Have you ever read a book that was so wonderful that you wished you could commit it all to memory right away?
I felt that way as I read Donald Maass’ The Emotional Craft of Fiction. Not only were the concepts he wrote about fascinating, but his writing is so easy to read. I just flew through the book reading it cover to cover over the course of a weekend—and I’m normally a slow reader!
Maass starts off the book with a revelatory way of thinking about emotion in fiction and then carries this concept on throughout the entire book.
“The most useful question is not how can I get across what characters are going through? The better question is how can I get readers to go on an emotional journey of their own?”
And so, throughout the book Maass teaches the author-reader of his book to do just that—to get their readers to not just experience the emotions of the characters, but to put those emotions in the context of their own lives. When they do, not only will they understand and feel those emotions more acutely, but they’ll remember the book and allow it to truly touch them, possibly even to make a difference in their lives.
Maass goes into a great deal of detail, obviously, but broadly, he touches on Showing, Telling, Setting, Characters, and even on the author themselves. Here are some examples from the book:
Regarding world building: “Creating a world that is emotionally involving for readers means raising questions and concerns about that world.”
Regarding character building: “…what makes any given scene dynamic is not changing story circumstances, but changing characters.”
And in the section on story beginnings, I found this particularly fascinating:
“Readers want an emotional experience. They want to feel something, not about the story but about themselves. … They want to anticipate, guess, think and judge, true, but they also want to emerge from a story feeling competent, like they have been through something.” (ergo, the best beginnings create both intrigue and involvement.)
And later:
“…the first task in building a compelling story world is to create hope. The stronger that hope, and the more that we fear it will not be fulfilled, the greater will be the emotional relief when things finally do come out okay.”
I could go on quoting from this fabulous book, but instead, I simply urge you to go and get a copy, or if you already have one, go back and reread it. I know I’m going to be reading through this again and again.