A question of emotion

[John Dean]

I have just started work on the latest DCI Jack Harris novel and my thoughts are dominated by emotion.

Why? Because you can be the best technical writer in the world, with perfect use of grammar and immaculate sentence construction, but if your stories do not engage your readers on an emotional level, you are in trouble.

The reason I am pondering upon this idea is that in the new novel I plan, as ever, to introduce characters who are experiencing situations with which the reader should be able to identify. As part of that process, I am working on a scene where a character relives an emotional event in their past, relives grief that is as acute now as it was the day when they lost their loved one.

However, when I read the first draft of the scene back, it was nicely written (even if I do say so myself!) but it was lacking emotion, starved of the character’s intense reaction, of the tears threatening to overwhelm them, of the sheer rawness of it all. When I rewrote it to include them, the scene leapt off the page and should engage the reader.

And if I find myself struggling to place that emotion on the page, what do I do? Well, life experiences in all their light and darkness are a writer’s tools so, for a start, I think back to how I reacted when something similar happened to me.

It may have not been an identical situation but, sadly, life throws plenty of difficult challenges our way and a writer often draws on them to infuse their fiction with a sense of reality.

For me, it’s what keeps my writing real, hopefully.