“This seems like an interesting premise, but I didn’t connect with the characters, so I’ve decided to pass.”
–Overworked Agent
Sound familiar?
If you’ve queried agents, traded critiques, or your mom is a hard sell, you’ve probably gotten this kind of feedback on your writing.
What the heck does it mean? You felt connected to your characters all throughout the writing, otherwise you wouldn’t have finished this draft. Why isn’t anyone else connecting with the names on your pages? Why aren’t readers imagining the same inward states which you imagine for your characters?
Here’s a hot take.
Readers experience a character in two stages. 1) The building of an emotional bridge, in which the reader constructs an imagined emotional state based on cues given by the writer; and 2) immediately running a moral evaluation on the person they find there.
When you break character connection into these two stages, it gives you greater control over your craft, allowing you to forge characters that will loom big in the hearts and minds of readers—in precisely the way you wanted.
So let’s dive in. We’ll start with the first stage.
1. Secretly help the reader build an emotional bridge
It’s not enough to talk about a character’s emotions. As readers, we need to feel those emotions ourselves. Which means we need to discover and create those subjective states on our own—not have them handed to us.
Think of it like Inception. Dom Cobb’s reverse psychological heist is so clean, so masterful, the subject “gives the idea to himself.”
The team succeeds in Inception because they connect with Fischer’s deepest emotional need—reconciliation with his father. The “story” which they create, and in which they envelop the victim, isn’t complete without Fischer’s preexisting emotional state. That state is actually part of the raw material which Cobb uses to build the whole.
In the end, Fischer buys it all because the idea feels like his own.
That’s the same reverse-heist which you, as a writer, need to pull on your reader.
Through cues as subtle as Dom Cobb’s lies, you must lead your reader into an emotional state of their own making.
That’s pretty abstract, right? But don’t abandon hope. There’s actually an easy (and thoroughly evil) way to do this.
Don’t couch your character’s opinions with “safe language.” Use propaganda techniques.
Which of these is more compelling?
Ex. 1 – I knew Tom didn’t have any right to shout. Everything was changing, and it was my time.
Ex. 2 – As if Tom had any right to shout at me—this was my show now.
The second one is way more compelling, right?
Sure, it’s more concise, more elegant, but that’s not why it works better. Elegance and concision aren’t enough, on their own, to force the issue of character emotion.
No, Example 2 makes a rhetorical move on you that’s deeper than the surface-level economy of its language. It’s using a recognized propaganda technique called transfer.
The idea here is to bring an idea or concept (in this case, “Tom”) under the shadow of an irresistible emotional micro-story (“as if… had any right to shout”). There’s a caveat, too: this only works if the reader can’t detect the transference.
Side note: Keep these techniques confined to your fiction. They do not make for healthy interpersonal communication! 😊
In fact, this kind of rhetorical move is a favorite technique of manipulators and demagogues. Rather than taking care to be factual, this rhetorical structure bakes its bias right in so you can’t parse fact from fiction.
And that’s exactly where you want your reader—unable to parse fact (“Tom,” who exists in the concrete narrative) and fiction (“as if… had any right to shout”, which is an interpretation existing only in the narrator’s mind).
That leads to a weird revelation: You need to write fiction within fiction.
Obvs, the whole thing is made up. But there are two levels to it. Concrete narrative (the facts of your story), and the POV character’s subjective internal narrative (a potentially non-factual story which they tell themselves about the story you’ve put them in).
That’s the key to secretly building an emotional bridge for your reader and dropping them on the farther shore of their own emotional imagination.
The best part? If you keep your rhetorical moves invisible, the reader won’t realize they’re the victim of your propaganda. Mwahahahaha!
2. Once I’m in their head, what moral judgment do I pass on the character?
We all pride ourselves on being non-judgmental, right? We accept others for who they are, sing kumbaya with them, and generally hold no opinions on anything we read about them on social media.
Heh.
Actually, we all engage in moral judgment every day. This explains the endless dumpster fires on Twitter and Facebook. It explains all the [PERSON]phobias, the despair we feel over #MeToo and MGTOW and all the rest.
We might all disagree on the exact definition of a good moral standard, but we all have one. It’s what we use to evaluate and name the bad guys. And that makes the phenomenon of moral judgment near-universal.
Let’s say you’ve mastered Point 1 above, and you’ve empowered your reader to build that emotional bridge with a character. Well, congratulations: You’re about to get judged. Big time.
Your reader’s moral standard might be different than yours, but you better believe they’ll ram your characters up against that standard and go over the gaps with a magnifying glass.
Feeling squeamish yet? 😊
The key is to know people. Know what’s universal about our many moral standards.
Many far better writers have covered this topic, so I’ll leave that to your further investigation. (Any book on characterization, antagonist vs. protagonist characteristics, etc. can point you in the right direction.) But I’ll leave you with a few questions. How do you want to handle the investment the reader has made in connecting with your character? How do you want the character to be judged?
Here are some things to ask yourself:
- Is the character’s caring side so compelling, I’ll forgive their flaws?
- Is the character’s narcissism on such flagrant display, I can’t peg them as anything but the antagonist?
- Is the character meant to be the hero but actually functioning as the antagonist do to an endless pattern of cowardly choices?
Moving forward
Like what you’re reading? I write SFF and hope to get an agent soon. Join my email newsletter, and I’ll send you updates on publications. I only use it for major news, so you won’t hear from me too often.
Ready to get the newsletter?
NOTE: I also use the pen name Leo Vaughn. Newsletters will probably come from this name.