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Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/28049
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/28049
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

The job of the writer is not to convey emotion (or only in a secondary sense that I will come back to in a minute). The writer's job is to create emotion.

A story is fundamentally an experience. You don't push emotions onto the reader during the experience, rather you design the experience to create the emotions, just as experiences in real life create emotions.

If the reader is not feeling the emotion you intended in a particular scene, therefore, chances are that the writing of the current scene is not the culprit, it its that the experience leading up to the scene has not primed the reader to have that emotion when they have that experience.

Think about passing an accident on the highway. You see cars smashed or overturned. You may feel some small twinge of sympathy for the victims, but they are unknown to you and chances are you will have forgotten all about it five minutes down the highway.

But prior experience can completely change your reaction. If you have heard your friend talking about how he is worried about his teenage son who likes to party and who drives too fast, and when you look at the wreck you recognize that the smashed vehicle is the same make and model and color as your friend's car, and you think you recognize a "This Car Climbed Mount Washington" bumper sticker on the trunk, then your reactions are totally different.

But the difference is not in anything you are seeing in one case vs the other. It is all about how your prior experience conditions you to react. It is the same in a story. The emotional response is created by how you set up everything leading to the scene. It is not created by the way the scene itself is written. In fact, the better you have set it up, the less you need to say to get the emotional payoff.

There is, however, one way in which you do need to be able to convey emotion, and that is when the emotions of the characters are actually part of the setup of the emotion for a reader. The nervousness of the groom about to propose is part of the setup for the reader's emotion when the proposal is rejected. We probably don't enter into the nervousness itself to any great extent, but it sets up the emotional payoff of the rejection.

For a perfect illustration of both these points, read the Saki short story, _The Open Window_. [http://www.eastoftheweb.com/short-stories/UBooks/OpeWin.shtml](http://www.eastoftheweb.com/short-stories/UBooks/OpeWin.shtml)

Original score: 7