How authors play with the reader's emotions

[John Dean]

I am returning to my theme of how writers evoke reactions in their readers for this blog. Good writing is about triggers with the author using words, phrases, images, places and sensations that reach deep into the reader’s mind.

That reaction will be based on something that the reader has actually experienced, or may be something that the reader dreads ever having to experience. It is why horror and ghost stories work so well. They play with people’s emotions and, by doing so, engage the reader in the book that they are reading.

Why am I thinking about this at this precise moment? Well, it’s never far from my mind but I am working on the new Blizzard crime novel, which contains scenes which I hope will send chills up the reader’s spine because they are set in a graveyard at night. Darkness and the dead are a big trigger for people’s fears and writers love them!

Yes, it means that as a writer you are messing about with the reader’s head, yes, you may be forcing them to confront deeply-held fears, but isn’t that sometimes what writing is about? If every story, every book, was about sugary-sweet people in lovely situations, then writing could never really move the reader as it should.

Yes, writing can, on occasion, make the reader feel uneasy, uncomfortable, scared even, but life’s life that and if writers can make their stories come over as real the reader is hooked.