in this video I'm going to show you seven principles for creating more emotion in your fantasy novels drawing from the emotional craft of fiction by Donald moss moss has run a successful literary Agency for over 40 years and his clients include notable fantasy authors like Brett weeks and Peter mcle who have sold millions of books what I really try to do is to uh Analyze That which seems magical or mysterious in fiction I've used this book a ton since I first read it in 2019 and it's filled with a lot of surprising and counterintuitive strategy that have helped me create more emotion in my fantasy novels and in my video game the first principle I want to share with you is to infuse info dumps with meaning so this is really a cheat code that allows you to use as much info dumping Exposition and World building as you want in your fantasy novel which is a big reason why we come to write fantasy we want to create these incredible worlds and we want to be able to convey those to readers in a way that feels enjoyable and entertaining and doesn't feel like we are bogging down the narrative with a bunch of clunky Exposition and clunky details from my experience of editing fantasy stories for over 20 writers this year and getting on over 80 coaching calls with those writers I know that trying to convey the key details about your unique world and your magic system and your history can be a real struggle but fortunately in the emotional crafter fiction Moss gives a really good solution to get around this as he says in the book what gives information emotional effect is not the facts it conveys but the personal significance it holds so in other words whenever you're writing a setting description in your story always be asking yourself if I was in the mind of the character who is observing this what would they notice how would they feel about this location what emotional impact would it have on them let me show you an example from one of my favorite books to kind of show this principle in action and help this make more sense so right here we have the lies of Lo lamur by Scott Lynch one of my absolute favorite fantasy novels it is basically this sort of high story set in this phenician inspired fantasy setting about a bunch of stes trying to pull off this incredible con so let me read a scene to you from this story that is on page 139 of my Edition here the last mistake was a place where the underworld of kamore bubbled to the surface a Flatout Crooks Tavern where right people of every sort could drink and speak freely of their business where respectable citizens stood out like serpents in a nursery and were quickly escorted out the door by mean-looking thick armed men with small imaginations here entire gangs would come to drink and arrange jobs and just themselves off in their cups men would argue loudly about the best way to strangle someone from behind and the best sorts of poison to use in wine or food would openly proclaim the Folly of the Duke's court or his taxation schemes or his diplomatic arrangements with the other cities of the Inc they would refight entire battles with dice and fragments of chicken bones as their armies loudly denouncing how they would have turned left when Juke nikan had gone right had they would have stood fast when the 5,000 blackened iron Spears The Mad Count's Rebellion had come surging down Gods gate Hill towards them not one of them no matter how far dust in liquor or gaze or the strange narcotic powers of jerim no matter what Feats of generalship or state crafty credited himself with the foresight to bring off would dare to suggest to Capen Carlo baravi that he should ever change so much as a single button on his waist coat so what makes that scene so effective from an emotional level and what makes it so entertaining to read even though it is just dumping a bunch of World building and Exposition on us well yeah it is dumping a bunch of details about the setting on us but it's doing it filtered through the emotional experience of the characters in that place we never actually really go into detail about what the bar looks like but instead we kind of follow the inhabitants of this location and we follow their emotional experience we get a sense that this place is chaotic it's bustling it's full of these rambunctious thieves who are spinning tall tals in between their drinks but crucially there's also a hint of fear that is running beneath it all at the very end you get that that description about the one person that these people wouldn't think to trifle with so as Donald mus says in the emotional craft of fiction as soon as you can start to attach some kind of emotional meaning to the description passages in your book you can kind of just have free reign to describe as much as you want because you're not just describing at the expense of developing character you're actually developing character and your setting and your world building and sometimes also your plot at the same time and it doesn't just have to be setting descriptions that you do this with you can literally take any small thing in your story whether it is a particular item that a character has whether it is a particular food that your character is eating and if you can figure out how to attach some kind of emotional weight or emotional sensation to that thing then the depth of connection that the reader is going to get into your story is going to be far greater as Moss says meaning lifts the mundane to new levels and with it our feelings when a character is struck by the meaning of everyday things we cannot help being struck by that character and to take this idea further you should use the second main principle I learned from this book which is to write around the Primary Emotion so many fantasy writers make the