A few weeks ago on a walk around my neighborhood, I found myself captivated by two peaked additions on top of the roof of a nice little house on the corner of my block. I imagined a writer sitting at her desk way up in one of the attic spaces. I couldn’t help but wonder why these little rooms sitting atop this roof created such a warm feeling in me.
Later, I came to learn that these little attics were false additions. Decorative dormers. They were illusions. I laughed when I learned that these features were indeed thoughtfully designed and meant to create a specific feeling in passersby. Much like anything we create, emotional texture (the various ways in which we feel something) is almost always part of the design, or at least, it should be.
When it comes to books, readers want to follow their narrator closely. Readers want to press pause on their own lives and temporarily step into the world a writer has created. And whether it’s falling into the vivid world of a novel or closely mapping someone’s personal triumphs in a memoir, readers are looking for ways to be moved and opportunities to see the world differently.
We are all looking to feel. How do we as writers do that for our readers?
When I think back to those decorative dormers sitting on the roof, and the emotions that swarmed around me, the house felt trustworthy. I could definitely envision myself walking up the front steps, stepping through the front entryway and feeling like I had come home. How was it possible that some decorative dormers could do that?
When you feel something in the books you read, someone has created the conditions for you to let a bit of your own story seep into the book. The writer has found a way for you to trust them. And when you trust the writer, you scoot a little closer and settle in for the long haul. You’re invested, ready to be moved by the words on the page.
When I speak to my students about building trust with their reader through emotional texture, I liken it to the writer putting together a puzzle, but with the caveat that there will always be one puzzle piece missing. The missing puzzle piece is clenched in the fist of every reader. Differently shaped, moldable, meant to wedge itself into the puzzle perfectly at a time unique to the reader. What can you do as a writer to make that reader trust you enough that they unclench that fist, and put their puzzle piece down into the puzzle you started?
In an issue of Write Magazine, published by the Writer’s Union of Canada, Jessica Vatalis wrote about her experience sharing her memoir and basically being told by the reader that they didn’t feel anything. In the article, Vitalis wrote “Emotional resonance is more important than facts. I learned this lesson the hard way. After writing a full draft of my memoir, I showed it to a friend. She said the story was interesting, but didn’t make her feel anything. I was stunned. How could a story about a child whose father was killed — maybe murdered — before she was born, a kid who lived in tents and campers and cabins with no electricity, a kid who was often cold, hungry, and scared, not have an emotional impact?”
If a reader says they don’t feel anything, aside from the over generalized advice “show don’t tell” or the clichéd “no tears in the writer no tears in the reader” line, what emotional texture techniques can writers use to intentionally move their reader?
Imagine emotional texture as an open umbrella. Under that umbrella, you’ll find a powerful cluster of tools and techniques that, if used at the right time, can evoke something in your readers.
Such simple tools include using the five senses, lyrical language and metaphor, playing with proximity, pacing, adding high impact lines and more.
One of the more complex techniques you can employ is what I call “writing the absence,” which is when the writer decides to leave parts, people or places out of the story. The writer then looks for ways for the absence or negative space to do the work of making the reader feel. This can be as simple as footprints left in the sand, lingering scents, lipstick on a glass or an empty chair pulled out from the table. Writing the absence can also be as complex as leaving out an entire voice and letting what remains haunt the reader. It is, after all, our job as writers to haunt.
When considering writing the absence, a writer can ask themselves four things:
1. What feeling are you trying to evoke in the reader?
2. What are you unwilling to overexplain?
3. If there is something you leave out or do not say, what will the reader need in order to feel what you want them to feel?
4. Who will I be temporarily pushing away and for how long?
In the introduction to Toni Morrison’s only published short story, “Recitatif,” UK writer Zadie Smith talks about creating thrilled observers in which readers encounter a moment in the writing where they do not (or cannot) understand the exchange. Maybe it’s an unfamiliar cultural reference or a moment in a very specific history that for whatever reason the reader cannot place themselves in. It’s when, as Smith puts it, “no image comes to mind” that these moments turn into opportunities for readers to become thrilled observers, to be only partially included, but excited to be in this place of new discovery.
