Destination: Emotion
It's Throwback Thursday & Haly's gone all the way back to July for this gem about character choices & emotional resonance. Features a callback & link to her short story, "The Bus."
One of the focus areas of this newsletter is the audience journey. As writers, as worldbuilders, if we plan to share our work — and especially if we plan for people to pay for it — then the emotional arc we create for them needs to be focused…on them. This is true whether you’re writing literature, running a game, or scripting a movie.
In this vein, we talk often about how writing is like travel: you cannot get to where you want to go, until you know where you want to go. Sure, you can leave your home with no destination in mind; wander aimlessly this way and that. Maybe you’ll have some fun along the way. Maybe you’ll end up somewhere worthwhile.
But probably not.
As people, we’re much more likely to wander in a circle — around the block, down the street and back, to the park and back. We might even just take a few steps off the porch, look around, decide that this experience wasn’t for us, and go back inside.
Travel requires a destination, a route, and a means of travel. Writing is the same.
“Wait, Haly…. Are you sure you know what you’re saying?”
Yup.
Writing requires a destination. This is your emotional resolution. It requires a route. This is your plot, the stops — or beats — that you hit on the way to your emotional resolution. Finally, writing requires a means of travel. This is your worldbuilding, primarily your main character(s), and their perspective.
Your main character, whoever or whatever that may be, is the quickest and easiest way to forge an emotional bond with your audience.
In my short story, “The Bus,” I very quickly establish that “you” are the main character. Because I want to make an immediate connection and give you a way into the story as “you” the character, I chose to set it on a bus. Most people in the world know what a bus is and have been on one, either as a student, a commuter, a tourist, or a traveler.
These choices give me an instant in with my audience’s emotional state, an immediate way to forge a connection. You care about the main character because I’ve put you in their shoes, and in a familiar circumstance where you can easily picture yourself as “you.”
As the story develops, you continue experiencing it through the MC’s interaction with the passengers on the bus, with the stranger, and with the world after getting off the bus. Each of these progresses the story by progressing the character’s changing experience.
The “you” who exits the bus is certainly not the same “you” who entered the bus, and that’s what gives us the satisfaction of a complete story: the MC came out different. And hopefully, you did, too.
Two things of important note here. First, I chose second person perspective to tell the story. I did this because, with a decades-long background in being a Dungeon Master, I”m familiar and comfortable with the benefits and limitations of the perspective form.
Second, and going hand-in-hand with the first. I made no assumptions or assertions about the reader’s emotional state. I don’t ever tell them how they are feeling, or even how they should feel. However, I use language designed to evoke emotions, designed to guide that emotional journey without ever dictating to the reader what those emotions should be.
As you expand your worldbuilding to support your incredible stories, make sure to keep your destination in mind. Even if you don’t communicate that destination to your audience, it’s important that you know. And, as always don’t build more road than you need to get where you’re going. Leaving yourself room to expand in the future (and especially in editing) will lead to fewer headaches as your story progresses.
Coming This Week:
Feature Friday: Exercises in Genre Blending, getting tropey with it!
Saturday Quick Six: Blended Genre Worldbuilding Prompts
Sunday: Weekly digest
Next week: Rebirth
