Second of three posts recreating workshops you may have missed at Un-Con 2019.
Most agree that the experience of reading a novel ought to be an emotional roller coaster.
Honestly, though, how many novels have actually provided you that experience: breathless highs followed by stomach flopping lows? How many novels have truly left you feeling emotionally wrung out? I’m betting not too many.
What in fiction causes us to feel emotional highs and lows? Characters may be written with immersive emotional intimacy, conveying to us all the inner doubt, bewilderment, bemusement, suspicion, warmth, chill, compassion, irritation, sense of irony or anything at all from the vast menu of available emotions. But is that the same thing as we—readers, I mean—riding an emotional roller coaster? It isn’t.
Emotional impact doesn’t come from the rich portrayal of characters’ emotional lives. It comes from story moments that clobber us, and maybe characters too, with something we don’t expect. Only story events that surprise us, that subvert our beliefs or undermine our presumptions, have the force to produce a sense of change.
An emotional tipping point is a story event which, when it hits, leaves the world of characters and our own world too rocked and reordered. We can’t feel the same. We can’t be the same. Too much is different. A security we may have felt is removed. A certainty in which we believed is false. What was so is no longer so.
Let’s break that down a little further. For a belief to be subverted or a presumption to be undermined, there must, in the first place, be a belief to tear down or a presumption to ruin. In other words, a tipping point is planned. It happens not in what happens, but in how what happens is set up. Our expectations and understandings as readers are emotional dominoes, lined up to be knocked down.
There is also in emotional tipping points a sense of discovery: discovery about things in general, others or self. I thought the world was against me, instead it is for me! I thought you were one way, instead you are another! I thought I knew myself, but I was wrong! A world shaken is actually the same world, just one that previously was hidden, disguised, misapprehended or misleading.
So, what kind of story events and moments are we really talking about? Emotional tipping points can come about in many ways.
- When a protagonist cares but that someone or something is taken away.
- When grinding suspicion turns into trust.
- When unshakeable trust is stabbed in the back by betrayal.
- When unrelenting despair turns to hope.
- When high hope turns to bitter disappointment.
- When stalwart resistance (as in love) gives way to surrender.
- When simmering frustration boils over into catharsis.
- When a puzzling mystery (of any kind) is solved.
- When a belief is suddenly shattered.
- When a spirit is unexpectedly awakened.
That kind of thing. Here are some ideas for setting up emotional tipping points on the macro-scale of your story:
- At the outset, whom or what does your protagonist greatly care about? Later on, take that person or thing away.
- What would your protagonist never give up? What’s the story moment when your protagonist must give that up?
- Who will (or can) betray your protagonist? Work backward to make that someone whom your protagonist implicitly trusts.
- If your protagonist will surrender (as to love), establish good reasons for resistance
- If your protagonist will succeed or win, pile on the inevitability of failure.
- If your protagonist will be disappointed, dashed or defeated, build the step-by-step expectation—even the likelihood—of success.
- If your protagonist will learn to trust, establish iron-clad reasons for suspicion.
- If your protagonist will take action, use every possible means to keep your protagonist helpless.
- If your protagonist will gain hope, provide every possible reason for despair.
- If your protagonist will achieve insight or understanding, create good reasons for ignorance and fear.
- If your protagonist will turn toward virtue, dig your protagonist into justifiable selfishness and self-protection.
- If your protagonist is high-minded, force your protagonist to get down and dirty.
- If your protagonist is one to go and get the job done, force a moment to choose the high road.
- If your protagonist will awaken or come to see anything differently, set up and reinforce earlier that your protagonist firmly believes the opposite.
- If your protagonist will forgive, make the offense unforgivable. Same thing: make the offense unforgivable if your protagonist is the one who needs forgiveness.
- If your protagonist fears death, find someone who will self-sacrifice or die with grace.
As you can see, the emotional tipping point can’t happen unless reader expectations are pushed in the wrong direction. By the way, smaller emotional tipping moments can occur within the context of an individual scene:
- In a scene, is your protagonist winning? What’s the moment when your protagonist realizes he or she will lose?
