How Should the Reader Feel?
Hans Ness, Feb 16, 2025
Most advice I’ve seen glosses over the most important aspect of storytelling: How should the
reader feel? Of course your characters’ feelings are very important, but they are there to serve the emotional experience of your readers/listeners/viewers. Through writing choices and editing, our craft is to arrange the highs, lows, tension, and humor in an arc that is most satisfying to our audience.
Emotional Building Blocks
For each scene, paragraph, and sentence, what do you want the reader to feel?
Tension / Suspense — This is an obvious requirement. You want us, the readers, to
worry that things will go wrong. Even if we know the genre requires a happy ending, or we know it’s way too early in the story for everything to fall apart, we still can and should worry. Even the little tiny obstacles — the door is locked, can’t find the key, car won’t start, lost the map, tripped and fell — are there to make us worry. On screen, visuals create tension too. Notice when characters are hiding from monsters, it’s always poorly lit and lights are flickering? That’s purposely to irritate you.
Mystery — Not just a genre, mystery is often a thread within the story. Give us just enough information to make us curious, but withhold the answer. Drop little clues along the way, or remind us again and again about the unanswered questions, till you finally satisfy that curiosity later.
Even confusion is a form of curiosity, if done intentionally and artfully. Ambiguous messages, missing pieces, and conflicting details make us curious to figure it out and resolve the confusion. Maybe the characters themselves are confused and we feel it vicariously, or maybe the narrator withholds information from us that the character already knows. (But of course, unintentional confusion about the plot is bad.)
Humor — Humor is great up to a point. But too much non-stop humor gets fatiguing, with no real tension to keep you engaged, so longer comedies do need a mix of dramatic scenes. Likewise, a long series of dramatic scenes can be emotionally exhausting, so comic relief is effective to give the reader a break, making each up and down more impactful. The characters themselves may be funny; the narrator may be funny; the situation may be funny. It’s all good.
Love — Romances, family, friendship, pets. We feel good vicariously through the characters.
Happiness — We feel the joy of the character’s success.
Sadness — Curiously cathartic, we like to feel sad about characters’ losses, with the security of knowing we haven’t actually lost anything.
Fear — Tension can go to the extreme of making us so immersed in the characters that we fear for our own safety. Curiously satisfying (for some more than others), this gives us the adrenaline rush of danger with the security of knowing we’re not actually in any danger.
Survival
Why do so many movies have chases, fight scenes, and cliffhangers (literally hanging from a ledge)? Even romantic comedies have chase scenes (rushing to stop the wedding before it’s too late). There are many ways to create tension, but these tropes are especially popular because they tap directly into our primal emotions to survive.
Fight — Fighting is such primal behavior for survival and dominance, it’s hard not to root for someone in a fight. Fight scenes draw us in.
Flight — Chase is also such a primal behavior, as the hunter or the hunted, we automatically root for someone. Even when we logically know the chase is totally contrived or no one’s life is at risk, we’re still hooked. Chase by foot, car, spaceship, flying broom — anything will do.
Fall — Fear of falling is crucial for us to stay alive, so we’re automatically invested when a character walks across a narrow plank, leaps across a chasm, and hangs onto a cliff with just the super-strength of their fingertips.
Likable & Unlikable Characters
Which characters should we like and dislike? Obviously we should like the protagonist. Even if they’re the anti-hero/villain (Gru in
Despicable Me), and even if they do something dislikable, we should still care about them enough to want them to redeem themselves. Typically we dislike the antagonist, but sometimes they’re just so interesting we still like them even when rooting against them (Darth Vader), or maybe they earn our empathy so we want the antagonist to be redeemed. Or a supporting character may be intentionally introduced as dislikable, then become likable later (Mr. Darcy).
Note that how the reader feels isn’t necessarily how the protagonist feels. Maybe the protagonist is making a poor choice, and we’re rooting for them to change their mind or redeem themself.
The Lion King — Simba wants to hide from his past, but we want him to go back and overthrow Scar.
Vicarious Experience
With many popular stories, readers want to
be the protagonist, especially children and young adults. They want to be Harry Potter, or Luke Skywalker, or any Disney princess, or Elizabeth Bennet. They may admire and envy the protagonist’s lifestyle, like
Emily in Paris. (Ever notice how many parties TV characters go to?)
But this isn’t always true. I don’t think anyone wants to be Shrek (well, not longer than one Halloween).
Also readers may want to be immersed in that world — Hogwarts, Middle Earth, Pandora, the Longbourn estate. Or even the Star Wars universe, which is weird because it’s dystopian, but it’s so cool people still want to be there.
Relatability
When the main character is an animal, robot, alien, monster, or amoeba, notice they are always anthropomorphized — imbued with human thoughts, feelings, and personalities. This is so we can relate to them. Even if we can imagine what it would be like to be an actual mouse, as readers we wouldn’t really care about them. So Judy Hopps, WALL-E, E.T., and Shrek all have human emotions, human personalities, and human facial expressions. (Why do you think WALL-E has eyebrows and eyelids?) It’s easier to connect when the protagonist feels like one of “us”, not an “other”.
In fact, on screen, you’ll notice the protagonist often has no accent, so they feel more relatable, not a foreign outsider. This happens even when it’s illogical, like all the people in
Ratatouille have French (or British) accents, except Linguini and Remy inexplicably have American accents. (In this case, “no accent” is from an American perspective.)
Likewise, alien worlds are usually analogous to the human world. It all depends on how familiar you want it to feel for the audience.
Takeaway
Think about how your readers should feel at every point in the story.
- Why should we like your protagonist?
- Why should we care about their goal?
- Who should we dislike, if anyone, and why?
- At the end of each chapter, why should we want to know what happens next?
- Would we want to be your protagonist and have their lifestyle? (optional)
- Would we want to live in your story’s world? (optional)