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Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/36635
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/36635
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

Forget the petty everyday annoyances like being stuck in traffic. **What awakens your righteous anger?** What makes your blood boil? Here are some examples.

## Injustice

If I read about a child being bullied or abused, I am going to be angry: angry at the bully, angry at the adults who are allowing this to happen. The child mighdt be angry, but I would actually be angrier if he isn't - if he's instead afraid, sad, or maybe doesn't even realise he's being abused. A possible example is Diana Wynne Jones's _The Lives of Christopher Chant_, where a child is being exploited by his uncle, without even realising, while the mother is busy with social events, and the father is busy avoiding the mother.

Any weak group, not necessarily a child, would elicit the same reaction. A downtrodden populace rising up in arms against an oppressor, a glorious revolution - those kind of stories rely on eliciting anger against the story's "oppressor". Take Robin Hood as an example: in every retelling, Nottingham does something that would make both Robin and the reader/viewer angry.

## Pettiness, self-absorbed characters, negligence

When you knock on every door and nobody listens, when whoever should be in charge cannot get his head out of his rear end, when there were a hundred warnings but nobody lifted a finger, when you need something really important, but the gatekeeper still remembers how you told on him at school years ago. And it's the story's Big Goal at stake! Sounds familiar?

The _Mass Effect_ games play with this: you're trying to save the world, but nobody would help you, because they're too busy with internal politics. But I'd say this setup would actually be more effective if the protagonist is, at least to some extent, helpless against the situation.

## Betrayal

The big one. The reason we don't want to strangle Iago is that Othello is a very old play - we're already familiar with it. But when the MC trusts another character, and the reader trusts that character, a betrayal would elicit a lot of anger. And like with the injustice example, the reader's anger needn't coincide with the MC's: on omniscient narrator can show us the traitor's scheming, and we'd be boiling with anger even while we observe the trusting MC continue to fall further into the traitor's net.

The list goes on.  
You don't need to reinvent the wheel. Open a newspaper. Which stories make you angry? There, you've got your examples. A writer eliciting an anger emotion in the readers. That what he's writing happens to be fact rather than fiction is happenchance.

Original score: 3