I want you to forget everything you think you know about fiction. Forget about plotting, about prose, about basic grammar. Forget everything I’ve taught you as well. Forget that I told you I go to support groups under false pretenses to get story ideas. And forget anything that might indicate I’m somehow culpable of D&E offices burning down in 2021.

The reason I’m asking you to do this is because we need to focus on the most essential part of creating good fiction. Bad fiction doesn’t fail because it uses too many adverbs, or because the story pacing lags, or because the author’s name came up in the Epstein files a bunch of times. It fails because readers don’t make emotional connections to the stories they’re reading. Crappily written books can still succeed if they manipulate the reader with cheap emotional tricks. You have to remember: readers are desperately lonely people. If it’s helpful, imagine your reader as stupid dog, and that you just need a few well-timed treats and belly rubs to get them to love you until they die in three or four years.

There’s science that supports this, too. Readers remember more about stories they connect with emotionally. Many years ago at D&E offices, I ran an experiment where several interns were asked to read books from the D&E catalog. We connected electrodes to their brain and chest to monitor their brain waves and heartrate. Books that elicited higher heartrates also had more stable brain wave patterns. But after ten hours, the books whose emotional arcs didn’t pay off left readers bored and confused, not to mention forgetful and dangerously dehydrated.

If you feel like these are cheap tricks meant for writers looking to earn a quick buck, you are actually doing the world a service because reading makes people more empathetic. One quick look around at the world today should tell you that we need more empathy. And as you search for this emotional truth in your writing, it may even bleed over into your personal life. For example, I always round to the nearest dollar to give money to kids mutilated by the corporations I buy things from. And at my job, I put a lot more effort into playing matchmaker for my employees.

We’ll reveal personal details we probably shouldn’t on this edition of Stories’ Matter.

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Strategy 1 – Open Your Characters (and yourself) up to vulnerability

Writing should make you emotional. If you’re writing a funny passage, you should be laughing. If you’re writing a tense, chilling passage, you should feel uncomfortable walking around your home at night. And if you’re writing an erotic scene, you should at least get the baristas to consider asking you to leave the Starbucks.

My suggestion: Don’t keep your reader at an ironic distance. At some point in your story, your character should bare their soul. And that’s the great thing about fiction. We can do this with make-believe people and make money, instead of spending our own money on therapy.

I sob all the time when I’m writing. Now, it’s not always due to my writing, in fairness. Sometimes, it’s a side effect of the stimulants I take to keep me productive, or sometimes I just think about the fact that my second wife’s new husband’s company is still making record profits, even in this economy. But that will translate to your character and also to your reader.

Strategy 2 – Keep the Reveals Spare (And Vary Your Emotions)

However, you can’t barrage your reader with this vulnerability. Remember, that our emotional state is complex. If you’re anything like me, you feel at least three or four different emotions every day. Some days I wake up thinking I’ll never get Cindy back, but then I’ll see a car accident on the side of the road and imagine it’s her new husband and I start to feel a little better.  

The big emotional reveal in my novel, The House on Pain Avenue, is when Daniel stands up to his father and tells him that if he can’t accept him for being gay, then their relationship is over. But throughout the novel Daniel goes through many other mini emotional arcs. There’s the shock he experiences once he finds out 9/11 may have been an inside job, and there’s the joy he gets to experience when his older sibling’s frat brothers run a train on him. Your characters will seem more human if you allow them this type of emotional complexity.  

Strategy 3 – Plot Out Your Story by Emotional Arcs First

Imagine your character’s emotional state as a Cartesian plane. The x-axis just stands for time. Everything above on the positive side of the x-axis is a positive emotion like love and contentment, and everything below the x-axis, is a negative emotion like jealousy and anger over losing money in a crypto scam. Your character’s arc should look like a sinusoidal wave as your story progresses. Once you finish your story, you need to use this formula to calculate the integral, where A is the amplitude of the wave, omega is the angular frequency and phi is the phase shift. If your answer is zero from T1 to T2, you’ve done your job.

So, for example, when I wrote my novel Minge, I knew that it was going to start with Minge feeling a deep sense of grief, and the arc of the story would be about overcoming that grief. So I had to think: what can instill a sense of grief? Well, what if she had gotten fired from her job because she yelled some racial insults at a heckler during an open-mic night? And then I had my story.

Strategy 4 – Emotional Mapping

Finally, one thing I find helpful is to write all the main characters of the story on a page. Draw all of your characters on a page and put them in a circle. Then draw lines between characters to show how they have changed one another. If you do it correctly, your map should look something like this.