How to make readers feel without telling them

1 The bottom line

Make readers feel by giving them the body, the object and the stakes, then stepping back. Announced emotion pushes the reader away, while earned emotion makes them do the feeling themselves.

2 Key takeaways

• Make the reader care, and put something personal at risk, before you ask for a feeling. Emotion needs something to land on.
  • Dean Koontz19:27 made the narrator of The Friend of the Family someone you fall in love with first, so her view of other people could be trusted.
  • Michael Jamin30:16 says even a meteor movie works because a father must make peace with his estranged daughter before the end.
• Show the body and the objects, not the name of the emotion. Feelings start as physical responses, and the reader supplies the theme.
  • R.F. Kuang2:10 had students place a feeling on a body diagram with no abstract words. One student felt joy in her toes.
  • Robert Macfarlane1:13:28 says roughly a hundred readers told him they had to skip ahead at the Paris catacomb passage in Underland.
• Go quiet where the feeling peaks. Words cannot carry the biggest moments, so silence and brevity do it.
  • Jodi Picoult34:36 noticed that Isak Dinesen's gothic fairy tales are adjective-heavy, while her memoirs Out of Africa and Shadows on the Grass are plain.
  • David Baldacci1:25:50 points to Psycho, where we never see the stabbing but know what happened.
• Feel it yourself, but only publish what you have processed. Feeling is contagious, and raw pain on the page is a dump on the reader.
  • Matt Haig41:15 says this holds even for a silly scene with a rude elf in a children's book.
  • Tucker Max32:00 could not reread his raw 2007 journal for eight years because it was so triggering.
• Let a laugh lower the guard, then turn. The contrast lets the hurt land.
  • Jack and Ryan of AJR4:05 model their work on Pixar, which starts as a silly fish movie and ends as a story about a dad learning to trust his kid.
  • When Ryan first showed his girlfriend their music, she laughed at a funny line, then went quiet at the line about wanting to call his dad AJR4:05.

If you don't have to push for the reaction, it simply comes from the condition of the character

Dean Koontz, author of Odd Thomas

2.1 Pick the feeling and the stakes

Decide what the reader should feel, then give them a person to care about and something that person could lose.

• Pick one dominant feeling before you write, and work back from it.
  • Lulu Cheng Meservey4:42 says readers are simple animals. Pick the main feeling, the main message and the one thing you want them to do. Three is the absolute maximum.
  • Shaan Puri45:02 picks the target emotion first, writes the piece, checks whether it creates that reaction, and juices it up if not.
  • Matt Haig20:09 treats a story as a way of carrying an emotion or a thought.
  • People only share things that make them laugh, say WTF, say OMG or go aww. Chris Quigley's agency got viral hits on 8 out of 10 videos by working backwards from an emotion Shaan Puri45:02.
  • Richard Powers28:10 says grasping a fact and shifting a value are not the same thing. Fiction invites identification, which makes people more helpful.
• Make the reader care about the character before you ask for tears.
  • Dean Koontz19:27 says the reader must see the character's world as like their own and think it could happen to them. That is where empathy arises.
  • Bill Browder6:46 builds scenes around emotions readers share, like betrayal, fear or a rival.
  • Men have written to Koontz that it was the first time they cried reading a book Koontz19:27.
  • A lawyer betrayed Browder, the Russian mafia threatened him and he was scared. People connect with those things, and that makes the writing readable Browder6:46.
• Put something personal at risk, and keep it small if you need to.
  • Michael Jamin30:16 asks what happens if the hero does not get what they want. Family and close relationships usually carry the highest stakes.
  • Noah Hawley1:19:59 says the stakes have to be character stakes, not plot stakes. He lost interest in his first novel once he was only paying off a set-up.
  • Steven Pressfield1:03:36 calls end-of-the-world stakes a cheap shot. Establish that one small thing matters enormously, then force a choice at the end.
  • Nat Eliason36:30 says to show something at risk of dying early, in any form: physical, psychological, a loss of identity, or a community falling apart.
  • Shaan Puri's story about cooking Brussels sprouts to prove he was an adult had stakes of embarrassment and ego. The audience only has to believe you felt it Shaan Puri8:37.
  • The film 45 Years ends with a husband reaching for his wife's hand and her pulling away. We learn she realized her marriage was false Pressfield1:03:36.

2.2 Get into the feeling, then write from steadiness

The reader feels what the page carries, so the feeling has to be alive in you and processed enough to control.

