The Five Elements Needed to Master Emotional Writing
I cry at movies.
There.
I said it.
Though I try to hide it when it happens, literal tears flow from my eyes every time I watch movies like:
The Green Mile.
Shawshank Redemption.
The Mist (Ugh. That ending).
Can you relate?
Do you cry at movies? Or have your tears ever dripped onto the page while reading a book?
Then you know all about emotional writing.
Learning this skill gives you immense power.
You will have literal control over your readers’ feelings.
The good news is that this kind of mastery doesn’t take years of study.
You only need five important skills.
And you know what? You may already possess them.
Let’s find out and dig into the five skills you need to learn to be a masterfully emotional writer.
First, a disclaimer:
Emotional writing can not only make your readerse feel a certain way, but you can influence how they think and what they believe in. You must promise to use your newfound powers for good.
Agreed? Good.
With that out of the way, let’s get started on the emotional writing tutorial you won’t want to miss.
Emotional writing can make your audience cackle, cringe, or cry like a baby.
What is Emotional Writing, Exactly?
Have you ever told a story that made someone else swipe their eyes with a tissue?
Did you ever tell a joke so funny it made someone double over and fall out of their chair?
Has recounting an embarrassing moment ever caused anyone to cringe so hard they showed all their teeth?
If you said yes to any of these examples, you already know the basics of emotional writing.
You’re already skilled in the art of using words and phrases to elicit a specific biological response.
You have what it takes to craft sentences and paragraphs that resonate.
By mastering five simple elements, you can make people:
Mourn the deaths of characters they’ve never met.
Cry with happiness at a reunion of two people that don’t exist in real life.
And cringe with embarrassment from a situation that happens to someone else entirely.
If you want these kinds of reactions from your loyal readers, here are the five elements to add to your writer’s toolbox.
Five Elements to Master for Emotional Writing
Empathy
Everyone’s heard the saying, “Step into another person’s shoes.”
This adage means to see and experience life through the eyes of someone other than yourself.
To be an emotional writer, you need to make your audience feel what it’s like to:
Be a slave in America in the early 1800s.
Yearn for a love that is denied because of family differences.
Watch loved ones die as the world suffers from an extinction-event plague.
But not only feel. They should also be able to see, smell, taste, and hear like those individuals as well.
As you can probably determine, emotional writing revolves around characters.
By introducing characters, you want your characters to get them.
Understand them.
And really feel what they’re feeling.
Another word for this is empathy.
To make your audience feel empathy for the characters you create, you must make them real in your readers’ minds.
Give them a background, friends, acquaintances, hobbies, likes, and dislikes.
Give your readers a reason to care.
Once you have that, you have the first building blocks to writing emotionally.
For instance, in the book The Road by Cormac McCarthy, a father and son are walking along the road in an apocalyptic wasteland.
That sentence alone does not make your readers care.
What does is knowing that the boy’s mother killed herself following the atomic blast.
Now the father is all alone, raising his boy while they both struggle for survival in a world largely devoid of life.
Now aren’t you more riveted in knowing more about this father and the boy he must protect?
That’s empathy, and you’ve just seen the power of emotional writing.
Observation
The more relevant details you add to your writing, the more empathy you will foster in your readers for your characters.
The best emotional writers can identify details from their characters’ lives that put readers directly in the story.
For example, one of the saddest books I’ve ever read is Flowers for Algernon.
A mentally challenged man undergoes a surgery that turns him into a supergenius, which isn’t the bed of roses it portends to be.
In one particular scene, Charlie - the main character - works at a bakery. He has flour on his clothes, he takes naps on the stacks of flour to read his favorite comic books, and his co-workers try unsuccessfully to teach him how to make rolls before he has the surgery.
All of these details paint the perfect picture and help us get engrossed in the story.
Being observant is one of the most important aspects of being a good writer.
It also happens to be an important building block to being an emotional writer.
Intuition
To be an effective emotional writer, you have to be able to predict what might occur.
More specifically, you must be able to foretell situations that will elicit the highest emotional response.
For sad writing, you’ll want to envision the worst case scenario.
For instance, a sister crying at her only other sister’s deathbed is sad.
But imagine if every time the sisters saw one another, they linked pinky fingers and both said simultaneously, “I’m here for you.”
Only this time, the healthy sister is the only one who can say their catch phrase.
The other sister mumbles on her death bed, because she’s too overtaken with morphine for the pain to properly respond.
Her pinky finger isn’t strong enough to hold her sister’s grip.
The dying sister can only nod before her hand falls and her slowing heart stops.
Isn’t that a much more heart-wrenching scene than, “A sister watches her only other sibling die?”
You started out with two healthy sisters and you went to the worst case possible by using intuition, a key building block of emotional writing.
Curiosity
Emotional writing requires you to think like a kid again.
Be as curious about your subject matter and characters as you can possibly be.
Stretch your mind to put them in scenarios and situations that bring about the very responses you’re trying to deliver from readers.
For humorous content, don’t be afraid to be off-the-wall.
For horror content, don’t be scared to get weird, gory, or downright disturbing.
When it comes to curiosity and emotional writing, there are no dumb ideas.
Intent
Emotions are not extracted from readers by accident.
You can’t accidentally make someone cry. You either do or you don’t.
The lesson is to be purposeful with your emotional writing.
Hone in on the feelings you want to elicit and really let your reader have it.
Really do your worst.
Like a medieval torturer choosing the right tools of the trade, choose the one that digs the deepest.
Choose the scenario that makes your readers squirm on the edge of their seat.
Pick the joke that makes them snort with laughter.
And describe the monster until they are forced to sleep with the lights on for the next few months.
Do all that, and your writing will improve.
And your audience will emote just like you expect.
Your Ideal Reader Wants to Feel Deeply
One more thing.
All of this talk about making your readers feel a certain way may sound like emotional manipulation.
Well, it is. Sort of.
As long as you are using your newfound skills of emotional writing for good, you have nothing to worry about.
You’re not manipulating people to do anything bad. You’re merely getting them to feel.
And guess what? Audiences want that!
Readers are so enmeshed in the mundanity of their lives that they want to laugh, cry, cringe, and shiver.
Emotional writing makes readers feel better.
Let’s call it catharsis through art, which is one of the most amazing aspects of being human.
The fact that we can feel true emotions through story, imagined or real, is a testament to how sensitive we are as beings, and how similar we truly are.
Now take your new writing skills and really let your reader have it.
I want to hear from you.
Drop a comment and tell me what emotion you’re going to target next.
I also want to know what story made you feel something unforgettable.
