The Saturday Writing Quote — creating an emotional experience for readers

In mid-April, I spent a week in Hood River, Oregon attending the Breakout Novel Intensive Graduate Learning Retreat. What? you say. It’s a six-day intensive writing workshop lead by agent, teacher and novelist Don Maass. This version is aimed at students who have already attended the basic intensive — known as BONI; it’s smaller with more individualized instruction. When I attended BONI in April 2012, I had a 3-book contract for the Food Lovers’ Village Mysteries. The first draft of book one was due August 1; I had about 60% of a first draft and was feeling pretty good about it. I went home and started over.

But that book, Death al Dente, won the 2013 Agatha Award for Best First Novel. So, I’m a BONI fan, even though it took me longer than any of my classmates to come back. (Scheduling problems, mostly.)

Maass The Emotional Craft of Fiction: How to Write the Story Beneath the Surfacetalks a lot about emotion on the page, but more significantly, about evoking emotion in the reader. His 2016 book, The Emotional Craft of Fiction: How to Write the Story Beneath the Surface, gives writers practical insights and exercises for giving readers an emotional experience. So that’s my theme for May.

It starts, I think, with E.M. Forster’s dictate: “Only connect.”

Or as American novelist and short story writer Dan Chaon said in The Writer (June 2009), “You can’t tell people how to feel when they read your work. You can only hope to connect.”

But I think maybe you can do a little more than that, actually creating an experience. How? Stay tuned.

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