There are only a few real “secrets” to writing powerful, effective fiction, but here is one:
Language, in fiction, is not the main event; emotion is.
Language that is too full of itself, too self-consciously elegant, clever, or “poetic,” too exhaustively literal, too relentlessly expositional can sabotage your story by standing in the way of the emotion it must deliver.
Nonfiction is different, because it’s main purpose is informational. But in fiction, language functions as the first and second-stage rockets in a space launch, its job to deliver the third and final stage–which is the emotional payload–then to fall away, mission accomplished.
Any story may be brilliantly designed and constructed, but it the emotion fails to come through, it never lifts off.
Shakespeare is a good model in this: as a man of the theater, as well as a brilliant poet, he knew from experience (watching audiences) that emotion is a far more primal mental event than discernment. That’s why he knew to deliver high emotion with simple language, or better yet, simple action. When we see it, we feel it.
Research neurologists tell us that fear, desire, anger, and other primal emotions are processed in a different, more “primitive,” part of the brain from where we deal with the purely informational. We are far more affected by witnessing a powerful image or event than by hearing a brief news summary of it. You may read about a violent industrial accident and reflect how terrible it was, but it’s only when you see the pictures, hear on video the cries of the survivors, learn their names, ages, and something about their lives that you feel genuine sadness in your gut. That’s emotion.
And in fiction, that is good writing.
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