How to write: Tricks to make sure your story is tugging heartstrings

Tricks How to Write a Story that is Tugging Heartstrings

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I think we can all agree that the reason most readers love stories is because we want to feel something.

We want the good guy to win and the bad guy to lose or if the bad guy wins we want to feel for the good people and hurt with them or experience their emotional hurt.

We want to be able to experience those good and bad emotional feelings without real-life fallout or consequences.

In other words, we want to make sure as good writers that we are tugging heartstrings.

How are we tugging heartstrings?

We create emotional connection and attachment for readers by setting it up from the start.

# 1 How to write a Story that is tugging Heartstrings: We make a character that we want the audience to love or hate.

The last thing we want to do is create a character that is likable, but forgettable.

No, in order to be tugging heartstrings there must be emotional consequences at risk.

We want our readers to feel mad, upset, or unfair about the character we have made them hate getting away with injustice.

We want them to feel sad at the loss of our character that they love is experiencing.

Disney does this SOOO well at this skill in many of their stories. They create a character that we love and then they KILL them or kill someone they love! (Bambi, Lion King, Good Dinosaur, Frozen, Guardians 2, just to name a few…) You can look at tons of their stories and you will find beloved characters’ dead bodies strewn all over the battlefield of story and cinema.

Even if we create a character that they hate this is also good because they will still be emotionally invested to find out if that hated character gets away with “it” or not.

This is called tugging heartstrings.

We make people feel something by getting them attached to characters in our stories by the feelings of love and hate.

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We do the same thing in real life.

We naturally love ourselves and our own stories so we psychologically as humans hate when bad things happen to us (lose money, get cut off on the road, are late, get punished, loss of a loved one), but love when good things happen to us (get promoted, catch every green light, make a new friend, receive a gift, win the lottery.)

Taking it a step further, we hate when bad things happen to others that we love and we love when good things happen to them.

In this same way if we are going to be tugging heartstrings we MUST create characters that are either loved or hated, nothing in between. 

Indifference about your character is the enemy of good storytelling.

If your reader feels indifference about your Character that is BAD.

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# 2 How to write a Story that is tugging Heartstrings: If we are going to be tugging heartstrings, our readers must care about the relationships we build for our characters.

Not nearly as important point #1 but to be taken into account is that our relationships must be interesting to our readers.

# 1 plays into this though. 

If we do a good job creating characters that are loved or hated then readers are more than likely going to care more about the relationships they are caught up in, and we don’t just mean romantic relationships.

They are to be emotionally invested in their relationships with their parents, friends, enemies, sidekicks, romances, pets, any relationship you can think up.

A good way to make any relationship interesting is to bring good times into it and bad times into it.

We are always interested to see how a fight between two friends or lovers will turn out.

Will they be together after? Or will they part ways? Will it end peacefully or ugly? Will there be theft or even murder involved?

All of these ideas make for interesting relationships between characters.

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I hope this helps!

Now get out there and write something!

What would you add to help other writers in tugging heartstrings with their stories?

Are you working on a story right now that’s quite conflicting and really gets the emotions going?

Do you have questions about how to write a story?

Do you know the dynamics of how to write a story?

Do you know the building blocks for how to write a story?

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