How to Tell a Story that will Make People Cry
Some stories touch us. A great story can make us laugh out loud, grieve for the death of someone who never existed, or even burst in to tears in the window seat of a train. But why does it happen? And, as a writer, how can you make it happen?
In this post, I will consider Peter Stockwell’s “Authenticity and Creativity in Reading Lamentation” and how to practically apply some of his ideas in your writing. Do you want to know what it takes to make your readers cry? Read on.
Professor Stockwell is a Professor of Literary Linguistics at the University of Nottingham.[i] He does research in the field of Cognitive Poetics, which applies cognitive psychology to the interpretation of literature and is something I’ve written about briefly in the past. Basically, he’s interested in how the way our brain works changes the way we experience the things we read.
In “Authenticity and Creative Reading in Lamentation”[ii] Stockwell explores the difference between two different forms of readerly identification with a text: sympathy and empathy. Here, sympathy means recognising things as having an emotional context whereas empathy means experiencing the emotion from the thing as your own. He looks at this this using an ‘investment model’ of reading, which we will explore a little in this article, and then provides examples of two poems by Kochanowski that promote these different forms of identification (sympathy and empathy).
For an academic, Stockwell writes in a clear and engaging way. Am I damning him with faint praise here? Not at all. But it is true that academic writing has a particular style. This allows academics to talk in a precise and detailed way to each other, but can look nonsensical and dense to everyone else. In this blog post, I have attempted to summarise and explore Stockwell’s work in the simplest language I can manage. I then talk about how I understand this to apply to the practical task of using words to trigger emotions in your readers strong enough that they feel them as their own.[iii]
If you find the ideas interesting then I do recommend digging out the original work and having a go with that. I’ve put the full citation in the footnotes, so you can grab the book from the library or take a punt on Google Scholar. Generally, if something in this post is brilliant and interesting it probably comes from Stockwell. If something is stupid and wrong, it’s all mine.
With that firmly in mind, let’s rock on.
Reading is active. It is a creative process. A story isn’t just something a writer writes and then sticks in the brain of the reader. It is a union of productive creativity (the writer) and receptive creativity (the reader). Give the same book to a hundred different people and they will read a hundred different stories. This makes it difficult to understand what works or is successful about a particularly story, because the story in the head of the reader is not the same as the story in the head of the writer. But it does give us a crucial clue as to why good stories work. They work because they engage the investment of the reader’s imagination. Yep, all that shipping is a sign of good storytelling.
Stockwell describes this process[iv] as a journey in three parts:
- Transportation: I got lost in the story. This book carried me away.
- Control: The story gripped me. I couldn’t put the book down.
- Investment: By the end, I was emotionally drained. The story had a great pay off.
Reading requires investment of time, emotional engagement and intellectual effort. Stockwell observes, “engaging with a literary work involves a potential loss, and thus a personal risk, which can be understood as either wasted time or as opening up the reader’s personality as a form of vulnerability.” Reading isn’t easy. It takes us years to learn how to do it.[v] And even when you can read well, it always demands something of us. This is a timely reminder not to take your reader for granted. At the very least, they are giving you their time. But they may well also be engaging their personality – their hopes and dreams and desires – in the world you are offering them.
When that engagement works, they are first brought into the story such that they begin to visualise it (transportation). They then take control of the story, a bi-directional experience where they engage with the text in an attempt to understand it (control). If this works, they will have invested emotion in the process (investment), and, in the most successful cases, completed a journey from sympathy to empathy. This is our first clue as to how we make readers cry. But what does it mean?
Stockwell argues that, while sympathy is principally a social phenomenon, empathy is “a more individual and intimate one.” A journey from sympathy to empathy means taking something we recognise socially as an emotive experience and transform it into something that we individually experience. That’s a posh way of saying that a good story lets us feel like it really happened to us (without the risk of getting burned up by Martian invaders or having our lover turn into a zombie or having to fight our way out of an arena against children chosen from the 12 other districts.)
So the first step is to generate sympathy. In its simplest sense, this sympathy is the recognition of emotion and an emotional context. There’s another use of the word – to feel sadness of pity for someone – but that is only a subcategory of the sort of sympathy we’re talking about here. Here, sympathy is “his dog died, that’s sad. His mother won the lottery, that’s happy.”
When we read we invest time and effort into understanding the story. But what does understanding a story mean? Stockwell refers to something called “Text World Theory”, which, if I have understood correctly, means that we understand a text by constructing a mental world that describes the story. We “locate the characters to establish readiness for discourse”; we figure out who is who and what is going on so that we can start to decide how we feel about it all. This means the people, the time and place, but all things like social context and status (he likes working for her, she is ashamed of her parents clothes).
