Category Archives: emotional resonance

Solo Summer Travel Tips For Females (Or Anyone!): How to Lower Your Crime Risk

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Street-smart solo female travel safety tips to lower your target risk and stay in control.

I’m going to be brutally honest here. We spend an awful lot of our time and attention on employing safety efforts and dwelling on the false belief that we can actually cocoon ourselves in real safety. Helicopter parents and people, take note: the idea of safety is a sham. There is no safe place in the world. Just look at the daily news for proof.

I’m not saying this to alarm you or grab you with a fear-mongering hook. I’m saying it because we have to call a spade a spade. Until we look this problem in the eye, we’ll be kidding ourselves (and our children!) all the way to the grave.

That said, there are ways we can keep ourselves on the low end of the risk continuum. I’m borrowing that term from FBI agent, cold case detective, and personal friend Greg Cooper, who co-authored the book “Predators: Who They Are and How to Stop Them” with Michael R. King.

The risk continuum gauges how a person’s lifestyle, choices, locations, and activities place them on a scale from low to high risk for becoming a target of a predator.

Traveling alone as a woman can push you toward the higher end of that continuum if you don’t pay attention to how you move through the world. You need to notice more. Assess more. Think a few steps ahead. Not out of fear, but so that protective behavior keeps steering you lower on the continuum. You can’t eliminate risk. That isn’t realistic anywhere. But you can be prepared and fully present, because when you understand how environments work and where criminal intent tends to surface, you don’t move through a place as prey.

How To Be More Aware: Not Anxious

Before you step into an airport, set your mind on awareness. Notice who’s moving with purpose, who’s lingering without one, who’s paying attention to you instead of their own environment. To do this well, you have to put that phone away. No eyes glued to your screen.

Pay attention to subtle movements: someone standing closer than necessary when space is available, a person who adjusts their position more than once to stay near you, attention that feels focused rather than incidental. Most of the time, everything is normal. But when something isn’t, this is how it announces itself. When you notice it, you have time to move, to remove yourself, to alert security if needed.

Airports are high-distraction spaces. People are tired and focused on boarding times, and that creates opportunity for theft and deliberate targeting. Keep your belongings close, bags zipped, phone and wallet secured. When your attention is fully on your phone, you’re completely disconnected from your environment. Your safety in a chaotic space is more important than any call, text, or email.

Transportation Safety: Control the Transitions

Some of the most vulnerable moments in solo travel happen during transitions: leaving the airport, entering a vehicle, arriving somewhere unfamiliar. Slow down, pause, keep your head up, look around, and orient yourself before moving from place to place.

Before getting into any ride, pause. Confirm the driver’s name, photo, and license plate against what the app shows before you step inside. Once inside, share your route with someone who can confirm you’ve arrived when and where you’re supposed to.

If something feels off, act early. Even a simple question establishes presence and signals that you’re paying attention. Predators in any context always prefer a target who isn’t watching. Drivers who know their passengers are alert behave differently than those who see a distracted, disconnected passenger. Don’t be that passenger.

Hotel and Airbnb Stays for Women Traveling Alone

Where you stay becomes your base of control. The moment you arrive, take ownership of the space. Check the locks. Understand entry points. Notice where the exits are and how you’d leave quickly if needed.

Airbnb safety for women starts before arrival. Review listings carefully, paying attention to access details, host reviews, and location context. A well-reviewed property in a walkable area with clear security measures is worth prioritizing over a cheaper option that introduces uncertainty.

In hotels, keep your room number private and never repeat it aloud in the lobby. Verify anyone claiming to be staff before opening the door. Use all available security features, not just the main lock. A portable door stop alarm is one of the most practical things you can travel with. You lower your risk when you understand your space and take control of it.

Navigating Public Spaces: Move With Purpose

When you’re walking through a city or using public transit, your presence communicates more than you realize. People read movement. They notice hesitation, distraction, and uncertainty. Predators specifically notice these things, because those signals tell them you aren’t paying attention.

