Readers don’t connect to plots, they connect to emotional truths. When there are no new plots, only new twists, what is it that keeps us turning the pages and rooting for the characters? Emotional connection.
It’s not about solving the murder, surviving the military academy or foiling the assassination. Readers want emotion. They want truth. That’s why Romance and Romantasy are the biggest-selling genres right now; instant emotion.
But it doesn’t stop at romance plots. Emotion drives our connection to the characters. We want to empathize with people – even made-up people.
Genre-agnostic
It’s why crime novels are about the detective and the victim; their emotional journey, the impact of the crime.
Sweeping historical novels don’t hold us for the events, but for the impact on the people caught up in them. We have to feel for the little people swept up in the drama, or sympathize for the kings, queens and generals at the center of them. We need to feel the weight of those big decisions, the compromises, the consequences, the sacrifices.
Espionage stories aren’t about the spy-craft, they’re about loyalty, trust, betrayal; friendships and relationships destroyed.
Westerns aren’t about cowboys and Indians, they fixate on freedom and justice.
Plot and setting only work when we have an emotional truth to anchor us. Otherwise it’s all just empty spectacle.
We turn to fiction when we want to feel something. Fictional characters are our proxies and surrogates, we want to feel something through them. It may be something we (thankfully) never feel in our own lives, or some heightened version of something we all feel.
The quest
Usually they are trying to find something; love, freedom, justice, achievement.
And they struggle. There is emotional connection in adversity, in the roller-coaster of the try-fail cycle. It build until we get the emotional release of the pay-off at the end.
Any story that wants to us to connect is driven by a character’s emotional wants and needs, something we can feel alongside them. We don’t have to sympathize with selfish, corrupt or immoral characters, but we need to understand their emotional state, even if we disagree with their choices.
In my latest story I have a teenage girl desperate to find her missing father. She’s driven by loss, by hope and by a need for justice. She’s also striving to find her identity, her place in the world. Her coming-of-age story is as old as time. It won’t win any awards for an original plot, but it just might win readers’ hearts.