A super simple example of “writing the absence” and simultaneously creating thrilled observers is in Sandra Cisneros’ novel “The House On Mango Street” where her young narrator is imagining she and her family moving into the house of their dreams. She wrote: “And we’d have a basement and at least three washrooms so when we took a bath we wouldn’t have to tell everybody.” And it is here that those who have lived in small homes with many people will understand the context and emotional weight of no longer having to alert everyone to your desire for a bath (because, what if someone needs to use the toilet while you are in the bath?) Those who have lived in this way understand what a profound change in socioeconomic status it is. Here, the author leaves out the explanatory fabric and trusts the reader to fill in the blanks. As a reader, this was where I put my puzzle piece down and I was only on page four. This example also doubles as a solid example of a high impact line: a short simple line that means so much more than what it says on the surface.
Lush description is one of the easiest emotional texture techniques to employ. One of my favorite writers, David Chariandy, does this so well in his novel, “Brother”:
When we were very young, we’d build forts and hide-aways in the brush, using branches but also cardboard and broken pieces of furniture occasionally dumped here. We’d race twigs in the creek, spot little speckled fish swimming together in the blowing current, hunt for the other small lives that had managed to survive in the park unnoticed. The tracks in the mud of a muskrat or a raccoon or maybe a turtle. One summer we used a stick to corner a crayfish, blue-red and mottled, and Francis explained shiveringly how it grew by cracking its own body open.”
In just this brief passage (which balloons even further), Chariandy has used description to build a mini world inside a bigger world. As readers, we also get to witness the private and intimate relationship between two young brothers unfold. Later, the description goes on to include “plastic bags and foil drifting down from the fast-food joints above.” When we consider the wider context through which this excerpt sits, we can also intuit that this time in nature is also an escape from the ever oppressive shadow of inner city life.
Most writers struggle not only with how to use these techniques but when to use them. Although you can weave in these elements as you write your first draft, revision is where you can take the messy draft and with one specific focus at a time, move through the draft using emotional texture techniques one pass at a time. It takes creative experimentation. You have to be willing to try so many things differently.
Begin to ask questions of the work. Investigate the parts of the book where you found yourself particularly moved. Pay close attention to the verbs used and ask yourself how they play a role in moving you. What did the writer say? What did they leave out? How close did they pull you in?
How did they describe a particular place and what did that make you think of? And even after all this intricate sculpting, dissecting, and questioning, what it really comes down to is the way writers stitch words together in such a way that they embed themselves in the deepest crevices of the mind. They haunt us.
In a conversation with David Perell, writer Ocean Vuong said, “We’re out here to write sentences the species has never encountered, and it’s possible in this lifetime.” We are here to use our tools in new ways. This is the work of the writer.
Decision-making is at the core of all writing but it’s also at the centre of just being human. What makes us feel is unique. Sometimes what makes us feel can’t be explained. Sometimes what makes us feel is as simple as a decorative dormer strategically placed on the roof of some small house on the corner of a street no one else noticed. But no matter what caused the feeling, the feeling is real, it is alive and it is this feeling that attaches some part of us to every story we’ve ever read.
Chelene Knight is the author of Braided Skin and the memoir Dear Current Occupant, winner of the 2018 Vancouver Book Award. Her novel, Junie is winner of the 2023 Vancouver Book Award and a finalist for the Ferro-Grumley Prize for LGBTQ fiction. Her narrative nonfiction book, Let It Go: Free Yourself From Old Beliefs and Find a New Path To Joy is out with HarperCollins Canada. Previously a professor of poetry at the University of Toronto and the University of British Columbia, she is now an MFA fiction mentor at the University of Kings College and founder of Breathing Space Creative Studio.