mistake of just trying to convey one emotion at a time to the reader when you do this it usually feels really clumsy and unsettle you're just sort of hitting them over the head and you're saying you should feel love you should feel fear you should feel Joy and it usually fails so what's the solution well in reality our feelings are rarely so simple they are usually messy and complicated and sometimes we struggle to put names to the things that we are experiencing we rarely feel one feeling at a time and that's something you should be exploring in your story as Moss says the art we're seeking is the evocation of tacit feelings that leave the reader helpless to explain yet speechlessly certain that they have felt this exact thing themselves in other words you're trying to create feelings without names and the way you do this and by the way this is something that I found that has created such powerful scenes in my own writing is to First identify the Primary Emotion that you're trying to accomplish in this scene let's say you're trying to express a character's love for another character and then you write around that emotion try to figure out what are the things that could be orbiting or surrounding this primary idea so let me put this book back on the shelf and I'll grab another one to illustrate this example further conveniently it's literally right next to the lies of lur on my shelf and the book here is six of crows by Lee B Dugo now six of crows is another fantasy Heist novel which is why it's in the same location on my bookshelf and six of crows is about these six young Outcast thieves led by the notorious and ruthless C Breer who attempt to pull off this impossible mission to steal something from a impenetrable IC Fortress now Caz is the leader of this gang and throughout the story he's presented as extremely ruthless extremely cunning and absolutely devoid of empathy but there is a moment in the story where he is drowning underwater and in this experience he realizes that he is forming a certain attachment to another member of his team called Ines so let me read this scene to you and as I go through this scene I want you to be thinking about how bardugo is constructing a scene where there is a Primary Emotion at the center that is never directly mentioned and instead what we are getting are all the orbiting Sensations and ideas and feelings around that one Primary Emotion C remember the first time he had seen an edge at the Menagerie in purple Sil her eyes lined with coal the bone handled knife he'd given her the subs that had come from behind the door of her room at the slat the night she' made her first kill the sobs he' ignored has remembered her perched on the sill of his Attic Window sometime during that first year after he' brought her into the drags she' been feeding the crows that congregated on the roof you shouldn't make friends with crows he told her why not she asked he looked up from his desk to answer but whatever he'd been about to say had vanished on his tongue the sun was out for once and N had turned her face to it her eyes were shut her oil black lashes fanned over her cheeks the harbor wind had lifted her dark hair and for a moment Caz was a boy again sure that there was magic in this world why not she repeated eyes still closed he said the first thing that popped into his head I don't have any manners neither do you C she' laughed and if he could have bottled that sound and got drunk on it every night he would have it terrified him and now skipping forward a couple of paragraphs the ache in his lungs was unbearable he needed to tell her what that she was lovely and brave and better than anything he deserved that he was twisted crooked wrong but not so broken that he couldn't pull himself together into some semblance of a man for her that without meaning to he' begun to lean on her to look for her to need her near he needed to thank her for his new hat the water pressed at his chest demanding that he part his lips I won't he swore but in the end Caz opened his mouth and the water rushed in so I really really love that scene and again what it does so well there is there is clearly some kind of Primary Emotion that this scene is orbiting around that is Kaz is developing love and affection for anes but can you really sum up what he's going through in that scene in such simple terms I don't think you can I think there's so many other things that are going on here you've got this conflicted sense of C realizing that in the past he wasn't as supportive towards a as he wished he could have been you got a sense of Kaz grappling with his own inadequacies feeling like he's not worthy of this relationship and there's just so many other bits and pieces and things that are going on there as well I always like to think about this as if you imagine a solar system and the Sun is the Primary Emotion you're writing in the scene you should be able to just show the orbits of the planets around the Sun in other words show the things that are surrounding the main thing you're writing about and even though you never mention what that main thing is the orbits of all these different planets of all these different ideas and emotions and Sensations and details should allow readers to understand there is something at its core that is hidden that everything is revolving around and when you can create something like that you build a tremendous sense of complexity into your scenes and you create these really emotionally profound moments as Mo says nameless feelings do actually have names it's just that these feelings are conflicting ing or complex and typically come across through the observation of something else and of course it should be stated that something that makes this passage from bardugo's writing