Showing the reader a world they can understand generates sympathy, because sympathy is the conduit by which we understand things. It gives weight to people places and things by attaching emotions to them. This goes far beyond simple pity and sorrow and is about how we establish common understanding. Without diving into a whole load of cognitive psychology, let’s stick with the idea that to understand things we tag them with emotions: that is a thing I would like, that is a thing that would make me a little sad, that is a thing that would make me very happy.
So the first step for the writer is facultative. Give the reader the information they need to construct the world of the story in their heads, which giving them enough information that they can tag people, events and places with emotions. But the final step of the journey – investment – requires more than just a clear world. There has to be enough that the reader wants to invest the effort to understand. The journey of transportation, control and investment begins by showing the reader the route along which they will travel, while also making it interesting enough that they can be bothered to take it. Does that sound paradoxical? What does a text look like that both shows them a clear world while triggering enough curiosity to encourage further investigation?
At one end of the scale, consider the instructions to build a flat pack wardrobe. It clearly locates objects, temporality, and the world of its story[vi]. But it doesn’t evoke sympathy[vii]. You read, you understand, you move on. You don’t have to make any particular investment to understand (unless you particularly struggle with flatpacks, in which case the only emotional you’re tagging is frustration!)
At the other end, consider The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco. I love it, because I’m a boring legal scholar who enjoys showing off his intellect and other people showing off their intellect. It presents the world of the story, but it does so in a way that requires work and I guess a certain type of education to engage with and understand. If you do that work, it engenders greater sympathy: you become more involved in the story because it was harder to understand (I bloody well put time into understand it, it’s going to mean something to me!)[viii]. For me, the extra time I put into looking up[ix] the latin parts of The Name of the Rose increased my connection the book – which then enhanced the emotional payout when the book reached its climax. For my wife, it made her put it down because it was obviously the sort of boring book only legal scholars enjoy. To take another example, the time and effort it took me to understand and contextualise the references and structure of House of Leaves was part of what made me love the book and be so utterly terrified by it. Plenty of other people I’ve spoken to think it’s boring, pretentious and not worth the bother[x].
But somewhere between “wardrobe with sliding doors” and “stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead” is the right level of complexity for your reader. This is part of the wonderful world of stories: you pitch your world at your audience. It isn’t about smart or dumb (it should be needless to say, but my wife is a very smart person – to flip the example, she loves Dostoyevsky whereas I’ve never gotten past the first chapter of Crime and Punishment).
It’s about shared contexts, interests, passions, mindsets, all the stuff that makes some people love some books and other people love others. Embrace the fact that your book doesn’t have to be for everyone and write for the audience that you love. But, whomever you’re writing for, the route generating sympathy, via transportation, control and then investment, is to present to them with people, locations and themes that they can recognise and place in a fashion that intrigues and excites them. The day Frank’s mother won the lottery was the worst day of his life. Clarity of people and place, information sufficient to allow emotional tagging, intrigue and mystery: check[xi].
Which is nice, you may say, but I came here wanting to know how to make people cry. Sympathy isn’t enough. We need empathy. We need them to feel it.
The process we have gone through as a writer has allowed the reader to build a text world in their mind. They have reached across the boundary between their secret selves and your book to create a world of their own. You don’t own the book any more. It belongs to the reader. And the more they take ownership of it, the more they invest their own imagination, the closer they come to the potential for empathy: internalising the experiences of the characters as if they were their own.
Once this begins to happen, then direct, authentic depictions of grief or sadness (or happiness or joy) will directly stimulate emotion in the reader. This isn’t simple or one dimensional. Because the textual world belongs to the reader now, those things that touch them will be as individual as each of us is individual. But the transition from sympathy to empathy is from placement and intrigue to directness and authenticity. Once you build sympathy by helping them construct a textual world that they recognise, the reality of that world will impact them as if it were their own.
In order to demonstrate how this works, Stockwell turns to the world of Polish Lamentation Poetry – and in particular the work of Kochanowski (1530-1584). Yes, you’re about to read 16th century Polish poetry. Don’t be afraid. As Stockwell reassures us, Kochanowski’s “contemporary wording [carries] a human voice out of history and into the present moment.” He’s right. It’s good poetry. Why Polish poetry? Stockwell has selected the two poems from his collection of literary works observed to make people cry. What do you mean normal people think academics are weird?
The first of the two poems we are comparing is “Lament VII”. Translations are by Dorothea Prall (1920), which I have lifted directly from the article. If you can, try reading it out loud. Poetry works better out loud.
Sad trinkets of my little daughter, dresses
That touched like her careses,
Why do you draw my mournful eyes? To borrow
A newer weight of sorrow?
