I'm scared my writing won't affect anyone

Writers' Fear # 3

Welcome back to the blog in which I invite writers to share their deepest fears, then I discuss them right here on Scary Truths Of Writing.

This particular fear - I’m scared my writing won’t affect anyone - was expressed to me by a Twitter user, many years ago. And here is my response:

Good!  This one should scare you. It’s what we call a motivating fear.

Affecting people is something that writers all too often forget. 

Oh, their plotting may be inch-perfect, conforming to all manner of textbook graphs and bar charts. 

Their dialogue may be super-snappy or silky-smooth.

Maybe their characters even seem hyper-real. 

And yet their work leaves their audience’s heart strings criminally untwanged. 

Failing to make your reader care is quite the sin.  Here’s the good news: you’re already afraid that you’ll make this mistake, which makes it all the less likely that you will.  The more conscious you are of the need to invest the audience in your work, the better.

The task of affecting your audience is arguably rooted in character.  Is your main character likeable or at least relatable?  Will the reader/audience root for them in some way? If the answer’s no, are they somehow magnetic, unpredictable and/or fascinating?  If the answer’s still no, what can you do to change that?

You’ll also need to think long and hard about your ending.  First and last impressions count, but your ending will decide whether people are touched (or however you want to affect them - who knows, maybe you want to repulse them) by the piece, or just shrug and rightly grumble in online reviews that they never connected throughout. 

This kind of connection can feel highly elusive and takes practice to get right.  Here’s a useful exercise: watch a film, read a book, watch a play, any narrative-based artform.  Make notes of the points at which you feel engaged, or you connect, or you just basically feel something. Do this several times with various pieces of work.  Eventually, you’ll start to get the sense of how other writers pull your strings.

Now admittedly, you can get a little too cynical and ‘Hollywood’ about this stuff. Blake Snyder’s screenwriting-focused book Save The Cat invites mixed views from readers, but I think there’s something in it, if you want the audience to connect to your protagonist. You just don’t want to get too painfully obvious or cliched about the whole thing, so that the audience rolls its eyes at your attempted manipulations.

Now that you have a character of interest, make the stakes as high as possible for them, to arouse maximum concern.  

What do they stand to lose and how will the audience feel about them failing? 

What are you writing about here that matters?

Ask yourself these questions all the time and make sure your answers are convincing.

I like to bear in mind something Chuck Palahniuk once suggested: write what upsets you. If it upsets you, and you’re not an alien from another world, then it’ll probably upset your audience too. Equally, you can swap out upsets for moves.

Lastly, monitor how you feel while you write. If you get the lump in your throat, or the swell of rage in your chest, or the prickles down the nape of your neck, then chances are you’re doing something right.

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I left Substack in Jan 2024.

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