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Practical Emotional Structure
Has an agent or editor said you lack "spark"? Do people have a hard time connecting with your characters? Your people are isolated, disenfranchised, inwardly full of emotion, fabulously supportive and wounded--why don't people get that?
If you have a hard time getting your showing words to mean something and don't like black and white rules, turbocharge your story with Practical Emotional Structure. A simple, plain-English guide to connecting with your readers using emotional theory and the transformational character arc.
If you have a hard time getting your showing words to mean something and don't like black and white rules, turbocharge your story with Practical Emotional Structure. A simple, plain-English guide to connecting with your readers using emotional theory and the transformational character arc.
- GenresWritingNonfiction
94 pages, Kindle Edition
First published April 26, 2013
About the author
Jodi Henley
12 books8 followersJodi Henley is a craft of writing geek, developmental trouble-shooter and writer. A popular workshop presenter, Jodi enjoys talking about the transformational character arc. Born in Hawaii, she likes talking story.
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Displaying 1 - 12 of 12 reviews
March 15, 2015
This is the first of what I hope will be a series of reviews of "writing craft" books. I plan to read at least a dozen this year, with the aim of taking my craft up another notch and selling more fiction as a result.
I began with this one because I recognise emotional engagement as a weakness in my fiction, one I want to work on. Did it help? Yes, it did, though I felt that with a thorough edit it would have been much clearer and helped a lot more.
There's a danger that a book like this becomes simply "how to manipulate the reader," and once or twice it did stray in that direction: "To keep selling stories, a reader needs to identify you as the person who can hit all their buttons on a consistent basis," the author says (dangling her participle). However, it isn't simply that. What the author is talking about is best summed up in this quotation from the final chapter:
"Emotional structure is actually a series of three things—the way your character feels about the story and plot (putting “emotion into your story”), pre-thinking (your emotional hooks and triggers) and a character’s emotional arc."
Emotional response that appears on the page helps the reader identify with the character and feel along with them. Emotional hooks and triggers are (if I've understood correctly) the relationships and emotional memories that the character has, which again help the reader imagine themselves into the character's life and experience, and care about what happens to them. And the character's emotional arc is the change in the character's (habitual) emotional state, or their emotional landscape, over the course of the story. For example, a character may go from being emotionally closed off and grieving to emotionally open and able to love again.
I marked a few other key quotations from the book as I went through, and here are some:
"If I can remove my heroine and replace her with an archetype, then I don't have emotion or the right people in my story." I thought this was an interesting idea that could have been expanded on. It seems to be talking about the importance of particularity in our characters. A story needs to be about this person in particular, who is uniquely fitted to being in this story because of what has happened to her in the past and how she's responded to it.
"A core event is the psychological reason your character reacts to story events in a consistent way." The author's concept of a "core event," something in the character's backstory that shapes her outlook on life in a way that is important to the story, is central to her approach. She makes the point that it can go in multiple directions, according to the character's personality and the needs of the story. The same thing happening to two different characters can produce two very different stories. But because it's such a significant emotional event, it consistently shapes the character's reactions (and actions). Only when the character's perspective on the core event changes, as the result of a new, equally significant event, can the character's emotional landscape change permanently.
"Justified anger is not conflict. It’s just anger." But unreasonable anger, driven by misinterpretation, or by confusing what just happened with something that happened a long time ago? That's conflict fuel.
"What makes her do what she does and what will tear her apart if she doesn't?" This is another perspective on the core event.
"While you can definitely create a story without conflict, the depth of the emotional arc is shallow which means there’s no reason to have all these story events because it shows the same thing over and over and the outcome is never in any doubt." That sentence needs commas (I'll talk about punctuation further below), but the idea is that a story without conflict is a mere recitation of events. Without conflict, nothing will change, and so one event can stand in for all.
"Plot grows out of how your character reacts to or takes control of what’s already going on in your story." There are various definitions of "plot," but this one (plot is the outward events which are needed to advance the emotional story, essentially) is a useful one. As the author, it's up to you to construct a plot which fits the emotional direction of the story. "Changing an emotional reaction to the core event changes what the story is about on a very fundamental level (the theme)."
