Monica Wood on how to pull readers’ heartstrings

Cry me a river… just not a whole river!

Most readers like to cry for the same reason they like to laugh: they long to enter into a story so completely that their emotions overwhelm them. In my experience, though, readers are a crafty lot. They can tell the difference between drama and melodrama. Or, to put it more bluntly, they know when they’re being conned.

Let’s say we’ve got a story that hinges on a puppy abandoned in a box on a roadside. I could force the waterworks by describing, in a downpour of cliché, the puppy’s sad eyes and quivering nose and matted coat. Gentle readers will find their own sad eyes welling despite this obvious manipulation, even if they recognize what I call ‘Bambi writing’ (after the dead-mum scene in the movie of the same name). Who can blame them? What kind of monster doesn’t puddle up over a homeless dog? I could whip my own self into a meringue of misery right this minute over poor little Sad Eyes, even though I’m the manipulator who just made him up.

Option number two is to write as freshly as I can. A writer’s goal is not to make readers cry, but to make them remember. And nothing sticks in the mind more than a juxtaposition made from concrete images. If forced at gunpoint to write about a puppy in a box, I’d begin with the box which has FRESH APPLES printed on the side. I’d give the puppy an oversized collar more suited to an adult Rottweiler. I’d compare its matted coat to the patchy topography of a schoolteacher’s corduroy trousers. The fragile line between sentiment and sentimentality is made of exactly the right words.

The puppy is fine, by the way. Some nice people took him to their sunny, verdant farm, where their pretty little daughter will call him Lucky and cuddle him back to health. Really.

Monica Wood’s new novel THE ONE IN A MILLION BOY is out on the 5th April 2016. You can pre-order your copy here.