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When was the last time you cried in a book? Have you ever cried in a book?
For me, I can’t remember the last time I bawled. Like, properly wept. I think it was the last time I reread Beautiful Ruins by Jess Walter. The scene in question features two older people who haven’t seen each other in a long time, and—without spoilers—it ruined me.
When it comes to screen, don’t get me started on this scene:
Or this one:
How can we play our readers’ hearts like a violin?
What about The Notebook, Up, and Forrest Gump? We all cry in those films, right? Now, what is it about those films that makes us cry? Can we capture the secret sauce of emotion and filter it into our writing? With films, there’s beautiful music, lighting, temporal editing… whereas in books, all we have is words and our readers’ imagination.
I’ve been thinking about this for years and here are some ideas that you can apply to your own writing.
😭 The Glaring Fear
Carrie Soto is Back by Taylor Jenkins Reid offers a perfect example of emotional storytelling. Jenkins Reid wrote Malibu Rising, Daisy Jones and the Six and The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo**.** All great, popular books.
In Carrie Soto, the lead character Carrie Soto is 37 and has decided to return to the world of competitive tennis to defend her world record against a younger player.
Shit, it’s good. I tore through it, digesting the prose as if watching it on a movie screen. The dialogue is simple and succinct, while the scene descriptions are economical. And, surprise surprise, I cried a little bit in the last few chapters.
What Are You Afraid Of?
Without going too much into the book and the plot, Carrie Soto has some emotional hang-ups. Unsurprisingly for a renowned athlete, she has chosen to prioritise fitness over personal relationships. The central relationship in the book is the one between her and her coach, who also happens to be her father (oh damn, I’m getting emotional just remembering it).
Alongside the main plot, Carrie finds her priority of ambition challenged. Stakes are raised, sacrifices are made, and character growth comes aplenty.
The emotional beats that got me were the simple ones. The expected ones. The moments that spoke to universal truths:
We all love our family. We all want love. We all want acceptance. We all want to feel like we’re enough.
Find What’s Most Obvious
To apply this to our own writing, we need to open our hearts a little bit.
Creating emotional impact isn’t about forcing emotion through technical expertise, but about tapping into universal human experiences and allowing authentic feelings to guide your writing. Even writing about this concept now is challenging because I’m attempting to articulate an idea that I can’t fully address using my brain.
Try this.
When you’re writing a confrontation scene, or a scene that deals with high conflict, try your best to turn your head off. Write from instinct rather than intellect, allowing your characters’ authentic fears and vulnerabilities to surface naturally. Forget vocabulary or syntax—just see what your characters say. Once you’ve gone deep into the scene, ask yourself: what is this character afraid of? What Glaring Fear is at the core of this argument?
Chances are, it’ll be a universal fear. I’m afraid you’ll leave me and I’ll be alone. I’m afraid you’ll think I’m weak. I’m afraid society will judge me if they knew my true feelings. I’m afraid I’m not the person I want to be.
In Iron Giant, Hogarth Hughes is scared to lose his new friend, the Iron Giant.
In that Fresh Prince episode, Will is afraid to admit that he still needs his father’s love but will never have it.
In Carrie Soto is Back**…** well, maybe I’ll let you read it.
🐣 Don’t Hurt My Sweet Innocent Baby
This concept cuts deep to our protective natures.
Let’s look at Up, Forrest Gump, and that Iron Giant scene. I often group pieces of art together and search for commonalities between them, and for these three films, it strikes me that all of the people in question who are experiencing a high degree of emotion and vulnerable in some way.
- In Up, Carl is an old man. Like, he has a walking cane and grey hair. He’s also heartbroken from losing Ellie, the love of his life—oh man, if I keep thinking about this I’m gonna tear up.
- Forrest is Forrest Gump is developmentally challenged.
- In Iron Giant, Hugh is a young kid.
There’s a degree of protective instinct at play for me here, I think. And because we have to watch the stories unfold through our screens, we’re unable to help. Watching someone you care about in emotional turmoil and not being able to help is frustrating and painful.
The frustration of helplessness might contribute to deepening our sympathy.
⚖️ Stakes
What does this character have to lose?
If they lost it, just how badly would it mess up their life and ruin their spirit?
For example, if we had a character who entered the Olympics as a pole vaulter and lost terribly, how upset would we be when this happened? It depends on the stakes. If our pole vaulter actually wanted to be a skier in the Winter Olympics, we probably wouldn’t care all that much about them losing the pole vaulting event. But if they had been training their whole life to be a professional pole vaulter, and they had a sick father in hospital whose only chance of survival was a miracle cure that cost the exact amount of money they stood to receive by getting the gold medal… that shit is heartbreaking.
When in doubt, up the stakes.
😪 So, how do we make our readers cry?
Let’s use the above lessons and apply them to some hypothetical stories.
Say you have a character, a tough detective. He or she is probably physically big, might be ex-army, and very rarely shows emotion.
Picture Arnie in… well, anything.
Or Sigourney Weaver in Alien.
Now, how can we make them vulnerable? Ooh, how about we give him… an addiction, like Sherlock Holmes (cocaine)? Or a disability, like Cormoran Strike in the Strike books (amputated leg from war injury)? Or some kind tragic backstory, like Robin Griffin in Top of the Lake (assaulted as a teen) or Veronica Mars in Veronica Mars (dead best friend)?
How about all three? Yeah, let’s give them all three. Now that we have a detective with a disability, tragic backstory and addiction (basically House from House M.D), we need to up the stakes.
Holmes has Watson, and he’s terrified of losing him. Strike has Robin, and is terrified of losing her. Sigourney — in the later Alien films — has a daughter. There’s a commonality here: people. Stakes are often people, or character’s relationships to those people. So let’s give our disabled, emotionally broken, vice-driven detective someone important they’re terrified of losing. Special points if that character happens to be vulnerable in some way too…
A DOG. There we go. Doesn’t always have to be a person. Remember with Will Smith’s character lost his dog in I Am Legend? Or John Wick? Or Marley from Marley and Me?
And lastly, we find our Glaring Fear for our detective. Deep down, what are they afraid of? Being alone? Never healing from their past? Being unloveable due to their addiction? Now we write a scene in which all of this comes to the surface and our detective finally puts their heart on the line and comes clean, either in dialogue or with action and…
Bam, I’m bawling. How about you?
📣 Currently Listening to: Project Hail Mary on Audiobook
While I’m biking to work or walking to a cafe, or when I’m at the gym pumping my guns, I’ve been listening to the ten hour audiobook of Andy Weir’s Project Hail Mary.
It’s narrated by Ray Porter, who does a magnificent job with so many accents (even a New Zealand one—yay!). I’d forgotten how often the book makes me laugh, and I’ve unexpectedly teared up about a dozen times in the first half.
GOODREADS BEST SCIENCE FICTION WINNER 2021