"Some people are full of angst and some aren't. Using the right focal point creates the right amount of emotional depth for the story you’re trying to tell." This was something of a relief to me. I'm not a highly emotional person myself, even by the standards of my low-emotional-expression culture, and I'm not up for the common practice of standing off and flinging tragedies at your characters until the audience cries. It may win Hugos, but it doesn't win me over. However, giving my characters some emotional stakes, some emotional driver which shapes their responses to the world, is going to help me engage my readers more, and I can adjust the sliders appropriately. Not everyone needs a deeply tragic backstory in which everyone in their village, including their parents, was horribly killed (epic fantasy authors, take note), but everyone has had something significant happen to them, something that influences how their subsequent story plays out, and by connecting to that we establish an emotional truth for our characters which our readers will recognise and identify.
"Write what you love, but realize…you love a lot of other things, too." This addresses the balance between being true to yourself and gaining an audience. If you begin with human universals, things you care about that other people care about too, your audience will be bigger than if you ride your hobby-horse until it's dead and then beat it.
All of this is good stuff. Now, to the not-so-good.
First and most obviously, the author needs remedial punctuation classes. Not just for her horrible habit of using scare quotes for emphasis instead of italics (it put me in mind of a manager I knew who would do the same with air quotes), but because she clearly has no idea when to use a comma, semicolon or em dash, and just uses them more or less at random. Along with sentences that change grammatical direction partway through, or are missing key words, and her habit of mixing together several examples and flipping between them without signalling clearly, the inept punctuation makes the book less clear and less useful than it would otherwise be. Both at the level of macro-structure (the progression from chapter to chapter to make a clear argument) and at the level of micro-structure (sentences and phrases that convey that argument clearly and unambiguously), the book has a lot of room for improvement.
It's useful enough that I give it four stars anyway, but be aware that the rating is more for the content than it is for the form.
I began with this one because I recognise emotional engagement as a weakness in my fiction, one I want to work on. Did it help? Yes, it did, though I felt that with a thorough edit it would have been much clearer and helped a lot more.
There's a danger that a book like this becomes simply "how to manipulate the reader," and once or twice it did stray in that direction: "To keep selling stories, a reader needs to identify you as the person who can hit all their buttons on a consistent basis," the author says (dangling her participle). However, it isn't simply that. What the author is talking about is best summed up in this quotation from the final chapter:
"Emotional structure is actually a series of three things—the way your character feels about the story and plot (putting “emotion into your story”), pre-thinking (your emotional hooks and triggers) and a character’s emotional arc."
Emotional response that appears on the page helps the reader identify with the character and feel along with them. Emotional hooks and triggers are (if I've understood correctly) the relationships and emotional memories that the character has, which again help the reader imagine themselves into the character's life and experience, and care about what happens to them. And the character's emotional arc is the change in the character's (habitual) emotional state, or their emotional landscape, over the course of the story. For example, a character may go from being emotionally closed off and grieving to emotionally open and able to love again.
I marked a few other key quotations from the book as I went through, and here are some:
"If I can remove my heroine and replace her with an archetype, then I don't have emotion or the right people in my story." I thought this was an interesting idea that could have been expanded on. It seems to be talking about the importance of particularity in our characters. A story needs to be about this person in particular, who is uniquely fitted to being in this story because of what has happened to her in the past and how she's responded to it.
"A core event is the psychological reason your character reacts to story events in a consistent way." The author's concept of a "core event," something in the character's backstory that shapes her outlook on life in a way that is important to the story, is central to her approach. She makes the point that it can go in multiple directions, according to the character's personality and the needs of the story. The same thing happening to two different characters can produce two very different stories. But because it's such a significant emotional event, it consistently shapes the character's reactions (and actions). Only when the character's perspective on the core event changes, as the result of a new, equally significant event, can the character's emotional landscape change permanently.
"Justified anger is not conflict. It’s just anger." But unreasonable anger, driven by misinterpretation, or by confusing what just happened with something that happened a long time ago? That's conflict fuel.
"What makes her do what she does and what will tear her apart if she doesn't?" This is another perspective on the core event.
