Writing with Impact & Depth

Do you find your stories flat, your characters one-dimensional, your plots without depth? Is your story there but not THERE? Have you read a novel or watched a movie that you found okay but unremarkable when you thought back on it?

Let’s look at impact, that oomph factor that should be present in our writing.

It’s easy to write about something—to tell the details—but it’s so much more difficult to draw a reader into the depths of a tale as if she were experiencing every action and emotion. But isn’t that what we want? For our readers to cry and laugh and fear along with our lead characters? We want them to be surprised and tickled. We want them to escape the world of carpools and divorces and endless business meetings. As Calgon does, we want to take them away.

We ensnare readers by allowing them to feel characters’ emotions rather than telling about them—this goes back to the show vs. tell discussion.

We pull readers deeper by giving them someone to root for—a well-developed character with clear goals is necessary here.

Our plots must be both interesting and involving—we need topics and events the reader can get lost in.

Our language must be bold and placed before the reader without apology. This is not the time to hold back over fear of Aunt Bertha’s reaction to our writing or worry over what the boss would think. Readers want an escape from the ordinary. Maybe Susie can’t cuss in front of Aunt Bertha, but she might long for a character who’s not afraid to tell off her own Aunt Bertha and does so in graphic terms.

Readers need more than reports; they need sensory experience. We enmesh readers by involving their senses over and over and over again.

Readers live in an ordinary world. (No matter what they do, it’s normal to them.) They want to visit the extraordinary, do and say what they can’t in their own lives. Give them the depth they desire and crave. Don’t be content with surface reporting. Create a world and compel them to enter. And then pull them deeper. Wrap your storyline and weave your characters around the reader so he can’t get away. And won’t want to.

We can keep readers at a distance so they never experience the worlds we create. They can be watchers rather than participants. But they’ll never be satisfied with that. It’s not enough to create a world and people it with shadows. We need to create doorways that readers can tumble through. And then we need to make our worlds so compelling that the reader seeks not an exit, but a path deeper into our tale. So he can experience what the characters do. So he can touch and hear and feel them. So he can escape the ordinary and be bigger and bolder and more
valuable. . . At least for a time. At least while he lives in your story. At least for the moment.

Readers may enjoy a book as a beach read or for an afternoon’s pleasure. But they may also use it as distraction—while waiting in an emergency room, as a way to hold back fear on a plane ride, as a means of escape from the pain of a debilitating disease. As writers, let’s give them a place of escape. A diversion. Hope. And let’s do it with depth and passion. The readers deserve no less. Certainly our stories deserve nothing less.