“Gah! This book gave me all the feels.” We love when a story leaves a lasting impression, and we hope our own writing garners a similar response. Emotions have such a huge influence on our relationships, choices, and habits. And our society is obsessed with learning about the human psyche. Kids are introduced to gender identity and taught emotional awareness at increasingly younger ages.
Great stories have a broad emotional range that sends readers looping through laughter, soaring toward ecstasy, and plummeting into despair. When we open a new book, we hope it’s our ticket to a rollercoaster we’ll never forget. Unfortunately, building this thrill ride as a writer is challenging.
Personality assessments are a hot topic today. But, like everything in life, people’s opinions differ widely. Some treat personality types as the explanation for all human behavior. Others are skeptical for reasons ranging from personal to religious. The truth, as so often happens, falls between those two extremes.
You open a book, and after several pages, you’re not yourself anymore. You’ve become the character. He’s different from you, yet somehow the same. When he remembers someone’s face but not their name, you smile sympathetically—even though your memory has always been sharp. That’s because his foibles seem true to life.
One of our goals at Story Embers is to release series that unpack different resolutions from our manifesto and help writers pursue our vision for Christian fiction. This year, as we discussed which resolution to focus on, empathetic characters rose to the top of our list. Readers need to bond with characters, or they won’t enjoy and be impacted by a story. Accomplishing this as writers involves understanding “readers’ thought processes, emotions, and worldviews so we can connect meaningfully with them in our storytelling, knowing that human nature is repelled by simplistic representations.”
On my first read of The Book Thief, the peerless prose stunned me. I wanted to achieve Zusak’s skill, but I didn’t know how. So I began a nightly experiment to see if any techniques would emerge.
Have you ever come across a saying that jumped inside your mind, made itself at home, and informed your thinking from that day forward? This happened to me several years ago when I read a quote by Neil Gaiman that rephrased G. K. Chesterton’s words from decades earlier. It helped me understand the unique strengths of the fantasy genre.
“Bad books are a myth because the only measuring stick is people’s whims.” I ended my first article in this mini series with that provocative and troubling conclusion. But hopefully you followed my reasoning. Since even literary-minded readers occasionally enjoy “bad” books, how can we make any objective assessments?
We all have books we hate where we can’t fathom how anyone else could enjoy them. And yet scrolling through the reviews of even your least-favorite book on Amazon or Goodreads will inevitably reveal a number of five-star write-ups. Why do readers like these books? And why does this matter to authors?
People often ask me how I manage to be a mother, pastor’s wife, and writer all at once. My answer is that I don’t. I’m human, with only twenty-four hours at my disposal, and I need sleep. Without it, I become a scary zombie mommy!