No longer will you clothe her form, to fold her
Around, and wrap her, hold her.
A hard, unwaking sleep has overpowered
Her limbs, and now the flowered
Cool muslin and the ribbon snoods are bootless,
The gilded girdles fruitless
My little girl, ‘twas to a bed far other
That one fay thy poor mother
Had thought to lead thee, and thi simple dower
Suits not the bridal hour;
A tiny shroud and gown of her own sewing
She gives thee at thy going,
Thy father brings a clod of earth, a sombre
Pillow for thy last slumber.
And so a single casket, scant of measure.
Locks thee and all thy treasure.
This poem is sad. It clearly creates sympathy. The author has lost his daughter. But did it make you cry? Maybe it did, but, as Stockwell puts it, “the reader observes the rich texture of the father’s grief but does not participate in it.” He explains that this is because of Kochanowski’s use of “deictic displacement” in his writing. He repeatedly uses techniques that makes us work that little bit harder to understand the world of the story. First, he does not directly address the daughter or the events, displacing us from what happened. Second, the text is full of negations: “no longer”, “unmaking”, “bootless”. These invest the poem with a beautiful sense of absence. But they also require an extra iteration of thought: imagine the boot, and then imagine the boot is no longer there. That might sound silly. But all these extra thought processes make the text harder to understand and distance the reader from the immediate emotion of the scenario. Third, taking this a step further, he even asks us to imagine someone else’s imaginings; “One day thy poor mother had though to lead thee.”
All this distance encourages greater sympathy once the reader has invested the effort to understand the text. But we see his pain from afar. We watch it, a beautiful but awful thing, but we don’t feel it as our own. That doesn’t make this a bad poem (far from it), but for our purposes we want to know how to get from sympathy to empathy. Stockwell shows us with a second example of Kochanowski’s poetry.
I think no father under any sky
More fondly loved a daughter than did I,
And scarcely ever has a child been born
Whose loss her parents could more justly mourn.
Unspoiled and neat, obedient at all times,
She seemed already versed in songs and rhymes,
And with a highborn courtesy and art,
Though but a babe, she played a maiden’s part.
Discreet and modest, sociable and free
From jealous habits, docile, mannerly,
She never thought to taste her morning fare
Until she should have said her morning prayer;
She never went to sleep at night until
She had prayed God to save us all from ill.
She used to run to meet her father when
He came from any journey home again;
She loved to work and to anticipate
The servants of the house ere they could wait
Upon her parents. This she had begun
When thirty months their little course had run.
So many virtues and such active zeal
Her youth could not sustain; she fell from weal
Ere harvest. Little ear of wheat, thy prime
Was distant; ’tis before thy proper time
I sow thee once again in the sad earth,
Knowing I bury with thee hope and mirth.
For thou wilt not spring up when blossoms quicken
But leave mine eyes forever sorrow-stricken.
This poem starts with the same distancing techniques as Lamentation VII, such as negation (“no father”) and abstraction (“a daughter – a child”). He’s world building for us, using distance and placement to create the architecture of sympathy that is a pre-requisite for empathy. But, as Stockwell explains, once Kochanowksi has placed the poem he moves swiftly on to a more direct form of speech, for example through the use of the third person (“her daughter”). Unlike Lamentation VII, which asked you to imagine other people’s imaginings (“your mother would have” etc), Lamentation XII avoids this sort of “world switching”, and grounds the poem in events and facts of the lost child’s life that make the child “too realisatic to be idealised.”
First person intimacy and the descriptive main body of the poem then leads to the final release of grief in the last lines. You may not actually cry, but “for thou wilt not spring up when blossoms quicken, but leave mine eyes forever sorrow-stricken” goes straight for the gut. You do not observe the grief. You are brought into the father’s space to participate in it.
So sympathy comes from the investment it takes to understand, but empathy comes from simplicity, directness and authenticity. You need sympathy before you get empathy. The reader can’t feel the text until they’ve built their own textual world and made the story their own. That means describing, showing, distancing and placing; negation, abstraction and mystery. But once you have their sympathy, authentic, direct description is the key to empathetic weight.
This sympathetic world building does not have to be heavy or overly-long.[xii] In Lament XII Kochanowski gets the job done in the first two lines. “As the bullets hit him he thought of his daughter,” does a hell of a job in nine words[xiii], as does Hemmingway’s “For Sale: Pair of baby shoes, never worn.” Nor does it have to be terribly, terribly clever. Young Adult novels do a good job of achieving direct empathy because of their authenticity, but once you are an actual grown up adult type adult you might find them pretty dull on a sympathy level because the writing and the world lack sophistication. Because I don’t have to invest a lot of understanding, I never develop enough of a connection to the story to care whether her attraction to Peter compromises Tris’ sense of self-worth.
