Cry, sweat, tremble, bleed

After all our toil and struggle to write our memoirs, how do we get people to read them?

We “Make ‘em cry, make ‘em laugh, make ‘em wait,” in the words of Wilkie Collins.

Speakers and writers follow that advice for obvious reasons: it keeps audiences engaged.

Over the past few weeks we’ve looked at how to ‘make ‘em laugh’

so now how do we make ‘em cry?

If you’ve tried writing your emotion, you know that can be a tough challenge, but in Writing Life Stories, Bill Roorbach suggests we employ method writing, a spin-off of method acting.

Here’s how method acting works: Before the curtain rises, the actor remembers a time in which he experienced the emotion he needs to act out. He spends time reliving that emotion so that when he steps on stage, he’s all wrapped up in that emotion and succeeds in playing his part.

Method writing, then, requires you to step out of the present and into the past. If you’re writing about a tragic event, take time (make time) to remember the event and relive it so you can rediscover the emotions you felt.

Avoid over-the-top hysteria, but be honest in admitting your emotions.

In the midst of reliving that situation and emotion, ask yourself:

• What was at stake? What did I have to lose or gain?
•  What dreams would never come true?
•  At the time, how did I envision that my life would never be the same?
•  Where would I find courage to live another day?
•  What were my fears, my hopes, my prayers?

When you are caught up again in that emotion, get it onto paper or computer screen.

Your “emotion should be so realistic and gripping that the reader can’t help but feel it too.…” (Becca Puglisi; emphasis mine)

To paraphrase Larry Brooks,

make your readers

happy they are not there,

yet grateful

to feel what it was like to be you.

Emotion: That’s how you make a way for readers to join you in your story, to make them care, to make them want to keep reading.

“Our best stories evoke an emotional response,

touch a deep cord,

and motivate action and change.”

 (Peter Guber; emphasis mine)

OK, are you ready? Go make ‘em cry!

Suspense, yes. Melodrama, no.

Life includes suspense. Good stories, then, include suspense.

Your memoir needs suspense. Hook your reader and make her eager to know the outcome—but make her wait for it. Suspense implies an uncomfortable waiting mixed with impatience for a good resolution . It arouses curiosity. It keeps her reading.

Today we continue with these all-important  ingredients for your memoir: Suspense. Tension. Conflict.

Becca Puglisi at Writers Helping Writers explains how she discovered the difference between conflict and tension.

A critiquer had returned one of Becca’s manuscripts and had noted, several times, the need for tension. “Where’s the tension?” and “Add more tension.” (Becca’s manuscript was fiction but remember: Many fiction techniques are important nonfiction techniques, too.)

Becca said, “No tension? What’s she talking about? The main character was just abandoned by her father. Her best friend was attacked by racist pigs. The family farm is about to go under.… There is conflict ALL OVER the place, so how can she say there’s no tension??”

Becca was puzzled but eventually recognized that conflict and tension are not necessarily the same thing. She adds, “Although the terms are often used interchangeably (and they CAN be synonymous), they aren’t necessarily the same.”

Conflict is when a character has a goal but an obstacle prevents him from reaching it.

Tension, on the other hand, stirs up the reader’s emotion, grabs hold of him, and makes him care about how the story will end—and it keeps him reading. Tension, Becca says, is “that tight, stretched feeling in your belly that makes you all jittery. That’s what you want your reader to feel.…”

Click on this link to read more of Becca’s Conflict vs.Tension.

So how do you stir up your reader’s emotion?

Your own emotion—excitement, fear, joy, doubt, wonderment, or awe—will impact your readers’ emotions.

“Emotion is an involuntary action:

The best stories in the world

always have an emotional appeal.

They inspire the audience to act, to think,

to laugh, to cry or to get angry. …

If an audience is moved to feel something,

they become more emotionally invested in a story

based on that connection.”

Slash Coleman

How much tension should a writer include?

Every scene should have tension, FaithWriter’s Lillian Duncan says, sometimes big, sometimes little. “It may be internal or external. It may be real or imagined, but there should be a sense of unpredictability in every scene.…”

Lillian offers this word of caution: Melodrama is not a mark of good writing. Avoid overwriting. “Keep your ‘flowery’ writing to a minimum.”

Click here to see Lillian’s checklist on how to avoid overwriting. It includes:

         Word choices

Exclamation points 

         Too many adverbs and adjectives

Emotional reaction equal to the event

Cut every unnecessary word

Read more at Lillian’s Writing Suspense. Many if not all of her fiction techniques also apply to nonfiction. 

Related posts:

Sneeze post: Suspense

Making suspense reader-friendly