so impactful is a use of specific and vivid imagery which is something that's very critical to get right when you're attempting to create emotion in your fantasy story and it's something that gets unpacked in principle number three which is that small details create big emotions now when you're trying to create feelings like Dread or Terror or love or joy these kind of big Grand emotions within your story something that Moss writes and something that I certainly found in my own experience editing different fantasy novels is that sometimes when you try to write too big and too General it falls flat and you don't actually convey that sense of largess or scope to your reader so for example just describing something that you think should be big and impactful like a character dying or a wedding scene between two characters even though that might feel objectively emotionally important it can be quite stale and how it's coming across on the page if you're just relying on that objective bigness a somewhat similar analogy to this is like all those movies that have come out in the last maybe decade or so where there's a big sky beam that's threatening to destroy a city or destroy the world even though the stakes are objectively huge for that in terms of the number of people that are at danger of dying they often feel really lacking from the perspective of suspense because they're almost so big that they just impersonal and not very interesting as a result so what's the solution to this well as M says in his book if you want to go big with the emotional response within your reader you need to narrow down big feelings like Dread Terror Joy or love can be evoked in readers but not by force they are most effectively evoked by trickery creating big feelings in readers requires laying a foundation on top of which readers build their own towering experience what triggers readers to Drudge up their own emotional experiences small details reminders used to evoke a situation that is preloaded with feeling osc is a fantastic example from Stephen King's Dr sleep which is a sequel to The Shining following a now adult version of Danny torren so as the kid from The Shining he's grown up and he has the ability to see when people are about to die here's a passage where Danny Torrance is comforting a old person who is on the verge of death I'm pretty scared Charlie said his voice was little more than a whisper the low steady moan of the the wind outside was louder I didn't think I would be but I am there's nothing to be scared of instead of taking Charlie's pulse there was really no point he took one of the old man's hands in his he saw Charlie's twin Sons at four on swings he saw Charlie's wife pulling down a shade in the bedroom wearing nothing but the slip of Belgian lace he'd brought for her for her first anniversary saw how her ponytail swung over one shoulder when she turned to look at him her face lit in a smile that was all yes he saw a far more tractor with a striped umbrella raised over the seat he smelled bacon and heard Frank Sinatra singing Come Fly With Me from a cracked Motorola radio sitting on a work table LED with tools he saw a hubc cap full of rain reflecting a Red Barn he tasted blueberries and gutted a deer and fished in some distant Lake whose surface was dappled by Steady Autumn rain he was 60 dancing with his wife in the American Legion Hall he was 30 splitting wood he was five wearing shorts and pulling a red wagon then the pictures blurred together the way cards do when they're shuffled in the hands of an expert and the wind was blowing big snow down from the mountains and in here was the silence and ai's solemn watching eyes at times like this Dan knew what he was in for at times like this he regretted none of the pain and sorrow and anger and horror because they had brought him here to this room while the wind whooped outside Charlie Hayes had come to the border now I haven't read Dr sleep that's actually the only sample from the story I've read but the amount of emotion that Stephen King creates in that small little passage is absolutely incredible and approaching something like describing a character's death is a very difficult feat because again it's something that is very objectively big but many writers struggle to actually create emotion when they're describing it and something that King does so well in that example there is he focuses on all these little moments and creates a tremend mendous amount of specificity here he's thinking about the cracked motor roler radio on his worktable playing come fly with me while he repairs something the specificity of that elevates this and that small detail allows the emotions to feel really big so right now if there's a big emotional scene in your book have a look at it and ask yourself am I being specific enough am I bringing enough really nuanced and unique details into this scene to really create that sense of emotional elevation within the story and of course you can't necessarily start your story with perhaps that level of emotional depth like King does there that's an example that probably can be done you know in the middle or maybe towards the end of your book but it is very important to start your story with something that does capture the reader's emotional attention and so this brings us to principle number four building an emotional hook so like I mentioned at the start of this video Moss is a literary agent and he's probably read thousands and thousands of books over the years and in particular particular thousands and thousands of opening pages from Hopeful writers and from all of this here has distilled what I think is a very effective formula for creating a great opening to your story and it is to combine two very specific things in the