Write with Emotion

I read an article recently about the best way to craft a work email that people will read. A major point of the article was to pick a feeling - the author simplified it to “positive” or “negative” - and to convey that feeling throughout the piece.On this blog, I’ve focused on the toolbox. Here is a list of tips and tricks that I have come across as I learn how to write, I say. Here is how to engage the reader with clever literary devices, or to keep the reader’s interest by using cliff hangers. But it is possible to write a piece that uses all of these techniques and to come up short.I’m going to focus, for a moment, on a book I’ve been reading, called The Righteous Mind by Jonathan Haidt. Mr. Haidt studies moral psychology, and believes that emotions are the first step in moral reasoning, followed by rationalization. We should be interested in this argument because it codifies something that common sense suggests - if you cannot make your reader feel something, they will not care how apt your metaphor is or how lyrical your opening passage was.Today, make your reader feel something.***When Alana went to sleep on that fateful night, she did not understand the danger she was in. As she drifted in the state between sleep and consciousness, her leg kicked out toward the corner of her room, of its own accord. Her vision foggy, she struggled to see.Something appeared to move in her bedroom mirror.She started awake and looked around the room. From what she could see, there was nothing there. She turned on the lights and examined the dark crack of the closet door. Her notebooks and pillows and books were all that she saw. She was alone.“Crazy dream,” she thought. And she went back to sleep.The next morning, Alana’s alarm woke her and she began her morning routine. Clothes, then shoes, then combing her hair in the mirror. While she began to run the brush through her hair, she gave a cry and dropped it.On the mirror, a streak ran from one side to the other, as if four fingers had dragged across it with great pressure. She had not seen the prints on the surface before.***Getting Started: 5Character: 5Point of View and Tone: 4Plot and Narrative: 4Dialogue and Voice: 4Descriptive Language and Setting: 4Revision: 4Overall: 4*Level 4*