• Put yourself into the emotional state of the scene before you draft it.
  • Robert Greene6:04 says a book written without feeling shows its deadness on the page. He worked on his own mood for each chapter.
  • Matt Haig41:15 says what you feel while drafting is what the reader tends to feel. Writing to a quota, such as 1,000 words a day, loses that.
  • Dean Koontz1:30:23 knows a scene works when it makes him laugh out loud or choke up, without twisting the heartstrings.
  • Greene played cosmic composers for the cosmic sublime, ancient Greek music for the pagan sublime and his childhood records for the childhood chapter Greene6:04.
  • Ada Limón45:23 calls writing a trust fall into an emotion. Sometimes you don't fall in, you realize you are already in it, like a grief you've been carrying.
• Write how you felt, not what you thought.
  • Tucker Max44:31 says people avoid emotion by thinking, so push yourself to put down the feeling. The meaning in your life is emotional.
  • Max compares thinking to a spreadsheet of your wine cellar, and feeling to how the wine actually tasted Max44:31.
• When a scene is flat, assume you are holding back.
  • R.F. Kuang19:03 says whenever she is stuck, she is unconsciously scared of pushing the scene to emotional honesty. Her most common comment on student drafts is "what else is going on here?"
  • Her first draft of Alice's turn toward wanting to live in Katabasis came out as flat therapy speak. She switched to the body, dug into her own memories, found hunger, and wrote Alice devouring a dead cat Kuang19:03.
• Wait until painful material is processed.
  • Tucker Max32:00 says unprocessed grief on the page is emotional vomit on the reader. Keep the raw material in a journal, then edit it, because editing is how a wound becomes a scar.
  • Taylor Tomlinson27:15 says audiences know when you are in control of the material and when you are not.
  • Max is writing about his mother's death only now, from a healed place Max32:00.
  • Tomlinson's mom jokes worked only sometimes for years. They got better after a lot of therapy, with barely any change to the wording Tomlinson27:15.
  • Tom Junod36:42 feared The Falling Man would read as cruel. He and a researcher called families of the dead every night, and he wrote it with as much compassion as he could.

2.3 Show the feeling through the body and the objects

Give the reader sensations and things to look at, and let them name the emotion.

• Put the feeling in the body.
  • R.F. Kuang2:10 starts from heart rate, shortness of breath and tingling toes. Words like elation tell the reader nothing, while physical detail tells them something material.
  • Tucker Max1:25:30 has writers describe numb hands, jittering legs, butterflies and sweaty palms. Then add what you see in the room and what odd thoughts or memories pop up.
  • Robert Macfarlane1:13:28 aims at the reader's heartbeat and breathing. Tight, enclosed detail works better than height.
  • Macfarlane describes crawling with his nose pressed to the rock until a train passes overhead. His vertigo passages never got that reaction Macfarlane1:13:28.
  • Kuang also has students combine opposites on an emotions color wheel, such as courage and fear. At her wedding first look she felt joy and terror of loss Kuang6:36.
• Write the furniture of the feeling, never the theme.
  • Rosanne Cash33:10 tells young songwriters to get specific about the window, the door, the coffee cup, the slamming, the clock ticking and the wind that blew through. The reader supplies the theme.
  • Dean Koontz43:02 reads poetry to learn this. A poem seems to be about a glimpse of nature, and later you see it is about death or love without the word.
  • Riva Tez38:52 likens the writing she likes to pointillism, and cites Rilke noticing fine detail in a door, a chair or a flower.
• Set up the inner life once, then show only what people do.
  • Wright Thompson15:05 builds what someone feels, then describes only the exterior action, which lands with the interior weight and needs no explanation.
  • Amor Towles34:48 says hidden backstory must still change the scene's language and tempo, so the reader senses it without understanding it.
  • Robert Greene1:00:15 learned from screenwriting to cut the internal monologue and show the mind through action and dialogue.
  • Michael Jordan falling asleep to Westerns lands because the reader knows he misses his father every day Thompson15:05.
  • Towles gives two versions of one kitchen scene, one with a betrayed mother and one with a mother who has just cheated. The girl would not know either, but the scene reads differently Towles34:48.
  • Greene tells the story of a Renaissance mercenary who saved a city and was beheaded by listing only what he did and what was done to him Greene1:00:15.
• Let the setting, a wordless beat, an animal or silence carry feeling a character could not.
  • Eric Roth47:11 is big on choosing the time of day. For melancholy he puts the scene at dusk or dawn.
  • Yann Martel15:44 used a dog licking a hand to express need and abandonment, briefly and forcefully, without melodrama.
  • David Gelb58:54 calls scenes without words the hardest and best thing to do. Try drafting a scene that conveys the turn with no stated dialogue.
  • Gelb praises the wordless 40 to 50 second listening booth scene in Before Sunrise, where body movement and eye contact say everything Gelb58:54.
  • In Fargo season 3, Noah Hawley1:14:38 left a cop's confession dry and scored only the triumph of the soap dispenser finally working. He says it's often where music doesn't go.

2.4 Go spare and let the reader finish

At the peak, use fewer words, stop a line early and slow the few moments that matter.