opening few pages of your novel the very first one and this is incredibly relevant for us fantasy writers is Intrigue so this is usually externally focused you're raising questions about the World building of your story or how the magic works or how the political or social system of your story Works in other words your kind of creating plot focused questions and that's the first component the second component is to create emotional investment in other words to create some kind of emotional hook that gets us into the character psyche and makes us really interested to see where this person will go over the course of the narrative and as Moss says in the emotional crafter fiction the way to create that emotional hook with a character is to show them really deeply yearning for something or being worried about something or being really hope hope ful for something in other words in the opening pages of your story you must give your character a strong emotional goal so let's put six of crows back and I'll get another example that shows this in action so over here we have the graveyard book by Neil Gaiman now this is an incredibly emotional story I think I actually cried a little bit at the end of it when I read it many years ago and I'm going to look at the opening of the story which in my mind kind of takes place in Chapter 2 chapter 1 is really more of a prologue chapter 2 is when we kind of meet our main character who is a young boy on the cusp of adulthood called bod after his parents murdered he has gone to live in a graveyard and he's been raised by the spirits of the ghosts that exist there it's kind of like the Jungle Book but set in a graveyard bod was a quiet child with sober gray eyes and a mop of tussled mouse-colored hair he was for the most part obedient he learned how to talk and once he learned he would pester the graveyard folk with questions why Amai allowed out the graveyard he would ask or how did I do what he just did or who lives in here the adults would do their best to answer his questions but their answers were often vague or confusing or contradictory and then bod would walk down to the old chapel and talk to silus he'll be waiting there at Sunset just before silus awakened his Guardian could always be counted upon to explain matters clearly and lucidly and as simply as bod needed in order to understand you aren't allowed out of the graveyard it's Aunt by the way not Amit not these days because it's only in the graveyard that we can keep you safe this is where you live and this is where those who love you can be found outside would not be safe for you not yet you go outside you go outside every night I am infinitely older than you lad and I am safe wherever I am I'm safe there too I wish that were true but as long as you stay here you are safe so it's a very simple opening you know the pros there is not necessarily doing anything crazy it's just quite functional it's quite simple but it's really effectively creating both that sense of intrigue and an emotional hook we get a sense of bod's Yearning For Adventure his craving to understand the world and to satisfy the Curiosity he has about this you know universe that exists outside of the graveyard but we are also getting a lot of great plot related Intrigue here we're wondering how has this boy been living in a graveyard all this time why is he not safe if he tries to leave it who is cus and how is he saying that this guy is you know infinitely old so it's really raising a tremendous amount of both externally focused questions and also internal questions about the emotional goals of bod as well now it's important to clarify here that creating emotional investment in your character a lot of new fantasy writers think that this means oh I must write a sympathetic character and that's not really the case and that can sometimes be a mistake you can write a character who is reprehensible but you can still create a way for readers to be emotionally invested in their Journey as Moss says there are no Universal characters but there are Universal human desires Heart Care hope dreams yearning what really forges that human bond with a character no matter how good or evil or whatever they are is that deeply held sense of Yearning For Something beyond what they have and preferably yearning for something that appears totally unattainable to them in other words what you're basically doing is you're giving your character a really strong and interesting goal and with that goal you are setting up a fascinating and intriguing story promise for us that will be explored over the rest of the narrative and of course it's not enough to just have a great emotional hook at the start of your story you also have to create a really great sense of depth to your character so that there is a lot of emotionally interesting nuances to them that you can explore over the course of your entire narrative which brings us to principle number five ask your characters the right questions I'm going to ask you a couple of questions right now and I want you to just answer these in your head first of all what year were you born in what color are your eyes where did you go to school great now we know each other now it's like we're lifelong friends actually no that's not the case at all those are totally shallow surface level questions that tell me absolutely nothing about who you really are and it's really funny actually because one of the things that M does in this book is he opens a chapter by asking these questions and he he kind of gets you to he tricks you a little bit here he says please fill out this questionnaire and he asked these really basic biographical details and like the chump that I am you know I started writing down my answers to them and then you turn over the