How to Evoke Emotion in Your Story
Everyone wants their story to be memorable. But what’s the best way to make something memorable?
The answer is simple: Emotion.
When you feel a powerful emotion while experiencing something, you remember it.
As an example of how to do this right, I’m going to look at one of my favorite stories. Today I’ll be breaking down Little Women.
The classics are always a great place to turn when you begin analyzing stories in an effort to better your own. After all, they’ve stood the test of time.
What more could you strive for?
As with most classics, I could write several posts on this story alone, but we want to keep it a little more manageable.
So today, I’m just looking at how and why this story was so effective at evoking emotions as a result of its character work.
If we’re invested in a character, we sympathize with them.
We feel their emotions right alongside them.
Think about it. It’s not just enough to make a character feel something. Otherwise, every horror movie sporting a terrified teenager would be a timeless classic.
As a writer, it’s your job to draw your reader in by sketching out a character that is (among other things):
Three-dimensional
Easy to understand
Relatable
As a refresher, the characters in Little Women are: Jo - the writer, Meg - the actress, Beth - the pianist, and Amy - the painter. And in the story, we examine the ups and downs over several years in the lives of these four sisters.
Let’s break down these 3 traits within the four sisters.
1 | Three-Dimensional Characters
I talk about the importance of a three-dimensional character to the lifeblood of a story in my post on writing electric chemistry.
This idea is just as applicable here.
The sisters are real women complete with desires, needs, flaws, weaknesses, passions, strengths, and Character Arcs.
We as the reader/viewer get a peek into their hearts, souls, and minds, which makes us more invested. And therefore more likely to feel intense emotions. They make us feel things!
Let’s take a quick look (not comprehensive, but a good overview) at the core four:
Jo:
Desire: to make her own way, to be self-sufficient, to be a writer, to make a mark on the world, to keep things the way they are
Need: to accept change
Flaws: Short-tempered, holds grudges, stubborn
Passions: writing, family
Strengths: loyalty, love, talent
Meg:
Desire: to have a family, to be wealthy and accepted
Need: to appreciate what she already has
Flaws: unsatisfied, insecure, eager to please
Passions: family, acting, enjoying society
Strengths: kind, compassionate, sees the good in people
Beth:
Desire: to keep her family together
Need: to speak up
Flaws: shy, sheltered
Passions: piano, family
Strengths: peacemaker, loving, generous
Amy:
Desire: to be great, to be loved
Need: to love herself
Flaws: spoiled, jealous, insecure
Passions: painting, family
Strengths: bold, courageous, ambitious
We can tell just from a quick overview how well-rounded and fully developed these characters are.
As a result, they jump off the page. They sing from the screen. They are beautifully raw and expansive. And they mesh well together as well as standing strong apart.
2 | Relatable Situations
Next, your characters need to find themselves in situations that are relatable.
This doesn’t mean the situations necessarily need to be believable. Your story can take place in a city beneath the sea and still have relatable characters and scenes.
But to get this right, you need to create three-dimensional characters (above) that are easy to understand (below). See how all three traits must work together? Well, you will.
Your reader will only feel meh about your story if your characters haven’t been fleshed out to represent three-dimensional people and if they’re not experiencing easy-to-understand, relatable emotions.
We don’t need to have lived through the Civil War to understand the March sisters’ love for their father. We didn’t need to paint in Paris to understand Amy’s ambition and longing. And we don’t need to lose a sister to understand their grief.
We’ve felt versions of these emotions in situations within our lives. They’re relatable.
3 | Easy to Understand Emotions
Finally, your characters’ emotions need to be easy to understand.
If you’re struggling to find a foothold in your story, start here. Crafting easy-to-understand characters, situations, and emotions is something Little Women does right.
These characters are not simple, but they are straightforward. In a sense, their emotions are larger than life, while still being complex and relatable.
For example, when Beth is gifted a piano from their elderly neighbor, her gratitude is overwhelming. She radiates it both on the page and on the screen. But we know there is more at play.
This scene is always emotional for me, because while Beth’s feelings are easy to understand (gratitude), we also have the loneliness of an older man, the softness of Beth’s heart, her passions for piano and what music can do, and a million other things at play.
It embodies what Donald Maass calls the 3-level emotion rule. In this simple situation, there are layers of emotions at play - both obvious and not-so-obvious.
It’s a very real moment. Something that can touch the reader because it has spent proper time building up, and because it is easy to understand.
If the story opened with this scene, it would be nice. But it likely would not be memorable.
We needed the background. We needed to get a taste for Beth’s passion and the sweetness with which she carries herself. We needed to see their neighbor’s wound in missing his daughter and having Beth bring a little bit of her familiar joy back into his life. And we needed it all to come together in the most straightforward action: a gift, followed by overwhelming graciousness and gratitude.
Both of which amplified the characters themselves.
How about another example?
When Amy falls through the ice, the scene is moving and memorable because of what was built beforehand. Both Amy and Jo had been fleshed out as three-dimensional characters.
Their flaws played into the climax of the scene because Amy’s spoiled demeanor, jealousy, and insecurity had caused her to burn Jo’s precious manuscript.
And Jo’s stubbornness, short temper, and tendency to hold a grudge had led her to ignore Amy, thus allowing Amy to fall in the ice.
It only evoked real emotion because of the full characters and the complexity of real-world, relatable feelings and scenarios at play.
And because of the magnitude of the emotions the characters experienced. Their fear, regret, humbling, and love was very easy to understand.
In addition to this isolated scene, these three-dimensional characters play well off of one another and build layered complexity.
Jo has a belief that Amy always squeezes out of the difficult parts of life, while Amy believes she has always been second to Jo.
Their personalities clash because they are well developed and because their insecurities are mirrored in one another. It creates conflict (another essential story element) naturally.
The good news is, you don’t have to try and layer in the complexity. If you’re building your characters as three-dimensional, relatable people, that complexity will come naturally.
And when you’ve done that, you want to include scenes where your characters, whether soft-spoken like Beth or loud and short-tempered like Jo, are expressing their emotions clearly and easily.
Little Women houses scene after scene of intense emotion. Jealousy, anger, insecurity, grief, betrayal, love. These emotions are easy to understand.
But they only work to create something timeless and memorable because the characters are three-dimensional and relatable.
If you can nail these pieces—if you can develop your characters into three-dimensional people, create relatable situations, and create easy-to-understand emotions within your characters—you are well on your way to evoking memorable and timeless emotion in your story.
The fastest way to write a strong story is with an effective outline that plots your novel’s beating heart.
In Outline Your Novel, you’ll learn exactly what these beats are, why they matter, and how to outline them effectively to make your story sing.
