Something that I have never forgotten was: during my formative years in high school, when I was studying marketing as a job training course, I was presented a TV ad that ran for many months in the Brazilian public television. This ad told an interesting story.
There was a lamp, a common desk lamp. The camera kept around it, as if the ad was from the lamp’s point of view. It told the story of a person picking up the lamp from the desk, packaging it, and dragging it to the street. The package would then be left for the garbage truck.
The street was dark and rainy. There was a whole mood on the ad, a tragic atmosphere. The lamp looked like a puppy being left to die in a box in the rain. There was a sad song too.
Then, some guy comes and says: “Why are you so sad? This is just a lamp. It doesn’t have any feelings.” The ad was for a store that sold lamps and office accessories. I can’t remember the details anymore, but it was something like IKEA.
A lot of people cried with this ad. Then, they laughed at the silliness of crying for a broken lamp being replaced. The ad tricked everyone’s emotions in many interesting ways.
The ad ran during the mid-2000s, and even today, many Brazilians remember it. They may not remember the brand that was being advertised, or the core message, but they remember the emotion. That’s one of the greatest examples of how powerful emotion is in storytelling.
Ads are volatile. They lose importance and meaning after a while. Brands change. Sales end. Products are replaced by new ones. Everything about that ad, from the brand to the text, faded from my memory. But, the emotion stayed. The same happened for stories. You may forget the characters, their names and characterizations. You may forget the plot beats, and the details of the climax. But, you remember the emotions.
Everything that had an emotional impact will stay with you for a long time. Have you ever had this experience? When you know that you loved a movie, but you watched it many years ago, and you don’t remember anything? You can’t remember the protagonist’s name, the plot, and the climax; but, you remember that you loved it. You remember what the movie made you feel…
Sometimes, the emotion (in the movie medium) is expressed through story beats, but most times it is expressed through soundtrack, aesthetic choices, and motion. Like, the heartbreak sequence of Pixar’s “Up!”, where a powerful music from Michael Giacchino plays while we see the love life that the two protagonists had, from childhood, through a lifetime together, to their elderly years, to one of them dying. Anyone who watched this movie remembers this sequence, even if they don’t remember the details.
I can safely say that emotions are the most important element in fiction. Being able to provoke them in the reader is a skill that sets you apart from any other artist out there. But, how do you do it? How do you play the heart strings, and provoke emotions, when readers are so different individually, and emotions are so subjective and complicated?
First of all, there is no ready answer for that. If I knew the definitive answer, I would be making millions of dollars with screenplays right now. But, there are certain patterns that I have noticed over the years that play the right strings and pull the right triggers.
Trigger… This is an interesting way to put it, isn’t it? We often see, today, so called “trigger warnings” in fiction. They are a message to let people know that the depiction of certain things, traumatic things, could spark anxiety and health issues in the audience that’s especially sensitive. Good writers avoid the use of cheap and painful triggers, like depicting rape as well as the panting and suffocation that comes with a panic attack.
But, there are triggers, not unlike these ones, that spark other emotions. For example, there are triggers of nostalgia. Remember when, in Ratatouille, the villain eats a bite of the protagonist’s food, and suddenly, he is transported to a moment of his childhood, where he is just an innocent child, and his mom is cooking for him? That’s a nostalgia trigger.
Or, remember when, in V for Vendetta, Evey comes out of the prison and finds out that she was being tricked? V was playing a creepy, terrible theater where he pretended to be one of the government’s torturers, and was forcing her to give away information. She resisted, and in the end, she learned that she no longer had fear. She didn’t fear the government anymore. By losing the fear of death, she overcame the fear of tyranny.
That is a trigger that spark a complicated emotion: overcoming fear.
In my last post, I talked about themes, and how they come from the universal human experience. This time, it’s no different. Emotion comes from a universal experience that every person has. But, of course, we can’t possibly hope to feel every emotion out there. Writers, therefore, specialize in a few emotions that are close to their heart. They feel them intensely, provoke them in themselves, depict in their stories, and provoke in their readers.
Everybody loves Kafka. He became a master of the emotion of being small, insignificant, ugly, insufficient, and pathetic, when facing an oppressive, horrible, suffocating world that’s much bigger than him. This emotion was true to him—he felt it every day. And, he recorded it in his writings, and managed to pull the right emotional triggers in his audience to make sure that they felt the same.
Not that the audience started to feel insignificant after reading Kafka. But, the audience felt what he felt, and by doing so, exercised empathy. Emotions could be seen like muscles. They must be exercised to be comprehended and explored. Sometimes, people need to feel like Kafka felt, by reading his books, to exercise the feeling of being oppressed and small.
Through the exercise of emotions, one becomes emotionally mature. Emotion is diverse and complex, and escapes any attempt of categorization, scientific inquiry, medicalization, and even comprehension. It cannot be understood, but only felt. And, only a human could understand the feelings of another human. A machine, or an alien with another type of biological nature could never comprehend. A person needs to explore the maze of feelings that exist inside them. It’s the only way to comprehend the pains and joys of others, and also, the only way to understand the things that swirl inside the Self.
You would be surprised to find out that a lot of people feel deep emotions, but don’t comprehend any of them. A lot of adults have deep sorrows, fears, and pains, but are so emotionally immature, and are so deficient when it comes to exercising those emotional muscles, that whatever swirls inside them becomes incomprehensible, potent, and primal.
That’s why we often see a person snapping in traffic or in public transports. That’s why people shoot each other in the streets, or express racism against someone, or join a hate group. People fail to understand their own emotions, and run away from them.
The same happens inside psychiatric clinics. People who seek therapy are mostly feeling deep and suffocating emotions that they don’t comprehend. But, while they seek therapy, they fear these emotions, or lack the proper maturity and strength to face them directly. So, they run away, and drown themselves in work, drugs, alcohol, church, or some other addiction, as a way to forget about it.
If the therapist pushes the emotional triggers only a little bit, then this type of patient will run away and find another therapist. As such, many therapists don’t even try to poke the dark, deep emotional oceans of their patients anymore. Therapy thus becomes a futile waste of time and money.
To exercise the emotional muscles, a person must spend a lifetime drinking essentially poison. Every possible emotion must be provoked. Through fiction, a person can pull the right muscles to make them stronger. That’s why, if you take a movie that makes you cry a lot, and watch it a hundred times, eventually, it will not be emotional anymore. You’ll be familiar with the emotion, to such extent that it will not surprise you, or provoke any kind of reaction.
Imagine, then, being hardened as such for most of the common emotions that we deal with every day. That’s how it works.
Authors are the greatest poison-drinkers out there. They expose themselves to levels of emotion that would make an ordinary person insane. And, they are hardened to it, to the point that they no longer feel pain and sorrow, and no longer cry so easily. At the same time, they can easily pull the strings in others, and become dangerously powerful in breaking someone’s defenses and ravaging their spirits.
Write with emotion. But, most important, dive yourself into this. Expose yourself to emotions that would drive most people insane. When you’re hardened, strong, and ready, write in a way that will pull these strings in others. That’s how you’ll be remembered. That’s how you, as a writer, will change the world.