But that book isn’t for me, and if it were sophisticated in an Umberto-Eco-I’m-a-Sociology-Professor-don’t-you-know sort of way the Divergent series wouldn’t have thrilled a generation of teenagers in the way it has. When I was 12 I cared very deeply about whether Garion would find a way to express his burgeoning love for CeNedra without her throwing more kitchenware at him. Even though I cringe a little reading those books now, I still feel something of what I felt then, as well as a tremendous gratitude to David Eddings for the way he inspired my imagination when I was a boy.
If you’ve made it all the way to the end of this post, you have now achieved a “legendary” score and quite possibly developed a sympathetic understanding of my struggle to understand cognitive poetics. The conclusions may well seem familiar. Write for your audience. Construct a clear and relatable world (placement), inspire the readers imagination through mystery and depth in your writing (negation, world switching), then show (don’t tell) them the emotional core through direct, authentic representation (direct language, realistic description). Once you’ve got them interested and engaged in your world, show them things that make you cry, and there’s a decent chance they’ll cry along with you.
There’s a serious and growing body of literature out there on the psychology of storytelling, and “Authenticity and Creative Reading in Lamentation” is a good place to start[xiv]. Stockwell’s work has helped me to think about the ways I can use language to achieve different sorts of emotional responses from my readers. Academic reading can be challenging, but it is worth the investment, and I can’t recommend this work highly enough.
In the meantime, in your own work, look for ways to manage and balance that process of clarity, mystery and authenticity. Show them an interesting world, and then put emotional honesty at its heart. Give the reader a structured journey to truth and you will make them cry. Suckers.
[i] The University of Nottingham is where I wrote my PhD. However, they generally keep the law students locked up away from the other faculties for fear that vampirism is contagious, so I’ve never met Professor Stockwell. Any pro-UoN bias is clearly justifiable on the basis that Nottingham is awesome.
[ii] Stockwell, P. (2011) ‘Authenticity and Creativity in Reading Lamentation’, in J. Swann, R. Pope
and R. Carter (eds) Creativity in Language & Literature, pp. 203-216 Palgrave (Basingstoke) (2011)
[iii] This may look like a properly seriously academic piece. Don’t be fooled, boys and girls. It’s mostly just overly-long. I haven’t referenced anything before the first paper, I’m not an expert in Cognitive Poetics, and this is nothing more than a blog post where I try to understand Stockwell’s work by writing what I think it means, and responding to how I might use it. If you’re looking for an example of how to write a good English Literature paper, this isn’t it. Actually, I have no idea how someone writes a good English Literature paper. Is it a real subject anyway 😉 ?
[iv] Active reading, not shipping. There’s nothing about shipping in his article. Don’t ask me to explain shipping. You know what it means. I’ve read your Spike/Giles fan-fiction.
[v] My little boy is trying his damndest to learn to read. He opens up his books and points at the words and says “blah blah dah gah blah blah.” He’s only 15 months old and can’t talk yet, but he knows reading is a thing and he wants to do it. It’s adorable. It also reminds me just how much time and hard work it takes to learn how to read. We take it for granted once we can do it, but the more I watch him grappling with the concept the more it amazes me that taking collections of squiggles and turning them into shared ideas is possible. That’s before you even get on to the law of constructive trusts.
[vi] How much you agree with this may depend on how much time you’ve spent building things from Ikea.
[vii] It doesn’t feel pity or remorse, and it absolutely will not stop…
[viii] It’s important to note that this doesn’t mean you should go out and write the fiction equivalent of an advanced calculus textbook on the basis that if it is hard to understand it will be good. You can feel a lot of sympathetic engagement with a book and absolutely bloody hate it. You can get away with that if you’re writing the most accurate book on banking regulation on the market, but if you’re writing fiction you’d better have some emotional payout for the hard work the reader has put into developing sympathy. That’s where empathy comes in, but we’ll get to that.
[ix] Read: googling. The first time I read the Name of the Rose I just skipped those bits. See, I’m not as much an intellectual as I like to pretend!
[x] They’re wrong. Read House of Leaves.
[xi] That one’s all mine baby.
[xii] Unlike this blog post, apparently. Hey, if I can’t wax lyrical on my own blog, what am I going to do with all this wax?
[xiii] I’m sorry to say I have no idea what book this comes from. But the line stayed with me!
[xiv] See the citation at the top of these endnotes, and if you enjoy that article it’s worth having a snoop around the bibliography. Peter Stockwell also ran a course on Cognitive Poetics through Future Learn, so you might want to try out the Future Learn website to see if it is running again.
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