You don’t need exaggerated confidence. You need purpose. Keep your head up. If you need to check directions, step into a store or café rather than stopping in an open area. Choose a well-lit route over a shorter one. Position yourself near others instead of in isolated areas. Create distance early if someone enters your space without a clear reason. Your posture, pace, and awareness signal that you’re engaged and alert. Predators look for the easiest path to a target. Don’t give them one.

Social Interactions: Stay Friendly, Stay Boundaried

Travel is enhanced by the people we meet along the way, and most interactions are genuinely positive. But clear personal limits are a core part of lowering your risk as a solo female traveler.

You don’t need to share where you’re staying, where you’re from, or where you plan to visit next. You don’t need to reveal that you’re traveling alone. You can be warm and engaging without exposing information that raises your risk. Pay attention to how people respond when you redirect or decline. Respect is a signal. Pressure from a predator is also a signal, and it’s one worth taking seriously immediately.

Understanding How Predators Behave in Travel Environments

Predators look for the path of least resistance. Someone juggling bags and chatting on their phone is exactly what they’re scanning for. Someone hesitating in an open area, looking unsure, is exactly what they prefer. Your physical behavior is being read and interpreted. When you move with awareness and intention, you signal that you’re confident and paying attention. It may be the difference between becoming a target and watching a predator move on to someone who isn’t watching. You can’t eliminate the predator. You can absolutely raise the cost of targeting you.

Trust Your Instincts Immediately

One of the most important things you can do for your safety as a solo traveling woman is to listen to your instincts and act on them immediately. If something feels off, it probably is. Leave. Change direction. Create space. Move away from whatever is causing that hair on the back of your neck to stand up.

Instinct is pattern recognition working beneath the surface. It draws from everything you’ve seen, experienced, and processed, and it often registers a shift before your conscious mind catches up. You don’t need proof. You don’t owe anyone an explanation for acting on a feeling that something isn’t right.

Women are trained to override their instincts: stay polite, don’t make a scene, give someone the benefit of the doubt. But that is exactly what predators count on. Trust me, as someone raised in Michigan on Midwest nice, I have to remind myself regularly that I don’t have to be nice if I’m feeling threatened. Neither do you.

Travel Prep for Solo Women

Preparation lowers your risk before you ever leave home. These habits keep you on the lower end of the risk continuum from the start.

  • Know your route, your itinerary, and your backup options if plans fall through.
  • Share your full itinerary with someone you trust, including hotel addresses and check-in times.
  • Write an emergency contact number on a card kept on your person, not just in your phone. Memorize at least three numbers in case your phone is lost or stolen.
  • Keep copies of important documents in a separate location from the originals.
  • Download offline maps before you arrive so you can navigate without cell service.
  • Research your destination before you go: which neighborhoods carry higher risk, what local scams look like, and what the emergency number is.
  • Carry a personal safety alarm that clips to your bag or keychain.
  • Don’t publish your real-time location on social media. Post the beautiful photos after you’ve moved on.

Frequently Asked Questions: Solo Female Travel Safety

Is solo female travel safe?

Nowhere in this world is safe. You have to start with that premise. Think about it: even going to school or church can end in tragedy. But we can’t live paralyzed under that fear. What we can do is increase our awareness, preparation, and situational instincts to keep ourselves on the low end of the risk continuum. Solo female travel can be both rewarding and lower-risk when you take steps to reduce predator opportunity through intentional movement, clear personal limits, and the habit of trusting your instincts the second they show up.

What are the best safety tips for women traveling alone?

The most effective solo female travel safety habits: stay aware of your surroundings without hypervigilance, slow down at transition moments, trust your instincts before you have proof, maintain personal limits in social interactions without apology, and prepare in advance so unfamiliar environments don’t require real-time decisions in the open.

