The Ultimate Guide to Harry Potter Fanfiction

How to Move Your Readers

Emotion is key to any good writing. If you can't draw up any sort of emotion through your words, you've got to work a little harder. A story without emotion is bland and flat. Luckily, your dear friend Ellie is here to help!

Freshly out of my OWLs (or... Kind of fresh... Let me take this time to apologize for the long wait!), I have finally returned to the land of emotion beyond stress and puking (both of which are very common side affects of said OWLs). In returning, I realized that a lot of younger (and probably older) authors struggle with drawing forth emotion in their readers. So, I have resolved to help.

The first thing we should ask ourselves is: What brings emotion in real life? Completely separate from the world of your story, what can make you laugh or cry? Be furious or disgusted? What sends shivers down your spine, or makes you gasp out loud with surprise? Well, that's not a very hard question. Most studied people agree that emotions are simply built in, natural responses to situations. Most are not only mental, but also physical. For example, you cry when you're sad. Your hair stands on end when you're scared. Your heartbeat quickens when you're angry. If you can get someone feeling something enough, you can basically predict how their body will react.

"Okay," you say, "that's how it happens in real life, when things are actually affecting us. But how can a book make us feel like that? And how can we make sure our readers feel it?" I'm glad you asked!

I'm a firm believer that you need to know why something happens before you can understand how to do it yourself. So, I've looked into why people can get so emotionally attached to ink on paper, and I'll share with you what I've found. The thing is, if you spend enough time reading about a character, you're bound to start feeling for them. Just as you would begin to know a friend really well after time, so it is with a character. You feel like you know them. You can see them in your brain, even if you're not reading about them then. You can know how the character will react to things and have a very complex knowledge of their lives. And our brains treat that like a human friend, to some degree. You care about what happens to them, and you feel empathy for them. And that's why, when they're terrified, you're terrified for them. When they're ecstatic, you feel it too. And when their soul mate dies in their arms, you feel like it was your heart that got ripped out. Because you don't just read about them. You're in the story. It all plays out in your head, and you love the characters too.

So, how can authors tap into this? How do you get readers invested in your story at all? And once that's done, how can you make sure your emotional seems carry maximum feels? Because, obviously, there are ways to do it badly.

First and foremost, you have to make us care. You could write the most tear-jerking or hair-raising scene in the world, but if we don't give two Knuts about your character we will yawn through it all. So, how do you make us care? First, let us get a chance to know your character before trying to get emotions out of us. Let us start to identify with her in her strengths and weaknesses, her un-Mary-Sue-ness. Once we can identify with her, you can slowly reel us in. By the climax, we will be so closely tied to your character that we will feel her emotions as our own.

Now that you've got us invested, let me give you some highly important advice. Never—under any circumstances—tell me how your character is feeling. I don't want to know that "She was sad." I want to feel it. This falls under the category or showing rather than telling. Instead of telling me that she is sad, say that she stares out the window, a year trickling down her cheek to match the raindrops trickling down the glass outside. Set the mood. We are smart enough to figure out where you're going with it. When we can experience the feelings for ourselves, instead of being told the character is feeling them, then we really begin to connect to your story on a very deep level.

Secondly, if you're planning to kill off a character for the sole reason of making us cry...

Don't do it.

Why? Because that's cheap, and we feel cheated. We look back when the book is over and see there was really no reason for that emotional torture. We get annoyed, and if another character dies in the series, we won't care as much because it might not mean anything. So, please, if that's your only reason, don't do it. Throughout the course of a normal plot, you'll find plenty of reasons to mess with our emotions, without throwing in an unnecessary death.

I heard somewhere (I can't remember where and this is not a direct quote!) that when there are big events, to write small. With small events, write big. For example, if your main character is playing wizard's chess in he common room with a friend while talking casually about a new teacher or something, it's okay to spend a paragraph going into her thoughts here and there, and to describe each move in the game and what's going on in he common room around her. However, if one of your MC's friends is dying before her eyes, you don't do that. You tell the friend's last words. You say his head slumped back, his eyes glassy. You say a sob caught in the back of your MC's throat as she shook him. She told him to come back, not to leave her. And she cried.

Don't try to describe that awful flurry of emotions that must be going through her head. Don't go into a bunch of detail about his dead body, or anything like that (unless it's super plot-related). Sometimes, the smallest, blandest words can have the biggest impact. Those short sentences, those fragments of sentences as she starts crying, and the end of the scene. Your readers have enough sense to fill in the rest. They will have a weight on their heart, tears in their eyes. You'll get comments of "NOOOOOOOOO" and "I HATE YOU AUTHOR" because they're distraught, not just because this character they loved died, but because this character they know on such a deep level is affected so heavily buy that. That's what you have to learn to tap into. Don't describe her pain. Describe how she shows it, in as plain language as you can manage. Don't worry about sounding flowery or important or smart. When we're crying an ocean's worth of tears, we won't notice.

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So sorry for the long wait on this chapter! I've had a crazy summer and unfortunately I've had to move this to the back burner. Luckily, with school starting soon and the return of routine, updates will be sooner!

While I was doing my research for this chapter I found a very interesting article heading I thought I'd share:

Good article? Bad? I'm honestly not sure, because I didn't have time to look into it then, but you can go check it out and let me know!

Anyway, did I cover everything on this topic? Comments, thoughts? Let me know! And if you have any questions or topics you'd like me to cover, let me know about that in the comments!