A matter of emotion

[John Dean]

Writing can, at times, be an emotional experience for both author and reader and one of the big challenges for writers is the way that they tackle those difficult subjects.

The idea has come to my mind, as it does so often, as I work on my next novel, which includes a scene in which a character discovers in a deeply distressing way how little they knew about the life of a loved one who has been murdered.

Writing that scene has made me think hard and I have gone back time and time again over the dialogue to ensure that I get it right and that it sounds as authentic as possible.

Testing as such challenges can be, writers need to take them on, not least because a story depicting people for whom everything is going well can lead to 60,000 words of crime novel that are a touch on the uneventful side!  Introduce something spiky into the narrative, though, and your crime story comes alive.

The reader is crucial to the success of the process. Storylines can have a profound effect on those who read them, often in ways that the writer has not envisaged as the reader calls on their own fears, emotions, experiences etc when reading some scenes.

Writing is all about imagination, of course, but so many writers have told me that it can help if they call on their own experiences to give their stories an authentic feel. I certainly do and it pays to use anything you can draw on to make a scene come over as real, not least because readers are remarkably adept at seeing through authors who do not know what they are writing about!

Get it right, though, and the rewards are there for the writer in the form of scenes that can evoke strong reactions from the reader – and once you have the reader reacting you have them caring about what happens to the people in your story and that will keep them turning the pages. For the author, that’s the biggest reward of them all.