How can I get my readers in the gut?

As you rightly perceive, the moments that have a potential for gut emotional appeal are well known, but merely creating the moment does not always produce the emotion -- precisely because we all know what the moments are: loss, sacrifice, enlightenment, affirmation, conversion, reunion, acceptance, marriage, etc.

There is nothing esoteric about these moments. They are the fabric of our lives. Our highs and our lows, and the emotions that they provoke, are the milestones of our lives. We expect them to be there in the stories we read, and by and large we understand where they come in a story and why. We see them coming and we are disappointed if they don't turn up when they are supposed to. They are what we expect from a story. They are what we read it for.

The structure of a story does have to lead up to these moments, therefore. In fact, it is these moments that define the structure of the story. But it is not the structure that produces the emotional response. The emotional response comes from our engagement. It comes from how much we believe and how much we care. If we don't believe in the people or the events, there is not emotional response. If we don't care about them, there is no emotional response.

People talk about their favorite characters as if they were real. That is how much they are invested in their stories. I heard once that the reason every character on a soap opera is rich is that if they put poor characters on the shows, the studios are inundated with care packages for them. (I don't know if it is true, but it is certainly plausible.)

When a charity wants you to give money to support poor people in foreign countries, they don't put out ads full of statistics, they put out ads showing individual children. They tell you their stories, how they and their siblings are being raised by their grandmother who is slowly growing blind. Some let you sponsor an individual child and exchange letters with them. It is all about emotional engagement.

The structure of your story will lead your characters to these moments of gut emotional appeal, but whether they pay off depends entirely on how well you have executed your characters and their stories, on how much your readers believe, and how much your readers care. It is not what happens -- it is the same old things happening that we have seen a thousand times, not only in fiction, but in life as well -- it is who it happens to.

Creating characters that people believe in and care about is not something that comes from a formula (much as some people may tell you otherwise). It comes from observation, sympathy, and caring.

posted over 7 years ago

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Mark Baker‭

4371 reputation 12 1104 744 58

TL;DR You need to have a well-developed Character with a well-known set of Skills, who adheres to a certain Moral above all else. The reader must share the same Moral, or they will have no recourse to relate. The Moral must be put to the Ultimate Test, wherein the Character's Skill is shown to be at its Strongest, and Moral is at its Loudest.

Seems to me like all these examples are just a jarring use of slapping you in the face with the 'moral of the story' which has been worked up to all along.

Wallace fought so that his people could have Freedom. Screaming Freedom! at the precipice of ultimate change emotionally reinforces all that we have been working towards. It inspires everyone, giving the notion that 'This is it, this is what we have all been waiting for'

When Jack has been so chivalrous and loving this whole time, and now he finally, willingly, pays the ultimate price for the love of his life, it speaks to the reader. It reinforces all the things we have previously known about Jack, and washes everyone with remorse for Jack's beautiful, frozen soul.

When good-old Samwise Gamgee inspires poor burdned Frodo, even at the Fringes of Middle Earth and on the literal edge of Doom, when all hope seems lost, (I'm getting chills just writing this) he is showing the audience his true colors, which they already knew about him. He is reinforcing our ideas about him, in the best way, by doing what he does best, in the clutch.

"Doing what they do best, when it counts" speaks for all of these scenarios, and many climactic moments, in general. Whether its a wacky group of like-minded people, coming together to take down a larger-than-life opponent using their individual skills (Oceans 11), or a hyperintelligent detective consistently solving the crime (Sherlock Holmes), we get a rush when people use their well-known skills to solve unorthodox or seemingly impossible problems.

It becomes a punch in the gut if misfortune befalls the actor, but they still solve the problem they set out to solve (Jack). If they don't even solve the problem, that's pretty tragic, and if the character is crafted to be well-liked, the effect is more jarring than heart breaking. cough cough song of ice and fire

I'd say LoTR and Braveheart aren't so much gut-punching as heart-wrenching, but they all serve to draw a supreme level of empathy towards the actor. Because they all did what they do best, and their morals shone, to the extreme and in some cases to the end.

EDIT: I'd like to extend a nuance of this recipe, and in doing so give a shoutout to Stephen King's The Dark Tower Series.

Roland is known to love his surrogate son, Jake. Roland is also known to be responsible for Jake's deaths (multiple), in pursuit of his Ultimate Goal. The Betrayal seed as been set... And then Jake dies for the final time.

additional spoilers in link

http://darktower.wikia.com/wiki/Jake's_Eulogy

It's utterly gut-punching, heart-wrenching, mind-quailing (to steal another King phrase) all in one.

I knew I shouldn't have expected anything else, but when it happened, and Roland let his guard down ever so briefly to give us a glimpse into his terrible inner turmoil, and saw Jake off with such love, remorse, loyalty, and compassion, it really tore me up.

It reinforced multiple things, Roland's drive towards the Ultimate Goal above all else, and the very tragic effect this had on his life. The juxtaposition of the two Morals existing at once, (pursuit and love, respectively), and the former consuming the latter, causing terrible grief.

I would wager that the more "layers" of a character you can make as raw as possible in the right moment, the more emotionally impacting the scene will be.

posted over 7 years ago

CC BY-SA 3.0

Bango‭

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The best advice I can give is that your readers won't care about what happens to your characters if you don't. You have to want them to succeed when you write their story or it will come off as generic and with no impact or lasting memory.

I once read a series of books and at the end of the third one, the main male lead was killed off. At the start of the fourth, the author actually apologised to his readers, saying that he knew it was hard to read and admitted it was even harder to write and promised there was a good reason behind it. Having read the rest of the books, I now know it was the right thing to do but it has stuck with me all this time after.

Years of watching (and reading) mean we want the hero to succeed, we want the couple in love to make it, we want good to triumph over evil but these in themselves aren't enough to make it a GEA as you call it.

The viewer / reader has to have time to get emotionally involved in the characters in these events taking place and it makes the GEA that much more powerful to watch.

This doesn't mean you have to leave them until the end of the book, just to have enough groundwork to make any event have a potential to be a GEA. I myself killed the girlfriend of my male lead in the first chapter but the entire chapter was setting up them getting ready for a date, he was going to propose etc. before they got attacked and she was killed.

posted over 7 years ago

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Stephen‭

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