Want to know how to capture your readers? Writing’s all about emotion – about the author transferring their own emotions to the page, and perhaps creating new emotions in the reader. It can be exhausting. As Hemingway once said, you sit down at the typewriter and bleed.
The funny thing is, it’s true of non-fiction as well as fiction. Non-fiction also takes readers on an emotional journey – at basic level, the satisfaction of having information. But more usually non-fiction involves an argument, a pathway – and it is here that the emotion emerges. As Charles Darwin discovered, way back when.
Actually doing it, of course, is the trick:
1. Capture. The first task is to engage the reader at that emotional level. This is done by hook-lines and promises – the promise of that emotional journey and satisfaction. This doesn’t mean writing advertising slogans, but it does mean calling to the reader at a level other than that of the literal content. Readers are captured not by that literal content, but by the promise of what that content will do for them – how they will feel when reading it.
2. Hold. Next step – deliver on that promise. Keep the reader’s interest. One way to do that is to make small promises of emotional return along the way.
3. Punch. It’s not enough to carry the reader on an emotional journey – it has to be memorable. And the way to deal with that is to deliver a punch. This can be a multiple punch – giving the reader a series of little hitsies through the work, before finally delivering the KO at the end. It can be sharp – think of the way short story writers put a twist into the last sentence. Or it can be paced to suit the work. Think of the last chapter in Hemingway’s Farewell To Arms.
Ultimately the question writers have to ask, as they finish each sentence, is ‘what does this deliver to the reader? How will it make the reader feel?’
Where – in short – is the emotional journey?
Copyright © Matthew Wright 2014
Matthew Wright 
Good points, Matthew. Thanks for sharing
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Happy to share! 🙂
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Great stuff Matthew. I like the idea of promising emotional content. I guess that’s like foreshadowing, perhaps “promised” by using foreshadowing.
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Emotional content is the whole essence of writing. It doesn’t have to be overt – the key is taking the reader on a journey that DOES something for them, even as simple as giving them a laugh or making them thing ‘I never thought of that’. Those stories you publish do that very well… more please!
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Aw, thank you kindly. I’ll keep inventing more to be sure! Thanks for the encouragement. 🙂
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