How do you stay safe in hotels or Airbnbs as a solo female traveler?

Take ownership of the space immediately on arrival. Check locks and understand entry points. Know where the exits are. In hotels, keep your room number private and verify anyone claiming to be staff before opening the door. Use a portable door stop alarm. With Airbnb, review access details, host reviews, and location context before booking.

What are the most dangerous moments in solo travel for women?

Transition moments carry the highest risk: leaving airports, entering unfamiliar vehicles, arriving at new accommodations, and navigating new public transit systems. These are the moments when you’re managing unfamiliar territory, baggage, tiredness, and maybe a new language all at once. Slowing down, pausing to orient, and verifying before moving are the most effective actions at each of these points.

How do you stay safe using rideshare apps when traveling alone?

Before entering any vehicle, confirm the driver’s name, photo, and license plate against what the app shows. Don’t get in until you’ve verified all three. Once inside, share your trip with a contact. Stay generally aware of your route. Predators prefer passengers who aren’t paying attention. Don’t be one.

How do you set limits with strangers while traveling without being rude?

You can be warm and still be private. You don’t need to explain that you’re alone, share your accommodation details, or provide personal information to have a friendly interaction. Redirect with brevity: “I’m just exploring” or “I’m meeting people shortly” closes the loop without confrontation. Pay attention to whether the person respects the redirect or pushes past it. That response tells you more than the initial approach did.

What should solo female travelers do if they feel their risk is rising?

Act on the instinct immediately. You don’t need evidence or a rational justification. Leave. Change direction. Move toward more people, a lit space, or a business. The urge to stay polite or avoid making a scene is real, but it’s exactly what criminal predators count on. Your safety is more important than the social comfort of the person who raised your instincts.

Is it safe to travel alone as a woman at night?

With intentional planning, you can significantly lower your risk. Choose well-lit populated routes over shortcuts. Know your destination before you leave. Share your route with someone. Use rideshare over walking in unfamiliar areas after dark. Trust your read of the environment: your instincts will register the difference between a busy neighborhood and an empty street before your logic does.

 

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Jennifer Dornbush is an author, screenwriter, and forensic specialist who brings crime stories to life with authenticity and heart. With a background rooted in real-world forensics and a passion for crafting unforgettable mysteries, Jennifer offers readers and viewers a front-row seat to the intersection of science, justice, and human nature. Jennifer’s crime expertise has made her a sought-after speaker, consultant, and educator. Through her webinars and master courses, Jennifer guides writers in melding suspenseful storytelling with forensic realism to the screen and page. Meet her at www.jenniferdornbush.com

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Empathy, Emotional Resonance, and Fear

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Emotion is at the heart of what makes fiction connect with a reader. People read for various reasons, but feeling suspense, or romantic love,  or a sense of wonder, or the suspicion arising from a mysterious crime, etc., and sometimes several of these at the same time, is a big part of what keeps a reader turning pages. Wanting to experience those feelings vicariously with the characters, and at the same time, experiencing the tension when those feelings are withheld or jeopardized by conflict.

In today’s Words of Wisdom excerpts, Joe Moore looks at how to create empathy so your reader will become attached to those characters, Clare Langley-Hawthorne discusses the importance of proving emotional resonance for the reader with your characters, and Laura Benedict considers the connection readers have to us via our fears.

All the posts are worth reading in full, and are linked from the date at the bottom of each excerpt.

So if empathy is the key to your reader becoming attached to your characters, what is a proven method for creating emotions?