• Go spare where emotion peaks.
  • Jodi Picoult34:36 asks herself where language fails and lets silence or brevity do the work there.
  • Ava Huang11:19 says the power comes from the gap between how simple the words are and how intense the feeling is.
  • Michael Arndt47:02 says the deadliest thing in a bad screenplay is feeling contrived. Do not oversell the humor or the emotion.
  • A breakup where someone just says they're leaving is a simple line carrying huge emotion. David Perell offers Nabokov's "you broke my heart, but she merely broke my life" as the same kind of contrast Huang11:19.
  • When Dwayne melts down in Little Miss Sunshine, Arndt realized Olive's best line was none Arndt47:02.
• Stop a line short and trust the reader to finish it.
  • Andrew Sean Greer8:28 saw Colette end Gigi with a man asking for Gigi's hand and an ellipsis. One more word would be too sentimental. The more the reader invents, the more tied to the book they are.
  • Robert Macfarlane1:25:51 does not explain the uncanny. He lets sense and cause drop out so the reader becomes a participant.
  • Greer adds that you must decide how hard you want the reading to be Greer8:28.
  • For a ghostly encounter on a haunted hilltop in England, Macfarlane just reported how he perceived it Macfarlane1:25:51.
• Slow down the few big moments, and skip the rest.
  • David Baldacci1:25:50 says every novel has a small number of scenes where you can go for it. Slow the action so readers feel impact and consequence.
  • Peter Attia28:35 and his co-author stepped back from a painful story to 30,000 feet and hit only the key points.
  • Clint Bentley and Greg Kwedar40:22 treat quiet moments like falling in love with the weight of a heist, without schmaltz.
  • In Unforgiven, Eastwood watches a man bleed to death over five minutes Baldacci1:25:50.
  • Attia's final chapter, once near book length, was cut to about 20% of its draft Attia28:35.

2.5 Turn the tone, cut the push and test

Revise by finding where you pushed, where a turn would hit harder, and whether the page moves you.

• Make them laugh first, then turn it into something that hurts.
  • Taylor Tomlinson29:17 told the crowd early that she was fine before her mom material. Naming the tension let people laugh instead of worrying.
  • Michael Jamin57:16 makes the first half of a story funny to lower the guard, then hits the heart in the second half without trying for laughs.
  • Andrew Sean Greer40:47 touches the serious subject briefly in comedy, then lets the reader see what is underneath.
  • Tomlinson's mom material grew from about 60 seconds to a six-minute chunk Tomlinson29:17.
  • Greer's line that Arthur Less was the first homosexual ever to grow old points to the generation of men above him who died of AIDS. The book won the Pulitzer Greer40:47.
• Push a feeling to its limit, then argue against it.
  • Dana Gioia5:26 builds a feeling with full force, and where the reader is ready to say stop, he qualifies it or says almost the opposite.
  • A poem about two people at a wedding was only finished when he added a turn of "might have beens" twenty years later Gioia5:26.
• Cut the push.
  • Dean Koontz1:35:55 separates sentiment, which is real feeling, from sentimentality, which pushes the reader's reaction. Piling a second tragedy on a dying character is sentimentality.
  • Robert Macfarlane1:24:23 says hyperbole is the enemy. Render the empirical basis of what you felt and let that carry it.
  • Koontz admires Joan Didion's cold clarity but doesn't want to read her, because she tells you she was devastated and no more Koontz1:35:55.
• Test the draft by your own reaction, and calibrate both ways.
  • Jack and Ryan of AJR1:19 write the joke that makes them laugh and the lyric that makes them cry. If they have the reaction they want from fans, they assume the audience is on the same wavelength.
  • Clint Bentley52:05 adjusted back and forth until the marriage in Train Dreams felt real.
  • The dog song made Ryan cry mid-draft. They found the emotional way in by writing from the dog, who naively thinks he is protecting the family AJR1:54.
  • Early cuts of Train Dreams had too many barbs, and viewers said the couple didn't even like each other. Later versions drew the opposite complaint, that it was too sweet Bentley and Kwedar52:05.

2.6 Where writers disagree

Writers split on the state you draft in, on inner thoughts, and on jokes near the end.

• Draft inside the feeling, or from a calm distance.
  • Henrik Karlsson1:18:59 wants to laugh, cry or be elated while writing, and writes rapidly while in the feeling.
  • Lulu Cheng Meservey11:55 says to bottle the feeling, step back, then write. Raw emotion gives you a rant.
  • She wrote her piece on why communicators should take more risks as a messy emotional rant first, then reworked it over several days Meservey11:55.
  • Haig says editing is different from drafting, though the bulk of a scene needs real feeling behind it Haig41:15.
• Add inner thoughts, or cut them.
  • Robert Greene1:00:15 cuts the internal monologue and shows the mind through action.
  • Nat Eliason12:12 added a few lines of interiority after an early reader said he was missing what was going on in his head. You can do a lot with one sentence in the right place.
  • Wright Thompson says scenes without interiority are flat, like origami that is not a swan. His fix is to set the interior life up once, then describe only actions Thompson15:05.
• End an emotional beat with a joke, or leave the silence.
  • Michael Jamin57:16 says do not button an emotional ending with a joke. He told a writer friend who did that he had ruined it.
  • Steven Levitan48:29 admires the Taxi scene where Louie's reveal turns into a hug and then the biggest laugh, taking viewers from laugh to powerful to laugh again.