page and as M says here thank you now we're like old friends right wait we're not what did I miss oh yeah all the important stuff what I didn't ask you about are the events that shaped you into the person that you are today I know nothing of these meaningful life events that do not appear on your resume and this is my frustration with character questioners they often focus a lot on very surface level things like you know what's your character's favorite song what's your fa character's favorite dessert and it can be useful to kind of know these and those can be things that add a little bit of extra depth but really what most character questionnaires are just looking at is simply surface character the collection of traits and personality and quirks that a character has on the surface of the story but what actually creates emotional connection to a character is when you get into true character these are the sort of underlying emotional truths and kind of the deep nuances of a character's personality that stories are really about testing and provoking and changing and helping us understand as M says to truly know a character you should be asking them these probing deep meaningful questions the kind of questions you probably would feel uncomfortable asking someone that you just met but perhaps you've actually dived deep into these questions with friends that you've been really close to for years or loved ones or family members even so let me give you a couple of these questions now that you can use for your own characters to create more depth what's the first thing you remember making you truly happy when and how did you discover that life isn't fair who first broke your heart what accomplishment proved to you that you can do anything when did you decide you had to grow up what's been your biggest sacrifice what was the most romantic night of your life what disgusted you and there are so many other questions like this that you can ask your characters to really get at the heart of who they are and I find that whenever I go through this process especially for secondary characters who I probably haven't gone as deep with as my main characters it always gives me new appreciations and new nuances to who that person really is and one of the biggest things that I was kind of teaching to writers who went through my fantasy outlining boot camp we just recently completed the first cohort of that the other week and it was so so much fun to kind of go through the process with this small group of six writers one of the things that I'm always trying to do in my coaching cuse with these writers is ask them those probing questions and say okay your character's behaving with this level of you know dislike towards this other character you've said it's for this reason I think it's actually deeper let's go deeper why are they behaving like this who was the person in their past that taught them this was the way they need to respond to it and you can kind of see these writers their eyes just light up when they start to realize oh okay this is why that character wasn't clicking it's because I didn't ask these really deep probing questions and then having me come in there and sort of interrogate their characters almost like a psychologist trying to figure out why they are the way they are it always leads to new depth and new insights from the very first time I got a critique from Jed like my brain was on fire with just like how much uh there was to think about and how much there was to improve in my story and it just filled me with passion to keep going and keep writing and keep improving and so once you've kind of deeply understood your characters by asking these really probing and insightful questions you're ready for principle number six which is to create polarity shifts so a character doesn't usually just exist as a static entity the idea of a story is you're showing change you're showing progression you're sing Evolution within a character and more specifically it is the sequence of highs and lows throughout a narrative that's what makes us deeply connect with the characters in your story if you just had a fantasy book where the characters were just despairing the whole time through or they were just triumphing the whole time through it would be boring rather it's the progression between moments of Triumph back to moments of Despair back to moments of Triumph and this sort of curving zigzag between all these different highs and lows of The Human Experience that really enamor us when we are reading a fantasy story and really create that sense of sympathy and connection with the character as Moss says the swings between polarities cause characters and their stories to grip us as if they are real so let's put the graveyard book back and I'll get another example here so let's look at the Name of the Wind as an example example of how you can create polarity shifts to really create a sense of emotional connection with a reader in your story so at the start of the narrative quo is at this high point he has this very idic early life he's the member of a loving and talented troop of traveling performers and he's with his family but it doesn't last early on in the story and this isn't a spoiler I would say because it happens quite early in the narrative the story takes a very devastating turn where qu's family and the traveling troop he's with are murdered by the chandrian which plunges qu down into a really dark and low moment now he's on his own he doesn't have that loving connection to help him in this world but then later on in the story you know things kind of go up again as he gets into this sort of magical University and begins to learn the ways of these different Magics in this world and so what you can really see is that