- In a scene, how does your protagonist realize that something he or she believed isn’t actually true?
- In a scene, how can your protagonist discover that a different character’s feelings, wants or motivation are not as imagined?
- In a scene, plant any of the following: a candid admission, an unexpected confession, sudden honesty, a calling out, an invitation into the club, a sharing of secret knowledge, an unwelcome judgement, an unsought blessing.
- In a scene, what’s something your protagonist doesn’t know about someone else, the situation, or things in general? Reveal it.
As you can see, emotional tipping points depend on surprise and surprise, in turn, depends on your protagonist—and we readers—having an incorrect understanding or expectation. Think of it this way:
When your characters are fooling themselves, your readers are blind. When they are, you’ll be able to shine a light or detonate an emotional explosion.
A roller coaster climbs up but then plunges down; it hurdles in one direction only to swerve in another. It’s loops and spirals leave us dizzy. Roller coasters make us feel inverted and a little sick. Nevertheless, we are exhilarated by the ride. We climb aboard the roller precisely so that we can feel wrung out.
No one reads a novel to float in an ocean lacking hurricanes. Capsize us. Plunge us under water, turning head over heels, emotionally speaking. We won’t drown because in the end, somehow, you’ll bring us up to the surface for air.
What’s an emotional tipping point in your WIP? How will you add another?
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About Donald Maass
Donald Maass is president of the Donald Maass Literary Agency. He has written several highly acclaimed craft books for novelists including The Breakout Novelist, The Fire in Fiction, Writing the Breakout Novel and The Career Novelist.
I knew this was a Donald Maas post the moment I started reading it. Excellent advice. Saved in my folder on my desktop with your other great articles, Donald!
me too! and copied and pasted. Thank you!
Me three!
Saved to the desktop? Well, that’s a compliment! Thanks, and Happy New Year!
Hey Don – You’ve reminded me of one of my earliest lessons regarding the power of the reveal. In book three of my first trilogy, I have a POV character who’s a highborn imperial woman, Serenida. She ends up growing fond of two Gottari siblings who are slave children (Serenida is childless). One of the children is being abused (by Serenida’s brother, an imperial governor), and an older slave helps the two to escape the imperial city.
Serenida is aided/tricked into going after them alone (by someone who does not have her best interests at heart). She ventures into the wild of a mountain pass and is swiftly captured by enraged Skolani scouts (who have a vendetta against her brother). In an early draft, I cut from the moment of her capture to the children, eating with several Gottari in the longhouse. They’re safe and sound. It was a throwaway scene.
Anyway, an early beta-reader, a non-writer friend who is a voracious reader, called me, which was unusual (for her to actually call). She was outraged. She said, at first, she was relieved to learn so quickly that the children were okay. But only for a moment. She said she almost instantly recognized that she’d been robbed of suspense that could’ve gone on for many chapters (and ultimately does, in future versions).
My reader told me that the moment I revealed the children as being safe, she knew Serenida would be safe too. It not only made my entire subplot all-too-predictable, it robbed her of the emotional punch of the moment when Serenida and the children are reunited (after much toil and turmoil for all three of them). She knew it was coming. No punch. Ho-hum.
Now you’ve gotten me thinking that the whole subplot can be leveraged into an even greater emotional tipping point. I can see that Serenida, who’s in denial about a whole mess of things (maternal longing, slavery, imperial righteousness/superiority, etc.) can “find” her true self in the reuniting moment with the children. It could be an even more powerful tipping point moment.
Great lesson to start the new writing year. You’ve provided excellent tools here, as well. Thanks much. Happy New Year!
Happy New Year, Vaughn.
I like the way your thinking and building an emotional tipping point for Serenida. She will reveal herself to herself. Perfect.
One thing I have to look forward to in 2020: more Roycroft to read!
One of my end-of-year fun activities was to clean out my office and organize my files. In doing so, I discovered folder upon folder labeled Maass/Craft, none of which got culled. In fact, it’s all now in one place and it reminds me how much you give us here. Just wanted to say thank you and wish you and your family a wonderful New Year and an amazing next decade.