"While you can definitely create a story without conflict, the depth of the emotional arc is shallow which means there’s no reason to have all these story events because it shows the same thing over and over and the outcome is never in any doubt." That sentence needs commas (I'll talk about punctuation further below), but the idea is that a story without conflict is a mere recitation of events. Without conflict, nothing will change, and so one event can stand in for all.
"Plot grows out of how your character reacts to or takes control of what’s already going on in your story." There are various definitions of "plot," but this one (plot is the outward events which are needed to advance the emotional story, essentially) is a useful one. As the author, it's up to you to construct a plot which fits the emotional direction of the story. "Changing an emotional reaction to the core event changes what the story is about on a very fundamental level (the theme)."
"Some people are full of angst and some aren't. Using the right focal point creates the right amount of emotional depth for the story you’re trying to tell." This was something of a relief to me. I'm not a highly emotional person myself, even by the standards of my low-emotional-expression culture, and I'm not up for the common practice of standing off and flinging tragedies at your characters until the audience cries. It may win Hugos, but it doesn't win me over. However, giving my characters some emotional stakes, some emotional driver which shapes their responses to the world, is going to help me engage my readers more, and I can adjust the sliders appropriately. Not everyone needs a deeply tragic backstory in which everyone in their village, including their parents, was horribly killed (epic fantasy authors, take note), but everyone has had something significant happen to them, something that influences how their subsequent story plays out, and by connecting to that we establish an emotional truth for our characters which our readers will recognise and identify.
"Write what you love, but realize…you love a lot of other things, too." This addresses the balance between being true to yourself and gaining an audience. If you begin with human universals, things you care about that other people care about too, your audience will be bigger than if you ride your hobby-horse until it's dead and then beat it.
All of this is good stuff. Now, to the not-so-good.
First and most obviously, the author needs remedial punctuation classes. Not just for her horrible habit of using scare quotes for emphasis instead of italics (it put me in mind of a manager I knew who would do the same with air quotes), but because she clearly has no idea when to use a comma, semicolon or em dash, and just uses them more or less at random. Along with sentences that change grammatical direction partway through, or are missing key words, and her habit of mixing together several examples and flipping between them without signalling clearly, the inept punctuation makes the book less clear and less useful than it would otherwise be. Both at the level of macro-structure (the progression from chapter to chapter to make a clear argument) and at the level of micro-structure (sentences and phrases that convey that argument clearly and unambiguously), the book has a lot of room for improvement.
It's useful enough that I give it four stars anyway, but be aware that the rating is more for the content than it is for the form.
October 18, 2013
This book is not particularly well-written. It's sentence structure and grammar are weak at best and I found more than a couple typos. For all that, though, I really enjoyed reading it. Jodi Henley understands what she's talking about and approaches it from a number of angles and with specific examples. She has a clear bias toward Romance, but pulls in mainstream movies and books to make her points more relatable. She disregards the value of Plot-Driven writing, but it doesn't make her advice on how to do Emotion/Character-Driven writing any less valid. I would recommend this to any fiction writer struggling with writing believable characters.
September 30, 2013
The only people who could possibly find value in this are those interested in creating formulaic crap more effectively. I expect it will be particularly interesting to housewives interested in writing romance novels and bad erotica. What a waste of bytes. I felt like I needed to reboot my iPad after I deleted it to make sure I purged any residue of it from my device.
June 7, 2017
Maybe it was the kindle copy I received, but the format in combination with the writing made this almost unreadable.
The author jumps between several examples - suddenly the story of a "Kim" is introduced, for example, and it took me a moment to appreciat that we're going into yet another example.
The book is very cheap, and for the prize, the content was okay and covered some ground, but I recommend to anyone who is serious about writing to spend a little more money on other writing advice books.
On the other hand, some people seem to enjoy this book, so I recommend to head over to the author's blog first to see if you can connect to her. (Although I found the blog posts better written than this book).
The author jumps between several examples - suddenly the story of a "Kim" is introduced, for example, and it took me a moment to appreciat that we're going into yet another example.
The book is very cheap, and for the prize, the content was okay and covered some ground, but I recommend to anyone who is serious about writing to spend a little more money on other writing advice books.
On the other hand, some people seem to enjoy this book, so I recommend to head over to the author's blog first to see if you can connect to her. (Although I found the blog posts better written than this book).
