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. [Read more…]

First of three posts recreating workshops you may have missed at Un-Con 2019. Planning this year’s Un-Con, Therese asked me to address the issue of career crashes and stalls.  Every fiction writer has hit a snag or feels stuck.  Pretty much every published fiction writer will at some point face a career crash: writing gone […]

By now, it’s pretty obvious that the days when the fiction shelves were dominated by straight white males are long, long over.  Women authors may feel that reviewers review them differently, or literary awards are unfairly distributed, but there’s no question that women authors are more than holding their own in sales in every bookstore […]