Writing Is About Making People Feel Something
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When you peel away all the tricks and techniques, fiction comes down to one thing: making the reader feel.
It’s not to admire your clever sentences. Not marvel at your worldbuilding. Not nod along at your carefully researched magic system. Feel.
That’s the target every time, joy, dread, longing, sorrow, awe, laughter. The rest is scaffolding.
Here’s the part I had to learn the hard way, emotions don’t arrive because you announce them. Writing “she was terrified” doesn’t terrify anybody. Readers need the raw inputs that would terrify them. The sliver of glass in the carpet they step on barefoot. The slow creak of a door when no one else should be in the house. The garage full of bloody chainsaws. The details do the heavy lifting, our job is to select the ones that will land like a gut punch.
The brain actually has two paths for emotion. One is instant and visceral. You jump at a sudden bang before you even know what caused it. The other is slower and more deliberate. You see the shadow in the corner, realize it’s not a person, and your pulse settles down. Good fiction uses both. You can jolt the reader, then let their mind catch up. Or you can lead them down the longer path, feeding them thoughts that coil into dread or tenderness.
It takes honesty, too. If you want your reader to feel heartbreak, you have to sit with what heartbreak feels like for you. What broke you open last time? What details made it real? Was it the silence after an argument? The coffee cup left rinsed but not washed, because they weren’t coming back? Those are the threads readers recognize, even in the middle of a space battle or a fairy-tale kingdom.
And here’s the part a lot of writers skip, clarity and focus. Readers can only hold so much in working memory. If you overload them with details, the emotional thread gets buried. Fear doesn’t come from twenty descriptions of the haunted house, it comes from the one detail that snags in the mind, the one that makes them lean forward and imagine the rest. The single muddy footprint at the top of the stairs. The sound of someone breathing when the room is supposed to be empty. The hint of lipstick on a collar.
Our job is to aim the spotlight. Pick the right detail, and the emotion blooms all on its own.
Nobody else has your particular catalog of heartbreaks, joys, and fears. That’s your toolkit.
So, when you sit down to write, don’t just ask, what happens next? Ask:
- What do I want the reader to feel right now?
- What details would make me feel that, if I lived it?
- How do I put those details on the page so the reader isn’t told, but made to experience it?
If you can guide the reader into laughing on the subway, or crying alone in their kitchen, or feeling the goosebumps rise at two in the morning, you’ve done it. You’ve given them the thing they came for.
And isn’t that the whole point?