Visionary Writing Techniques Essay #13
by John Onorato
We humans love a good story.
Consider the success of a few movies: Star Wars. The Hunger Games. The Color Purple. Titanic. Gone With the Wind. Jaws.
Now consider a few books: Don Quixote. Alice in Wonderland. The Wizard of Oz. Harry Potter.
What do these books and movies all have in common? I’ll give you that the commonality might not be easy to pick out, but if you think about it …
If you think about it, it’s really pretty simple.
They have great stories.
The Other Commonality
Granted, these stories have gone through endless amounts of refinement and re-jiggering. Every stray word, every misplaced image, every character that doesn’t serve the plot ends up on the cutting room floor.
I wouldn’t presume to think we have that kind of time or person-power as we craft our essays.
Now, I’ll be writing another essay on using Story at a later date. But in this moment, I’d like to draw your attention to another thing these stories have in common:
They engage our emotions.
Yes, we humans love a good story. And we engage with those stories through our emotions. Our essays are stories, and a story without emotions seems flat. And even lifeless.
“But John,” I can already hear you asking. “How do we create emotions in our readers?”
Easy-peasy! You evoke those emotions with emotion words.
It’s All In the Words
It’s easy to classify emotions as “good” or “bad,” positive or negative. Yet those words are not specific enough to elicit an emotional response from our readers.
Consider the Junto Emotion Wheel.
An aside: There are many different “emotion wheels” and methods for refining basic emotions. They’re all valid and all useful. This is just one of them.
According to the Junto model, there are six “basic emotions.” There’s love, joy, and surprise. And there are the less positive ones, or fear, anger, and sadness.
Let’s look at Love. The basic emotion of “Love” can be further refined into “enchanted,” “romantic,” “affectionate,” and “sentimental.” The emotion named “euphoric” inhabits a space between Love and its neighbor “Joy.”
These emotions can be further refined into different words with slightly different connotations. (Remember, a “connotation” is the undercurrent of a word, the feeling that it invokes in addition to its literal meaning. This literal meaning is also known as the denotation.) The word “enchanted” refines into “enthralled” and “rapturous.” And from the word “sentimental,” we get “tender” and “nostalgic.”
Here’s the Trick
So that’s the groundwork. Here’s the trick to generating greater engagement with your words, no matter if you’re writing a Visionary essay, copy for your website, or a letter to your Dad:
Use the words.
That’s it. Just use them.
The verb forms are best to use. If you say “Fred came into the room,” that’s flat and lifeless. The reader is confused because there are a zillion different ways someone can come into a room. There’s no telling what the writer had in mind, so the reader will create an image in their head that makes sense to them. But it might not be in line with the original intent.
The writer then has to do more work to provide relevant information as to how.
On the other hand, if you say “Fred exploded into the room,” you already know that Fred is enthusiastic and energetic (at least in this instance). It’s a safe bet that Fred is a positive, happy person.
Now let’s look at Claude, who is terminally depressed. We can say “Claude is depressed,” but again, that’s lifeless. Flat. (As per the nature of depression itself!) But if we say “Claude skulked into the room,” we can tell there’s something up. He might have some nefarious motive. He might be sad. We don’t know yet, but we WANT to know.
In other words, we’re engaged.
We can also use adverbs to display emotion. Adverbs are words that typically end in -ly, and they modify verbs. As in: “June ran happily.” Or “The movie ended abruptly.” Or “Her mod outfit displayed Brigit’s delightfully quirky personality.”
Conclusion
To recap, we humans love stories. And we love it when our emotions are engaged. One way to engage our readers’ emotions is through the use of emotion words. Words like love, joy, and fear are good, but too general to make much of an impact. Instead, use more specific words. Using emotional adverbs is a good idea, yet an even better one is to use precise verbs.
So I challenge you: In your next Visionary essay, use emotional words. And see what kind of engagement you get 🙂