September 29, 2013
I received a free copy of this ebook in return for my honest review.
I cannot recommend this resource highly enough. There is so much information in here that I have not found anywhere else in a concise, easy-to-read book. But it's DEEP. You may well find yourself reading a paragraph or a sentence and then putting the book down to think about how what you've just read applies to you and your writing.
Amongst others, there are sections on:
* genres, bestsellers and niche markets and their respective emotional structures;
* characters and how to make them people your readers can relate to;
* thought strings - a subconscious ability to understand a character from his or her actions;
* why plot-driven stories don't make readers care;
* emotional arc - the progress of a character through one emotional state to the next;
* useful questions to help a writer discover/uncover the core event in their character's backstory (and why filling out character worksheets or conducting interviews do not a character make, at least not on their own);
* how a core event becomes a lens and how it leads to specific (conscious and unconscious) emotions and attitudes in the character which will affect their actions and decisions in the story;
* how there are different arcs for different events in our lives, but the plot in your novel needs to focus on just one in particular and then build on it. (This is why it's always useful to start planning a novel by looking at the character arc first. The external plot is then created to highlight the character's emotional journey and provides the means by which the character changes.)
As I read, I got the urge to put the book down and examine my characters more thoroughly. If you love details, you want to carry your reader on an emotional rollercoaster (or tone it down a bit so as to not overwhelm them), then you NEED to read this book.
The best thing about this book for me were:
* The wealth of information it contains (and it's worth mentioning at this point that the illustrations in the ebook can also be found online at Jodi Henley's website and can be saved or printed off for future reference);
* The examples she creates to illustrate her points. The characters jump right off the page - they're REAL. And most importantly of all, I CARE about them which is the whole point of reading a book like this. A writer wants the target audience to read the story and care about the characters.
Jodi Henley not only knows her stuff, she is also well able to teach it. "Practical Emotional Structure" gets two thumbs up and 5 stars from me.
I cannot recommend this resource highly enough. There is so much information in here that I have not found anywhere else in a concise, easy-to-read book. But it's DEEP. You may well find yourself reading a paragraph or a sentence and then putting the book down to think about how what you've just read applies to you and your writing.
Amongst others, there are sections on:
* genres, bestsellers and niche markets and their respective emotional structures;
* characters and how to make them people your readers can relate to;
* thought strings - a subconscious ability to understand a character from his or her actions;
* why plot-driven stories don't make readers care;
* emotional arc - the progress of a character through one emotional state to the next;
* useful questions to help a writer discover/uncover the core event in their character's backstory (and why filling out character worksheets or conducting interviews do not a character make, at least not on their own);
* how a core event becomes a lens and how it leads to specific (conscious and unconscious) emotions and attitudes in the character which will affect their actions and decisions in the story;
* how there are different arcs for different events in our lives, but the plot in your novel needs to focus on just one in particular and then build on it. (This is why it's always useful to start planning a novel by looking at the character arc first. The external plot is then created to highlight the character's emotional journey and provides the means by which the character changes.)
As I read, I got the urge to put the book down and examine my characters more thoroughly. If you love details, you want to carry your reader on an emotional rollercoaster (or tone it down a bit so as to not overwhelm them), then you NEED to read this book.
The best thing about this book for me were:
* The wealth of information it contains (and it's worth mentioning at this point that the illustrations in the ebook can also be found online at Jodi Henley's website and can be saved or printed off for future reference);
* The examples she creates to illustrate her points. The characters jump right off the page - they're REAL. And most importantly of all, I CARE about them which is the whole point of reading a book like this. A writer wants the target audience to read the story and care about the characters.
Jodi Henley not only knows her stuff, she is also well able to teach it. "Practical Emotional Structure" gets two thumbs up and 5 stars from me.
March 10, 2016
A very short, but helpful read on an essential component of fiction: how to make readers care about what you're writing about.
Drawing examples from theoretical romance novels to movies, Jodi Henley does a good job explaining the emotional component of a story and why it's needed in order to make it stronger. It's a very deep advanced topic, so you'll need to take careful notes on it.
