Big Emotions in the Reader needs Trickery from the Writer

From Writers with Love
Extracts from books, guides and articles that I believe will help make me a better writer. They may help you too…This week DONALD MAASS from The Emotional Craft of Fiction.

Big feelings like dread, terror, joy or love can be evoked in readers, but not by force. They are most effectively evoked by trickery. Stage magicians use misdirection to take their audience by surprise. Emotional craft is similar. Artful fiction surprises readers with their own emotions…what triggers readers to dread up their own emotional experiences? One answer is this: it’s the small details (reminders) used to evoke a situation that are preloaded with feeling.
Or just remember this: details. Details have the power of suggestion. Suggestions evoke feelings in readers, drawing them out rather than pounding them down.
Donald Maass

Donald Maass is the head of a New York Literary Agency, founded in 1980. He is the author of The Career Novelist (1996), Writing the Breakout Novel (2001), Writing the Breakout Novel Workbook (2004), The Fire in Fiction (2009), The Breakout Novelist (2011), Writing 21st Century Fiction (2012) and The Emotional Craft of Fiction (2019).
I haven’t read his other guides, but I’ve read and re-read the Emotional Guide since I bought it a couple of years ago. He uses relevant and lengthy cotemporary examples to illustrate a point and at the end of each section suggests a number of exercises to use on your own WIP or questions to consider. I don’t know if I’ve given enough to show you how good he is, but he has evoked emotion in me – not love exactly, but something next door to it, that and the conviction that he knows what he is writing about.

Photo by Victoria Roman on Unsplash