Raw Emotion: Some Musings

December 13, 2024 by Harvey

In Today’s Journal

* Raw Emotion: Some Musings
* Of Interest
* The Numbers

Raw Emotion: Some Musings

A thought occurred awhile back as I talked with a friend who said the horror of one scene I’d written that evoked such fear that she had to take a day off from reading the story.

I took the reader’s unease as a great compliment, albeit a left-handed one. In this case, I thought it might mean s/he didn’t want to read another book (of mine) in which similar scenes might occur.

Fair enough. (Reader taste.) But it served only to encourage me.

The scene was in a Blackwell Ops novel, but it wasn’t something perpetrated by the POV character. It was something the POV character discovered upon his homecoming that happened TO the character’s family.

It was a spine-tingling scene, but one in which ‘the monster’ never appeared. The reader saw only the results, and s/he saw them through the raw emotions of the POV character.

In today’s Of Interest, psychological suspense master Alfred Hitchcock explains how to do that. I was fortunate to read a similar article by or about him several years ago. Between reading it, pondering it, and practicing it, I learned a ton.

In every book I write regardless of genre, I want the reader to know the main character(s) intimately.

Not as if they live next door or in the neighborhood, but as if they’re part of the family, albeit (in some cases) a part of the family nobody talks about.

As if they sleep in the next bedroom along the hallway. As if, when you hear the floors creak in the middle of the night, you secretly hope it isn’t Barbara or Billy up wandering about.

And if it is, you hope s/he isn’t coming to your room.

Part of that desire to have the reader know the characters intimately is that the story itself touches—or in the case of fear, singes—the raw emotions of the reader.

But the emotion doesn’t necessarily have to be spine-tingling fear.

It might instead be sheer joy. It might be the soft, purring kind of joy a parent experiences and expresses the first time s/he holds a recently arrived newborn infant. The kind of emotion that causes the reader to say “Aw” aloud as s/he’s reading.

Or it might be laughter so raucous that it causes the reader to laugh right along with the character.

Or it might be a gentle sense of wonder or a hard, angry, head-shaking scowl or, as I alluded to earlier, a gut-twisting fear.

Well, not fear really. More of a gut-twisting anxiety. A gut-twisting apprehension.

For days or even weeks after a reader finishes one of my stories, I want him or her still laughing or wondering about something s/he read in one of my books.

Or sleeping with a nightlight.

The point of all this is that what the reader experiences is all on me. It’s on the writer to create that kind of funnybone-jiggling emotion—or sighing and smiling emotion or spine-crinkling emotion—in the reader.

The story is the story, as lived by the character. But what the reader experiences is the story as presented by the writer.

Of course, I also hope my novel causes the reader to want to read my next book. But if something in the book causes the reader to still be thinking about it later, then at least that book was a success.

I heard recently that all writers go through a stage of writing stories that are filled to the brim with thornless roses and butterflies. Stories in which happy endings abound and they’re blissful or even—dare I say it—serene.

I don’t really believe that. Can you imagine Stephen King writing like that? Ever? For one thing, it simply isn’t realistic. It isn’t true to life.

I’m more prone to believe something else I heard recently: All happy endings have consequences.

Even in the earliest days, I don’t think I ever wrote all sweetness and light.

I see psychological suspense everywhere, whether a character is deciding what to make and serve for supper (and why—the why is all-important) to which knife to use to peel the skin off a disloyal lover (and again, why that particular knife?).

When TJ Blackwell whispered in my ear and Blackwell Ops clawed its way out of my psyche, I was blessed. Not since I was deep in writing the Wes Crowley saga had I hoped a story or series would last forever.

Now that hope is centered around Blackwell Ops. I hope I can keep it going. It’s morphed over time, as everything does, but it remains a great concept.

The concept? The elevator pitch? In the Blackwell Ops series, various operatives relate some of their assignments and how and why they carry them out.

As I’ve often said, all good fiction is character-driven. Usually, the story is all about the protagonist and how s/he reacts to the various events that happen as the story unfolds.

The Blackwell Ops stories are not only about the protagonist and how s/he reacts, but also about how the other characters, even the lesser ones in the story, react to each other and to the protagonist. That’s what keeps the series fresh and alive.

And in the case of each character, the story is about not only what the character does or how s/he reacts, but why.

But to focus on just the protagonists for a moment, most of the time, the catalyst for their actions is only a mission assigned by the boss.

But sometimes the catalyst is also personal. Sometimes it smacks of vengeance for something that happened to the character.

Sometimes it’s both an assignment and vengeance.

And sometimes it’s something the boss assigns but the protagonist doesn’t really want to carry out. Yet s/he does anyway. Again the why is of ultimate importance.

Does s/he carry out the assignment because it’s what s/he agreed to do?

Or does s/he take a certain amount of pleasure from doing so?

Hey, say it with me: It takes all kinds.

The purpose of the Blackwell Ops series in particular is to let the operatives tell their different stories. But how they handle the different situations (and why they choose to handle the situation that way) is as important or more so than the situations themselves.

Why? Because again, all good fiction is character-driven. How the operatives handle the assignments and situations (and why) is as revealing about the character as it is about the situation itself.

Then again, writing is an evolution. No matter what I personally want, the characters tell the story they want to tell and reveal of themselves what they want to reveal.

And someday they’ll stop talking to me altogether. I do not look forward to that day. That day might cause me to experience some raw emotions of my own.

Of Interest

Alfred Hitchcock on his film-making secrets You can learn about writing fiction from the very first sentence of this article.

Learning Over Years The Kris & Dean show is live on Teachable now.

Short Short Story Competition The entry fee is $35. The deadline is Dec 16 at midnight. The top prize is $3000.

The 5-Paragraph Hook: Capture Readers Immediately Other than the hook, they don’t necessarily have to be in this order.

The Numbers

The Journal…………………………… 1220

Writing of The Waller Files (a Stern Talbot PI mystery)

Day 1…… 2094 words. To date…… 2094
Day 2…… 4654 words. To date…… 6748
Day 3…… 3594 words. To date…… 10342

Fiction for December………………… 48675
Fiction for 2024………………………. 794775
Nonfiction for December…………….. 14160
Nonfiction for 2024…………………… 376730
2024 consumable words…………….. 1,171,505

Average Fiction WPD (December)…. 4056

2024 Novels to Date…………………….. 18
2024 Novellas to Date…………………… 1
2024 Short Stories to Date……………… 32
Novels (since Oct 19, 2014)…………..… 102
Novellas (since Nov 1, 2015)…………… 10
Short stories (since Apr 15, 2014)……… 269
Short story collections……………………. 29

Disclaimer: Whatever you believe, unreasoning fear and the myths that outlining, revising, and rewriting will make your work better are lies. They will always slow your progress as a writer or stop you cold. I will never teach the myths on this blog.

Writing fiction should never be something that stresses you out. It should be fun. On this blog I teach Writing Into the Dark and adherence to Heinlein’s Rules. Because of WITD and because I endeavor to follow those Rules I am a prolific professional fiction writer. You can be too.