Let’s say you want your character to be afraid—to experience fear. You could always just tell the reader that he or she is scared. That would mean little or nothing because not only is it telling, it paints an unclear picture in the mind of the reader. Scared could mean a 100 different things to a 100 different people. Now ask yourself what it felt like when you’ve experienced fear. Perhaps you were in a parking garage late at night. The sound of your high heels seemed as loud as hammer strikes. The shadows were darker than you remembered. You could see your car but it appeared miles away. Then you hear someone cough. But there’s no one around. You pick up the pace. Your heels become gunshots. You shift your gaze like a gazelle that sensed a stalking big cat as you hug your purse to your chest. Your pulse quickens. Breathing becomes shallow and frantic. Palms sweat cold. Legs shake. You press your key fob and your car’s lights flash but your vision blurs. You hear a strange cry escape your throat—a sound you’ve never made before. Your car is only yards away but you don’t feel like you’re getting closer. Were those your footfalls echoing off concrete walls or were they coming from the shadows? You reach for the door handle, your hand shaking, fear gripping you like a cloak of ice.

Here’s my point. It may not have been in a dark parking garage late at night but we’ve all felt it. Paralyzing, heart-stopping fear. In your story, you need to have your character feel the same. Describe it so that your reader will empathize. So that their hands will shake and their chest will tighten. Make them sweat, even if it’s only in their imagination. Approach every emotion your characters feel in the same manner. Use your life experience. How did you feel the first time you felt love, hate, jealousy, rejection. If you are honest in expressing true emotions through your characters, your reader will have empathy for them, and very possibly come to list them as their all-time favorite.

Joe Moore—August 3, 2016

Almost every book I’ve failed to finish or which has left me disappointed, has failed because I haven’t been able to care enough about the characters. Even in books where the plot has become thin or events have stretched credulity, emotionally deep and resonant characters have kept me reading.

In some ways, the process of providing emotional resonance mirrors the way a writer describes a character because it focuses on the feelings the character inspires in a reader. Those feelings don’t have to always be warm and fluffy, but they do need to strike a chord with a reader. The most powerful characters stay with a reader long after the book is finished.

All too often at writing classes or conferences the pieces that I’ve read or critiqued have had one major failing – the characters themselves. They are often flat on the page, cliched or simply do not ring true. So how do you create emotionally complex, relatable and ultimately resonant characters? Maybe the best starting point is to identify what not to do and work up from there.

Many new writers may feel the urge to create a quirky, one-of-a-kind character or perhaps they hope to create characters similar to those that have proven most popular in their genre (here’s where the recovering alcoholic, down at heel PI often comes into play). In either case, a writer should beware of using standard character tropes and cliches as well as going too far the other way by creating the most ‘out there’ character who sounds nothing like anyone a reader would ever meet in real life. if a character is nothing more that a series of quirks or tics then a reader is going to be just as dissatisfied as if the character is little more than a carbon copy of the stock-standard genre character. The key is (I think) to get into the head and emotions of a character in a way that displays the writer’s own unique perspective. In some ways, perhaps you have to place a little of yourself in each character (maybe not in a literal sense but certainly in an emotional sense).

Striking a chord in readers can be tricky as each reader also brings their own perspective, background, and emotions to the books they are reading. One character’s actions may pack an emotional punch for some readers and yet leave others cold. I find, for example, that parents in books often pack a huge emotional whallop for me, especially in books like Wonder or The Fault in our Stars. If I’d read these books when I was younger, I suspect different characters would have evoked a very different kind of emotional reaction. Yet there are some universal truths out there and characters that evoke strong emotions will go on to have wider resonance.

It’s hard to provide any kind of definitive ‘tip list’ for creating this kind of emotional resonance, simply because it is an illusive target (we only know it when we feel in the gut) but I think some of the elements include:

  • Going deep within a character’s psyche to understand their motivations;
  • Drawing upon your own past experiences and interactions to add depth;
  • Using action as well as interaction to draw out a character rather than description alone (this helps readers experience a character rather than just reading about them in a static sense);
  • Finding the humanity within all the characters (even your villains);
  • Exploring the inhumanity within all your characters (we all have weaknesses and foibles, prejudices and flaws that make us who we are – even if we’re not proud of them);
  • Looking for the universality of experience that strikes a chord in you the writer as you describe your characters and take them on their unique journey through your book;
  • Avoiding thinking or describing characters in terms of what they should be but rather what they are – try to step back from relying on conventions or mimicking other writer’s characters and remember no one is superhuman or a psychopath in their own mind.