stories are fundamentally a process of taking characters from these high moments back to low moments up to high moments and so forth and you modulate the intensity of these you don't always have to be going from a 10 out of 10 high to a 10 out of 10 low sometimes you're just going between like a 2 out of 10 high moment down to a 3 out of 10 low moment for example but there are points in this progression between polarities where if you have a low moment and you really want it to be a kind of dark KN of the Soul thing that really hits super hard then ask yourself how can I make this low moment hit even harder and the reason I bring this up is cu I often see fantasy writers reluctant to really do this they might challenge their characters they might kind of throw them into the hole metaphorically speaking but they are unwilling to then have that hole be filled with mud and water and rusted objects and also maybe some snakes down there as well and I think that if you really want us to connect with your characters there should probably be a moment in your story where it is as low and as dark and as difficult as you can make it for your characters as you possibly can because it's from those low moments that a character's climb back up to the top feels very satisfying which leads to our final principle and perhaps one of the most important ones definitely the principle I would say that Don of mus thinks is the most important in this book and that is the principle of moral elevation so this principle of moral elevation is basically to have your character do something that is inherently decent and good especially if you make it as difficult for them to do that thing as possible and I think the perfect example of this comes from possibly my favorite epic fantasy book Words of Radiance by Brandon Sanderson so there's a character in this book called kaladan he's on the front cover here and kaladan is a sort of communist Spearman who becomes enslaved he sort of hates the Nobles of this world and there's a scene in this book where one of the noble princes is in this Gladiator style Jewel he's facing off against four opponents who have sort of unfairly gotten themselves into the fight so that he is outnumbered and it's extremely rigged and there is a moment where Prince adelin who's the guy who is down in the Gladiator arena is suffering and it looks like he's going to die his father Dina stands up and shouts out to the other people around the arena watching the fight Dela turned upon the stands full of spectating light eyes you can watch this he shouted at them my sons fight alone there are Shard bearers among you is there not one of you who will fight with them he scanned the crowd the King was looking at his feet amaran what of amaran dalar found him seated next to the king dalar met the Man's eyes amaran looked away no what has happened to us dalar asked where is our honor honor is dead a voice whispered from beside him Dina turned and looked at Captain kaladan he hadn't noticed the Bridgeman walking down the steps behind him kaladan took a deep breath then looked at dalar but I'll see what I can do if this goes poorly take care of my men spear in hand he grabbed the edge of the wall and flung himself over dropped dring into the Sands of the Arena floor below my God I literally got chills as I was just just reading through that again and every time I've read through that scene I've gotten the same experience this is just such a perfect example of using moral elevation as the Cornerstone of that emotion in the story and it's something that if you've read this book you know a lot of you have probably felt the same way what is so effective about this scene well it's the fact that Sanderson probably had this scene in mind from early on I I don't know this this is just me speculating and he worked backwards to ask how can I make this moment as satisfying as humanly possible so if your character has to go in and kind of make this dangerous decision that might be a really deadly sacrifice on their behalf to save someone else don't make that someone else someone that they naturally want to save or someone that they like make it someone that they hate so kaladan you know he sort of hates the person that he's trying to go in to save at this point in the narrative he despises everything that the nobility stand for and he could very much just let this person suffer in the arena and probably die or be crippled and instead he recognizes within himself that it's more important to honor the Oaths that he has made to dinar and the Oaths he has made to himself and the fact that he then decides to jump into the arena and mind you he's literally jumping in with nothing but a spear against these people who have these magical swords and power armor and that's why that scene works so effectively and I think if you think about many of the most emotionally pivotal moments in fantasy stories out there whether it is Sam carrying froto up the mountain I can't carry it for you but I can carry you well Harry finally achieving his victory against Voldemort many of these moments in our favorite fantasy stories the reason why they hit so emotionally hard is because they are built up to be this moment of moral elevation as Moss says I'm not against despair but the characters we remember tend to inspire of they lift us and the shest way to do that is with a positive spirit theirs but also yours as well infusing emotion into your fantasy characters is such a pivotal part of writing a great fantasy novel but it's also very important to avoid falling victim to the common pitfalls and traps that I see a lot of new writers make and if you want to avoid the 10 most common main character mistakes that new fantasy Riders make then watch this video over here