(There is content that may spoil the end of Harry Potter in the last two paragraphs)
Apparently, opening a Word document and writing, “Once upon a time, a boy was crossing the road, got hit by a car, and died,” is not enough to create a story. Go figure!
First, you need to create empathy for the poor guy. I don’t mean to sound cruel, but I don’t care if the boy was hit by a car or not. It’s a story, and we are already trained to remember that it’s not true. The reason why books make us laugh, cry, and fear for the characters’ lives is because we create a certain connection with them.
If you tell me that the boy had just left the café with two cappuccinos in hand because he was about to meet his girlfriend, whom he hadn’t seen in ages, and that he had just returned from a mission in Iraq, and if you add that after lunch with his girlfriend he was going to see his mother, and if you also add that he was a war hero who saved a colleague from a burning car, then I start to feel sorry for the boy.
Why? After all, it’s still not true, is it?
But the way the story is told matters.
Before, we just had a stranger being hit by a car. Now, we have a person who was about to reunite with his girlfriend. A girlfriend who lost her boyfriend. And a mother who just lost her son. And as if the situation wasn’t bad enough, the person who just died was a good person. Not one of those jerks that, if they don’t die under the car, we feel like throwing them onto the railway tracks when the train is passing by!
To provoke emotions in the reader, we need to make them visualize the situation and picture it with words, and give information about the character that allows us to create a bond.
HARRY POTTER SPOILER ALERTS
Why do you think I cried like a baby when Sirius and Dumbledore died?
Why do you think I still can’t forgive J.K. Rowling for killing Fred (instead of Percy, to whom I wasn’t as attached)?
And why do you think I flipped the page where Harry and Hermione don’t know where Ron is in the Room of Requirement, muttering “Oh, please, no, not Ron, not Ron”?
Because of my connection with the characters.
I have to admit, the only books that made me cry were the Harry Potter ones.
But even if I didn’t cry with others, it doesn’t mean I didn’t want to punch the writers when I read them, and it doesn’t mean I didn’t make some pretty offensive comments when things like this happened.
And even insulting them, I can guarantee that the books that make me feel like this are my favorites.
Because they made me feel for the characters.
PATRICIA MORAIS
I write bilingual (PT and EN) supernatural fantasy books inspired by mythology and folklore from around the world. But my actual mission is to help other writers write, publish and market their books.