Clare Langley-Hawthorne—August 15, 2016

When we write about things that frighten us, chances are there will be lots of readers who share our fears. We can exploit (terrible word, but I mean it in the nicest way) those fears and redeem ourselves through characters that may suffer for a while, but journey to overcome their fears or terrifying situations.

As humans we all have fears. They don’t have to be big, bloody fears, or deeply felt emotional fears to propel or inspire a story. They can be as small as a spider or as microscopic as damaged chromosomes. Resonance is the important thing.

Here’s a list of fears that immediately spark stories of all sorts for me:

Fear of death.

Fear of being submerged in water.

Fear of my embarrassing secrets being revealed in public.

Fear of losing a child.

Fear of being blackmailed.

Fear of being taken advantage of.

Fear of success.

Fear of being a failure.

Fear of a bug crawling in one’s ear or nose.

Fear of being watched in a lighted house from the darkness outside.

Fear of being pulled over by a fake cop on a lonesome road.

Fear of being mistaken for a criminal.

Fear of home invasion.

Fear of the apocalypse.

Fear of snakes in the house.

Fear of roaming packs of dogs.

Fear of being watched through a computer’s camera.

Fear of being kidnapped.

Fear of a child being hurt or being killed by one’s carelessness.

Fear of being judged and found wanting.

Fear of being too happy, because it can’t last.

Fear of one’s eye(s) being gouged out.

Fear of the supernatural.

Fear of random violence.

Fear of cancer.

Fear of loving too much.

Fear of poverty.

Fear of seeing open, bleeding wounds.

Fear of corpses.

Fear of being wrong.

Fear of betrayal.

Fear of snarky groups of teenage girls.

Fear of being vulnerable.

Fear of losing a lover.

Fear of losing a friendship.

As you can see from the list, many of these fears are close to being universal for humans. Readers always want to discover things in stories that they can identify with. It’s all about the resonance, and not so much about the shock value.

Laura Benedict—January 24, 2018

***

Now it’s your turn to weigh in about creating and connecting emotions with your readers.

  1. Have you drawn directly on your life experience to help create emotion? Any tips on drawing on your life?
  2. How important is forging emotional resonance with your characters to you? As a reader, how important is it to experience?
  3. What fears spark or drive stories for you? Any that weren’t listed above?

***

You can join my reader group and receive a brand-new Meg Booker prequel novella.

Newly-hired librarian Meg Booker expects the extra two hours the library is open to be a piece of cake. Instead, she finds herself confronted by a mystery involving cookies.

December, 1984. Fir Grove Library, Portland, Oregon: Feathered hair. Cowled sweaters. Instant cameras. Meg has volunteered to work late at the branch during the Christmas festival. Families throng the library, looking to find items for the community treasure hunt. All goes well until odd behavior by a few patrons raises her curiosity. When cookies go missing, Meg realizes she’s stumbled into a mystery and decides she must solve it, even if it means joining the community treasure hunt and racing to the finish.

Farewell, My Cookie is a prequel novella to the Meg Booker Librarian Mysteries—a cozy library mystery series set in the 1980s.

Guest Post by Agatha-Winner Leslie Budewitz

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Agatha-winning author Leslie Budewitz

Today, I’m pleased to host Leslie Budewitz for this guest post. Leslie is an attorney, mystery author of two cozy series, and triple Agatha Award winner. For more than 20 years, she and I have been trusted critique partners and good friends.

Leslie offers insightful techniques to deepen emotion in our writing. Welcome, Leslie!