Funny, I was cleaning out office files too. Writing advice made the cut, much of it from others here at WU.
Have a happy and productive New Year, Susan, always a pleasure to read your comments.
Oh, I love this. I think of a novel as a linear journey where what makes it interesting are the places where it isn’t linear. Tipping points? They’re where the story ties itself in a knot or folds over. The smaller tipping points? When the story goes sideways, a tremor underfoot.
In the first chapter of Riparia’s first novel there is a lot of sideways. She discovers a body where there shouldn’t be one. She’s turned on by the crowd that gathers. She flees, but many in the crowd lose their lives moments later. Guilt ensues. The chapter ends by flipping over when the fears she’d tamped down upon entering the city become real in a back alley. So, yeah, I setup the reader for the tipping point at chapter’s end. Thanks again!
Get emotional set ups. The reveals and realizations that knock them down like dominoes should be awesome to read.
Hi Don, and Happy New Year.
As usual, your post offers valuable guidance grounded in a lifetime of studying how books succeed or fail, this in turn based on a worldly-wise understanding of human psychology. Anyone interested in writing fiction would do well to absorb and learn from your advice.
But I would like to put in a good word for those writers whose books aren’t written for most people. I’m talking about books whose target audience responds to mind as much as to or more than “breakneck highs followed by stomach flopping lows.”
I’m thinking of certain (not all) novels by Jane Smiley, Bruce Wagner, Anne Tyler and Philip Roth, also to Elmore Leonard’s thrillers. These authors have objectives that certainly include emotional elements, but the main goal isn’t really to leave readers wrung out. Surprises, yes, absolutely. No surprise, no story. But IMO, reducing readers to a state of stunned emotional amazement would work against what these writers want to accomplish.
I would add Elizabeth Gilbert to your list of authors whose effect is more on the level of intellectual discovery than emotional surprise. Hey, why don’t you write a post for WU exploring this distinction?
I just might consider it. As for Elizabeth Gilbert, since I see her as a narcissist almost but not quite in the same league with You Know Who, she wouldn’t make the cut.
No spoilers here, but just to say I enjoyed this exercise at Un-Con and, wow, I got some exciting ideas from it: several scenes pushed harder, one scene turned in a different direction, and one enticing bit of backstory that I hadn’t fully realized became clearer and is now fleshed out with a specific function in the plot. Fun stuff!
Fun indeed. Amazing, isn’t it, how when we dig a little deeper, stories surprise us with their hidden potential?
Happy New Year to you, Marcie. Are we going to get to read your awesome manuscript this year?
YES.
Coming from a visual arts background, I love the vivid imagery of your metaphors. Your suggestions would create tension so taut, readers would be forced onto a tightrope from scene to scene. Don’t look down…
Happy New Year, Donald!
I always enjoy your posts. You have a folder of your own in One Note and this one I even printed it out. I’m late to this conversation but, like Barry Knister, I would love to see a post that is less geared to genre fiction. On the Liz Gilbert front – The Signature of All Things was fabulous. Not genre fiction. No rollercoaster but a lovely arc of the life of a woman botanist and failed love. I don’t read too many stories with emotional tipping points. I rarely genre fiction. I did read The Witch Elm (OK) and The Turn of the Key (OK) Emotionally resonating books for me are Legends of the Fall (the story of the same name specifically), or the Goldfinch of which I read the last 50 pages twice a year. Maybe I can include Anna Karenina and Crime & Punishment in the mix. Or a fabulous love story that is quite sad, Angle of Repose which is a favorite of long-standing. I could only get through the first book of Outlander, but I watch it on TV. My goals are stories like James Salter’s All That Is which is my ideal where there might be an inkling of remorse and pale dawning of awareness. The other might be a story like The Underpainter – total narcissist and barely a pale of remorse when he abandons her for the second time. James Salter, Jim Harrison, Julian Barnes, Rachel Cusk, Paul Auster and Virginia Woolf are the authors that inspire me. Will you do an essay on the lesser emotional tipping points – or lack of tipping points.