Emotion: Bridging the Gap Between Your Character and Your Reader

For the last couple of weeks, I’ve been doing prep work to try my hand at a novel. Although I don’t normally write either fiction or for an adult audience, this time I’m going to be writing a cozy mystery.

The first task has been to develop my main character – Clara Cunningham works in a small museum and sings in her church choir. I’ve put a lot of effort into making her unique but then I started to worry. Will my readers identify with her? After all, not everyone works in a museum, wears period clothing or sings in a church choir. How am I going to bridge the gap between Clara and my reader?

Thank goodness for my book club. This month’s book is The Lying Game by Ruth Ware. Ware has shown me how to forge a connection between the reader and the characters even though our circumstances differ greatly.

In The Lying Game, four teen girls meet at boarding school and play a game where successfully lying to someone outside of the group earns you points. They form a tight clique and then one girl’s father turns up dead. They think it is a drug overdose and for various reasons decide it will be best to hide the body. Fifteen years later, the bones are discovered. I don’t know about you, but I never helped three classmates hide a body. Nope. It never even came up in our little group of nerdy girls, but I still managed to identify with the characters.

Ware accomplishes this by giving the characters emotions and situations that are real to me because I’ve experienced them. Consider Isa, the POV character. She’s the mother of an infant and worries that she will lose her child if what they did as teens is discovered. Many of us who are mothers can identify with this powerful connection. Even if you don’t have this connection, she is outraged when she is accused of something she didn’t do. Ironic though it may seem coming from someone who helped hide a body, that’s a rage we’ve all felt and it helped draw the connection tighter.

Isa’s roommate at school was Fatima. Although it wasn’t the case in high school, she now wears a hijab and prays five times a day. Not Muslim, I can still identify with Fatima’s annoyance at her old friends when they all jump to the conclusion that becoming outwardly religious was forced on her by her husband. Any woman who has ever had to defend her mate to her friends will understand Fatima’s frustration.

Fear of losing a home. Fear of losing a career. Anxiety when wrestling with whether or not to betray a trust when either choice will harm someone. Layer by layer, familiar emotion by familiar emotion, Ware builds a bridge between the world of her women readers and the world of her women characters. Whether your book is a murder mystery, a thriller, or historical fiction, using character emotion can help readers connect with unusual or unfamiliar characters as these characters face challenges unique to their worlds and their situations.

--SueBE

To find out more about Sue Bradford Edwards' writing, visit her blog, One Writer's Journey.  Sue is also the instructor for Writing Nonfiction for Children and Young Adults. The next session begins March 12th, 2018.

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2 comments characterization, connecting with readers, cozy mystery, creating a bridge

Don’t Forget to Build that Bridge

“Don’t send us what we’ve already seen. We want something new. New settings. New situations.  New stories. We want true diversity.” 

Editors, agents and publishers are singing this refrain or something much like it which makes sense.  They want to publish work that is new.  They want to publish work that represents the diversity of readers they hope to reach. They are also coming to recognize that diverse reading leads to greater empathy.  If you have seen Grace Lin’s Ted Talk on this subject, it is well worth the time. 

Duchess Harris and I are working on our second book together. Our first book was Black Lives Matter.  Our second is African-American women at NASA. Yet again, we are discovering how tough it is to write diversely. It isn’t the partnership that’s difficult although that can be challenging. 

What we are rediscovering is the need to build bridges for our readers.  It doesn’t matter if this reader is your agent, your editor or the person you hope will curl up with your book, if the subject matter is new to them, they will need a bridge. They will need a way to cross from what is familiar to what is not. 

In our case, we have to build a bridge between the dominant culture and the realities of racism and civil rights. Although we are familiar with the topic and often discuss race, we live in a society that has long sidestepped race. We can’t just plunk our subject down in front of someone and expect them to read long with us. It just feels too foreign, too extreme. To get them from where they are to where we want them to be, we build a bridge of facts, laying these details out one beside the other like the stones in a bridge.

But this problem isn’t ours alone. One author I know had written about both her native West Indies and her current Midwestern home.  In both cases, she was questioned by her coastal editors about details in her stories.  “Surely people don’t live like this?” “I’ve never seen a town with an empty street corner?” “Is the New Madrid fault a real thing?” She too had to build a bridge using sensory details and facts drawn from her own experience. It was the only way to make her settings real and accessible to big city readers who were more accustomed to skyscrapers than gravel roads.

Whether your story is set among the Ancient Maya, a futuristic Wild West culture or a fantasy world of elves and magic, you will need to create a bridge for your reader.  Lead them step by step, fact by fact, detail by detail, from the world that they know to the world of your story. No matter how much they want the experience, they need the bridge to get there.

--SueBE

Sue is the instructor for our course, Writing Nonfiction for Children and Young Adults. The next session begins on June 6, 2016.

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Leave a Comment creating a bridge, diversity, fiction, nonfiction

Pull Your Reader into Someplace Real

Whether you are writing historic fiction or science fiction, pulling your reader into the world of your story boils down to creating a world and story that feel real to your reader.  Succeed at creating this reality and the reader will fall into your story.  Fail and the reader might not make it to page 5. 

Here are four things that you can do to create the sense of reality your reader needs.

Details make the setting.  The first step in making your world real to the reader is to create a world they can sense.  It isn’t enough for them to see it.  As much as possible it has to engage all senses (sight, sound, smell, taste, hearing, touch, and motion). This means that each manuscript page needs to include details that involve at least three of senses. That’s sounds like a lot but it is doable when you learn to take your descriptions beyond the obvious.  We know snow is cold, but how does it sound? How does summer heat smell? Choose things your character would notice and weave them into the story.

Make the culture real. This is vital for any story, historic, contemporary or science fiction, that takes place outside of the world of your reader. In book club, we read Daniel Woodrell’s Winter’s Bone, set in the poverty rich hollows of the Missouri Ozarks in 2006.  These people, the majority of whom cook meth, police their own based on a complicated set of rules and morays.  In spite of the differences between this world and our own, Woodrell made the culture make sense even if it was still horrifying.

Common Goals make for a Common Experience. Another way for your reader to identify with the story is to give your character a goal the reader will recognize. It could be to see history made or to do something you’ve been told you will never accomplish (The Race for Paris by Meg Wait Clayton).  Perhaps the character wants nothing more than to clear his name (Storm Front by Jim Butcher).  Giving your character a goal that is familiar to your reader will help pull the reader into the life of the character.

Connect through Character Emotions.  None of us who read Winter’s Bone know that life, but we could connect with it through the main character’s emotions – fear and desperation at the thought of her family losing their home. The same will hold true for your story. Your characters and their lives may be unfamiliar to your reader, but the emotions that they feel are emotions that people have felt in every culture and every time. Use these emotions as another way to help your reader connect.

It doesn’t matter if your story is set one street over from where your reader lives or in the Amazon ca 2027. Pulling your reader in involves helping them connect with your story both through the setting and the characters. Learn to do it and don’t let go.

--SueBE
Sue is the instructor for our course, Writing Nonfiction for Children and Young Adults. The next session begins on June 6, 2016.

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1 comment creating a bridge, hooking the reader, pulling the reader in