Emotional Research

by Leslie Budewitz

No matter what genre we write, readers come to our books in part for an emotional connection with our characters and the story. One way to give them that is to draw on our own experiences. We’ve all felt deep emotion—rage, betrayal, jealousy—that if pushed to extremes could lead us to do terrible things, planned or unplanned. I’m betting most of you have drawn on your own emotional experiences in your fiction, exploring your personal emotions, perhaps through a free-write, then giving that, or pieces of it, to your characters.

But sometimes characters have experiences we haven’t had. This is when need to call on our research and observational skills, as well as our empathy, to better understand a character’s emotional experiences, what motivates them, and how they will respond in a particular story crisis.

I first delved into this when writing my first published mystery, Death al Dente. When the series began, my main character, Erin Murphy, was a 32-year-old who had lost her father to a hit-and-run accident when she was 17; the crime was unsolved and I planned to solve it over the course of the first three books.

My father died when I was 30. That’s a very different experience. I’d worked on countless personal injury cases as a lawyer, including wrongful death cases, and knew some of what survivors went through. But I needed to know more about the emotion and how it might continue to influence this particular woman

I sat down and wrote by hand about every person I could think of that I knew—well or not well—who’d lost a parent when they were young. Some of my observations were decades old, but it turned out that I knew a lot. I remembered talking on the phone for an hour, back when daytime long distance was expensive, when my best friend from college lost her father at 21. I thought about some of the ways that loss at that age affected her—she’s still my BFF—and gave her a different experience than her older siblings got.

I remembered a conversation with a 35-year-old colleague whose father died when he was 18. “But you were grown,” a friend said, implying that that lessened the impact; “not really,” he replied, and his sadness told me how much he felt had been unjustly taken from him.

I wrote about the high school classmate whose father died the year after we graduated, and whose own husband died in his early 40s, leaving her with a small child, giving her—and me—a dual perspective. I let my focus drift and I wrote about my reaction and that of my high school classmates when a boy in our class was killed in a car accident junior year. Later that same week, a girl a year behind us in our small school lost her mother to wintry roads; the family lived near us and went to the same church. I thought about the baby, not a year old, who never knew his mother, and some poor decisions the oldest girl made that might have turned out differently if not for that tragedy.

Other options: Talk to people who’ve had your character’s experience, if they’re willing, or to people involved with it in other ways. I talked to my husband, who’s a doctor of natural medicine with a general practice and has treated many patients rocked by grief. Talk to your friend who teaches high school or your walking buddy who’s a social worker.

I searched online for guides for teachers and school counselors on dealing with students who lost a parent. You could also read memoir, personal accounts, or YA novels involving that situation.

And from all of that, I was able to see how Erin would have responded, the different ways her older brother and sister responded; how the death affected her relationship with her mother at the time, and how it affects their relationship now. Francesca still wants to protect Erin, who’s 32, and knows she can’t, any more than she could when Erin went off to college that fall. What does that lead Francesca to do—and say—when she sees her daughter investigating murder? Erin was on stage in the local theater rehearsing for the school play when the accident happened; fifteen years later, she still thinks about that every time she walks in the building. And the guilt she feels over having argued with him the last time she saw him doesn’t resolve until she solves the crime. It was just a teenager’s pique, but the more complicated the relationship, the more complicated the emotions and the bigger the potential story impact.

Of course, all losses have ripple effects. In college, Erin was aloof, focused on school and her own grief. She barely noticed a guy who was really into her. She meets him again, 15 years later. How does that history influence their relationship? And the impact on her friendship with her childhood best pal is a big driver of the story as well, because of what the other girl thought she knew and how she responded—and because she’s now a sheriff’s detective in their hometown.

For Erin, I did the emotional research during the first draft. For Bitterroot Lake, my suspense debut coming out later this month, I did the digging during revision, in response to questions from my editor. I thought about people I knew who, from my perspective, appeared to be driven by bitterness and resentment. I read articles online in Psychology Today and blog posts by psychologists. Tip: This is one time when you want to read the comments! People will say the most amazing things when given the freedom.

