 Ways to Evoke Emotion in Your Writing
"No matter what you write,
some people will adore it
and some will want to burn it with fire,
which is hard,
but both are better than "meh"."
~ Victoria Schwab
I write to evoke emotion. Some love it. Others hate it. It's the lukewarm readers that bug me. Not personally, mind you, but their lack of passion one way or another makes me wonder where and how I failed at my task.
So, how exactly does a writer avoid the Meh Factor? Here are a few ideas...
5 Ways to Evoke Emotion in Your Writing
Experiences & Memories
When actors are required to act passionately, they are advised to relate to their own experience and dredge up a memory of a particular event that provoked passionate feelings in them. Guess what writers? You can do the same. Relive a particularly emotional memory and capture those feelings in words.
Setting & Details
Use details to enhance the emotion. Weather is a good one for this. If you're writing a death scene, make it a bleak, gray day outside. Or if it's a creepy scene intended to invoke fear, how about adding in a flashlight and having the batteries go dead? I hate it when that happens.
Voice & Tone
It always gets to me when a hero's voice cracks as he says the heroine's name. Wow. He's got to be super in love with the girl if he gets choked up like that, which in turn makes me feel all warm and fuzzy.
Metaphors & Symbols
Associations or comparisons are a great way to pull a reader into the heat of the moment. Here's an example from the memoir Safekeeping by Abigail Thomas when she's reflecting on the days of yesteryear:
"She wouldn't return to those days. But she can cry over them. As if youth were a limb that had tormented her, and its phantom remains, and she can still feel it aching, and she misses it because it was her own."
Expressions & Gestures
When a character runs his fingers through his hair, I feel his frustration. Slumped shoulders show me defeat. Those are gestures that I do myself so I can totally relate. Facial expressions--tear bright eyes, a deeply-lined grimace--are giveaways of emotion that you can use to really tug at a reader's heart.
Give one or two or all five of these effects a whirl next time you sit down to write. There's enough Meh in the world. Do your part to stamp it out.