Emotional impact is what every editor is looking for and what many unpublished writers fail to deliver.

What do you want the reader to feel when closing your book?
Satisfaction, certainly. A sense of completion—the story had a beginning, middle and end. It kept the reader’s attention and delivered a satisfactory closure.

If you ask a reader, “what do you want to feel,” you’ll likely get a blank stare. Most readers rarely think about it. But you can bet there’s a subconscious tug going on if your ending delivered the emotional goods. The reader is eager to buy your next book. A book that ties up all the plot threads but fails to deliver emotional impact will not provide the satisfying completion that makes a reader hunger for your next story.

Writers often prefer not to think about reader satisfaction. They’d rather “just write” (right-brain). Or they’d rather work and rework the plot details (left-brain). But you can bet editors are thinking about reader satisfaction from the moment they open that first page. They know the reader expects an emotional ride, regardless of whether the reader knows it.

Consider a couple of explosively popular books
Every editor is looking for another The Bridges of Madison County, a compact love story by Robert James Waller that created an unexpected and thus far unexplained fire in the bookselling business. No one can predict that a story will have this sort of explosive popularity any more than anyone can explain the craze for Pet Rocks or Cabbage Patch dolls. Similarly, and in the same year, 1995, Richard Paul Evans’ tiny spiritually evocative and self-published book The Christmas Box was snatched up by Simon and Schuster and sold a million copies its first year. Such successes are flukes in the publishing industry. They hit the public at the right time, with just the right promotion and word-of-mouth recommendation, and they soared to remain on bestseller lists for months.

One thing those two books have in common is an emotional ride. They twang the heartstrings.

Three bestselling authors deliver a fear factor
Stephen King rocketed to fame with an unpretentious 1974 horror novel called Carrie. Tightly and expertly written, Carrie depicts a psychologically abused teenage girl tormented by her peers. Carrie White’s agonies and her eventual revenge touch us on a primitive level where our fight-or-flight trigger resides.

If King fired the nation’s hunger for horror, Dean R. Koontz fanned the flames as he rose to popularity with a 1980 book titled Whispers. The hero, a cop on the trail of a serial killer as unpredictable as he is ruthless, uncovers astonishing, blood-freezing family secrets that apparently shaped the killer’s psychotic personality.

Thomas Harris, with the 1981 publication of Red Dragon, Thomas Harris unleashed the most famous fictional serial killer of all, Hannibal “the Cannibal” Lecter. Lecter horrifies, but he also fascinates, and readers couldn’t let go of him. He returned in 1988, in Silence of the Lambs and again in 1999, in Hannibal.

While horror and dark suspense might not be your cup of tea, you can’t deny these bestsellers deliver a wallop of emotional impact.

Character driven stories can ignite our pride in humanity
Margaret Mitchell created not only a classic novel in Gone With The Wind but also a paradigm for heroines that still influence romance fiction 60 years later. Scarlet O’Hara was impatient, petulant, stubborn, selfish, deceitful, determination, and above all, passionate. And she ignited a passion in readers that no other heroine has quite matched.

Though not nearly as widely known, Quoyle, the homely, over-sized writer of Annie Proulx’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Shipping News is certainly captivating and memorable. Proulx stirs our compassion as she draws us seductively into Quoyle’s world, gradually transforming the damaged hero from a lovesick, ham-fisted bungler into a loving father and a valued citizen.

What do you want your reader to feel?
If you can’t answer that question immediately, think about the hero’s journey throughout the tale. How do you want the reader to feel about your hero? Curious? Sympathetic? Appreciative?

We tend to think of emotion as tied to such genres as romance (love, desire) and thriller (fear, worry) and to literary novels (sorrow, angst). Humor is also an emotion, as is appreciation, pride, horror, disgust and joy. If you’re writing a humorous novel, you want the reader to close the book laughing—or at least smiling. If you’re writing a story about courage and glory, you might want the reader to close the book feeling a sense of awe and admiration and perhaps pride in the hero.

A story needs one compelling emotional thrust that propels the hero and the reader to the journey’s end. Interspersed throughout are various emotional sparks—humor, anxiety, fear, sorrow, joy. These all contribute to a satisfying ride.

The trigger for your reader’s emotion lies in the amount of concern you’ve created for your story people. You want the reader to worry, about what will happen, which means you must make the reader care about your characters, especially your hero. And that begins on page one.

Not every book has the same emotional highs and lows.
Some whip you around like a rollercoaster, others bounce you gently along like a carriage ride in the park. But you can bet your left elbow that every editor is looking for the next bestselling novel. What they want to see in your opening pages is the promise of an emotional ride. What they want to feel at the end is a satisfying completion delivered with emotional impact.