In the last blog, we talked about the emotional arc of a story. In this second part, let’s look at how to track the emotional rhythm of your story and improve to engage your readers.
A story hinges on the inciting incident—the event that pushes a protagonist outside of her status quo and forces her to move in a new direction. The inciting incident presents a choice: to stay and deal with the new circumstances or to move beyond what’s comfortable to go after what the protagonist really wants, facing new challenges along the way. It really isn’t a choice since it wouldn’t be much of a story if the protagonist stayed where she was. Thus, the inciting incident starts the journey.
In Decartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason and the Human Brain, Antonio R. Damásio suggests that no one makes a decision without an inciting emotion. It is our emotions that determine our actions.
Wolfram Schultz, a neuroscientist from Cambridge University, said, “The emotional brain effortlessly figures out what’s going on and how to exploit the situation for maximum gain. Every time you experience a feeling or joy or disappointment, fear or happiness, your neurons are busy rewriting themselves, constructing a theory of what sensory cues provided the emotions.”
In other words, it comes down to emotions. They are what our brain uses to understand input. It’s also how readers understand story.
We react to what the protagonist feels and feel it ourselves. This is why it is so important to pay attention to how you build emotion within the story itself. You are literally guiding your readers’ emotional response to your story.
The emotional journey may change from culture to culture. Not every person will react the same way to author input, but you can establish a rhythm and pattern within the story. This is called the emotional arc.
Think of emotions as a progression. They exist along a continuum that builds and connects certain emotions to others. For example, it would be weird to go from intense anger to flirtation or hilarious laughter to guilt. Those emotions are too dissimilar to easily fit together. However, you can flip from love to hate rather quickly. They share a connection. The trick is to figure out a natural progression for your character’s emotions.
Most people, when not under extreme conditions or experiencing mental breaks, do not rapidly ping pong between emotions; therefore, it doesn’t make sense to have a character swing violently from strong emotion to emotion unless it is vital to that character’s personality.
If you are writing an unstable character or one that is being driven to their limit, you can use rebounding or cycling emotions (emotions that bounce from one extreme to another) to reflect their mental state. However, if you are not writing an unstable character, it is better to manage your emotional arc as closely as your character arc.
A successful story is the one that makes the audience/reader feel. We’re going to talk about the neuroscience of story in an upcoming series, but it is important to understand that our brains are built are not only built for story, but that it will react emotionally to stories.
Emotion is the key.
Ways to Enhance and Manage Emotion in Your Story
What is the primary emotion in your scenes? If you don’t have a predominant emotion in your scene, what are the biggest emotions found in your scene? Pull our your scene cards (if you use them) to make your list. Keep doing this until you have a complete list for your story. This is your emotional arc.
Now examine the emotional arc from beginning to end and ask the following questions:
Speed of Change
How quickly does the emotion change? Does it feel like a natural progression or is it jarring? Are you changing emotions quickly for a specific reason or would it be better to smooth the emotional arc? Adding chaotic emotions can show unease in the protagonist or fear. It could enhance action scenes or show instability. If you have a character who would benefit from that, change up your emotional arc more frequently. But if that is not your intent, your story may be better off with fewer emotional swings.
Progression Scene-to-Scene
Does the progression of emotion from scene to scene make sense? Does it make sense to go from grief to joy? Happiness to revenge? Look at the emotional arc you made above and think about the progression of one emotion to the next. Does it move in an organic way or does it feel forced? Did you miss an emotion that fill in a transition between the scenes to make the story stronger?
Progression Moment-to-Moment
Does the progression feel right? The progression is the way the emotions move from one to the next. It should feel right for the character, not the author. Do these emotions work for where the character is at that moment and where the story is going? Does it match what is happening? Does it lead to the next scene in a natural way? Is it a natural progression of feeling or does it feel chaotic? Is it supposed to feel chaotic?
Story Logic
Is there a logic to the scenes? Are you missing anything that would strengthen the emotional arc? Could you add in a transitional scene to enhance the emotional story? Or could you remove a scene that interrupts the emotional flow of the story?
Diversity of Emotion
Is there a diversity of emotion? Or does the story maintain a similar emotional level throughout? Is this benefiting your story? Would adding in a wider range of emotion help your story? When the emotion stays the same throughout, the audience loses focus. If we use emotion to hook a reader, staying too long on one emotion can lead to losing that audience. Try to find a way to introduce a wider range of emotion to your story. It doesn’t have to be a drastic range, but the overriding emotion of each scene should be at least slightly different than the preceding and following one.
Protagonist’s Emotional Arc
Does your protagonist change emotional from the beginning of the story to the end? In other words, is there an emotional character arc? Does it align with the story character arc?
Visualize the Arc
Pull out your outline (or create one after the fact) and mark the emotions within each scene on your scene cards or plot. This will help you see the emotional arc and will highlight any issues you may be having.
Our brains seek logic and order, but engages through emotion.We judge stories by how they make us feel—make sure your narrative has a natural emotional rhythm that enhances your story and engages your reader. In the end, emotion is how your stories find audiences and are the reason they are remembered.