All that helped me develop what I knew, and gave me specifics on how such a person views the world and the language they use. I was able to imagine more fully what this particular character in this town, in this crisis, might do.

I said write by hand when you mine your memories and connections, and I mean it. Research shows that writing by hand bypasses our internal editors and judges, and gives us more direct access to our feelings.

You know how to research dates and car models and the color of prison jumpsuits. Turn those skills to your characters’ inner lives and you—and your readers—will connect with them more deeply, more fully.

~~~

Leslie Budewitz blends her passion for food, great mysteries, and the Northwest in two cozy mystery series, the Spice Shop mysteries set in Seattle’s Pike Place Market, and the Food Lovers’ Village mysteries, set in NW Montana. She’ll make her suspense debut with BITTERROOT LAKE, written as Alicia Beckman, in April 2021. A three-time Agatha-Award winner (2011, Best Nonfiction; 2013, Best First Novel; 2018, Best Short Story), she is a current board member of Mystery Writers of America and a past president of Sisters in Crime. She lives in NW Montana.

Find her online at www.LeslieBudewitz.com and on Facebook at www.Facebook.com/LeslieBudewitzAuthor

When four women separated by tragedy reunite at a lakeside Montana lodge, murder forces them to confront everything they thought they knew about the terrifying accident that tore them apart, in Agatha Award-winning author Alicia Beckman’s suspense debut.

More about Bitterroot Lake, including an excerpt and buy links here: https://www.lesliebudewitz.com/bitterroot-lake/

 

 

A big thank you to Leslie for sharing her wisdom! 

TKZers: Do you have favorite techniques to portray emotions about experiences you haven’t experienced yourself? Please share in the comments section. 

Emotional Resonance

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by Clare Langley-Hawthorne

I’ve been reading a great book on writing for children and YA called ‘Writing Irresistible KidLit‘ by Mary Kole and, apart from wishing I’d read it a little earlier (for it encapsulates all the elements that make any novel great), I was particularly interested in the comments surrounding the need for emotional resonance. Kole writes that when she puts down most manuscripts or submissions she’s left wondering “And? So what?” She notes that all too often a book fails to create sufficient emotional resonance to make the reader care – and all too often this is because the writer hasn’t built in enough conflict.

Just a few weeks ago I experienced the exact thing Kole was writing about. I was only a couple of chapters into the final instalment in a very popular YA trilogy when I put down the book and thought “So what?” The story had totally lost any kind of emotional resonance for me.There was no longer any conflict that I cared about between the characters, and (as a result) I couldn’t be bothered continuing to read. To be fair, I did keep reading but I found myself skimming the pages until the end hoping that there would be a point at which I became reinvested in the story. 
There wasn’t.

Often when we talk about the craft of writing we focus on elements such as characterisation, setting, style, plot and structure. Embedded within all of these are the need to establish a strong voice and the need to make a reader care enough to keep turning the pages. However the issue of emotional resonance can be just as tricky to explain as the concept of ‘voice’ in some one’s writing. You know it when you see it, just as you know when it’s not there – but it can be a pretty difficult concept to wrangle to the ground.

So, mulling over this rather slippery concept of emotional resonance, I thought of a few key elements, namely:

  • High stakes for characters that have believable motivations and emotions;
  • High conflict between these characters, who face life changing events that a reader cannot help but become invested in; and
  • A greater (‘bigger’) question that touches upon core emotional needs that readers identify can with…

Central to all of these is conflict (both between and within the characters) – which is exactly what was missing from the book I just tried to finish. As I grapple with final edits to a current WIP, I have the issue of emotional resonance now firmly in my mind. I don’t want my agent or an editor finishing it, putting it down, and saying “And? So what?”(!)

So fellow TKZers, how would you characterise emotional resonance? How do you try to achieve it in your own writing? And have you ever put down a book because (like me) you found yourself saying “So what?”…