It's a great starting point on how to think about your character's emotional needs in relation to the story, but I don't believe it's the end-all book. The first half feels very solid in how Henley explains the emotional terminology, while the latter half has examples that seem to try to put every aspect together, which makes it a bit confusing. However, I'm glad I purchased a copy, because it put a face on something I'd been struggling with for a long time: how to make my story and protagonist stronger.
It's worth picking up if you have problems with character development and not letting your desires override the plot.
Drawing examples from theoretical romance novels to movies, Jodi Henley does a good job explaining the emotional component of a story and why it's needed in order to make it stronger. It's a very deep advanced topic, so you'll need to take careful notes on it.
It's a great starting point on how to think about your character's emotional needs in relation to the story, but I don't believe it's the end-all book. The first half feels very solid in how Henley explains the emotional terminology, while the latter half has examples that seem to try to put every aspect together, which makes it a bit confusing. However, I'm glad I purchased a copy, because it put a face on something I'd been struggling with for a long time: how to make my story and protagonist stronger.
It's worth picking up if you have problems with character development and not letting your desires override the plot.
June 23, 2013
Wow, I'm so glad Ms. Henley wrote this book! I love characters that are driven by emotion, but writing them that way isn't always easy.
This book is loaded with excellent information on how to make your characters and story mesh based on events in the past and present. How the emotions resulting from those events should drive a story is made clear here. What I loved most about this book is how the author used clear and relatable examples to show what she means by Focal Motivation, Core Events and Story Events. By using these examples, she made it easy for me to understand them and apply them to my own work. I'm hoping to convince my local critique group to use this book for our next workshop
This book is loaded with excellent information on how to make your characters and story mesh based on events in the past and present. How the emotions resulting from those events should drive a story is made clear here. What I loved most about this book is how the author used clear and relatable examples to show what she means by Focal Motivation, Core Events and Story Events. By using these examples, she made it easy for me to understand them and apply them to my own work. I'm hoping to convince my local critique group to use this book for our next workshop
January 30, 2014
I just finished this book. I'm always reading "writing" books. I felt like this book hit on a missing piece that other blogs and books were not discussing, character emotion.
This is the first book I've read on the emotional arc. Other books have touched on it accidentally, but this book focuses on plotting out how you want the character to change emotionally. Most books focus on sections: beginning, middle and end. They don't talk about making the emotional connection and making it believable. I do see how this could be easily considered common sense, but it isn't. There are tons of books that prove it isn't. LOL!
There were some errors, I feel obligated to note, but the information outweighed any editing mistakes.
This is the first book I've read on the emotional arc. Other books have touched on it accidentally, but this book focuses on plotting out how you want the character to change emotionally. Most books focus on sections: beginning, middle and end. They don't talk about making the emotional connection and making it believable. I do see how this could be easily considered common sense, but it isn't. There are tons of books that prove it isn't. LOL!
There were some errors, I feel obligated to note, but the information outweighed any editing mistakes.
May 25, 2014
The little book that's huge!
I read this one out of curiosity and I'm glad I did! I'm not going to say every concept was new to me, but Jodi talks about emotions and psychology without the babble, with clear, easy to understand examples and it finally hit home and I got it.
Most importantly, Jodi made me think! I've already found the issue with two problem spots in my current project just from the changes in approach from Practical Emotional Structure. She even had me examining why my favorite genre, Urban Fantasy, is my favorite.
Well done, Jodi. I highly recommend this book to anyone who even dreams of writing.
I read this one out of curiosity and I'm glad I did! I'm not going to say every concept was new to me, but Jodi talks about emotions and psychology without the babble, with clear, easy to understand examples and it finally hit home and I got it.
Most importantly, Jodi made me think! I've already found the issue with two problem spots in my current project just from the changes in approach from Practical Emotional Structure. She even had me examining why my favorite genre, Urban Fantasy, is my favorite.
Well done, Jodi. I highly recommend this book to anyone who even dreams of writing.
December 25, 2013
Good book overall but I wanted to have a synthesized version of building the emotional structure. I read it all and I still don't quite understand. The examples were both helpful but could become overwhelming.
July 22, 2013
The kind of book you have to read slowly because after every chapter you have to spend a day thinking about what you've read and apply it to your writing.
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Displaying 1 - 12 of 12 reviews