"Manipulating" your readers' feelings.

Personally, I think all stories (even the non-fiction) aims at manipulating the reader's emotions and feelings. It's rare that a writer simply presents the scenes or facts without any agenda or thoughts behind them.

I think when people feel that they've been "manipulated" (and thus feeling resentful) is when the writer is being too deliberate and obvious in making something happen. Sometimes it is just cliched (oh, here come the strings, then the moonlight, then the dying swans -- we're supposed to cry, aren't we?) There is a line -- where, I can't really tell you. I think usually it's when the plot or whatever doesn't come about naturally, or when it's orchestrated so deliberately that it's artificial, and it's manipulative. (It's not that the writer doesn't feel the same thing.)

For example, when a certain named writer killed of his protagonist because it's "tragic" and the readers will "cry" -- I felt resentful and believed it was manipulation.

There are times when I feel that I've gone overboard with the manipulation -- I try so hard to make the readers feel something that it ends up not feeling genuine or organic -- and I have to watch that. My betas are generally very good at telling me.

RE: love story vs. horror/thrillers, etc. I think when it comes to love and sadness, people have a tendency to resent manipulation more than anything else. I can't really tell you why -- I guess people would deliberately seek out thrills and frights (that's why amusement parks are so popular) but they don't necessarily want to be forced to feel sadness. And love should be organic and not forced... no one wants to feel obligated as far as love is concerned, and that translates to the pages. That's my take on it.

I think there's certain truth in that, and that's why a lot of people (men, for example) refuse to read love stories. "Feeling misty eye/cry" is not a "cool thing" and they feel manipulated that way; meanwhile, they have no problem to be manipulated into feeling a chill up their spines.

While that theory may contain seeds of truth it's maybe too much of a generalization. I may avoid love stories due to genre preference, but I've read Sci-Fi and Fantasy authors who are adept at building up to misty eye/cry situations. I have no problem with feeling those "unmanly" emotions when characters I care about are affected.

-Derek

I like to think my reader/s will cry when my MC has his hand nailed to a table.

For me, I have these clarifying moments when it flows so quickly from my brain to the keyboard that I can't stop. If I pump out a good heart-felt passage, I know it is the kind of feeling I want my reader/s to have. It's like being in the moment - there when it happened. It's when I am struggling with a passage and I try to force the issue that it feels like false manipulation on my part. I know it sounds corny, but that's why I try to visualise myself as the MC and what would I do in that situation.

JJ

"No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader."

--Robert Frost

I think the feeling of reader manipulation can also come about when the author has their character do something that either isn't natural to the character or organic to the story - giving it a contrived feeling.

The resulting emotions then don't seem genuine and seem artificially created by the author for effect.

Every word I write is an aim to attach myself to the reader's emotions. If I beat them over the head with this, I would be manipulating them. I try to do it subtly so they don't feel manipulated but they do feel emotional impact. If I try telling them how to feel, they will feel manipulated...if I simply make them feel, they won't. That's my take anyway.

And when you consider the fact that we're already lying to them, what's a little manipulation on top of that?

Manipulation does go on - that's what writing's all about. Causing emotion, stirring feelings (and satisfying them also.)

But it has to be seamless or it's failed. Like a magician's trick. The audience knows it's a trick, but they love it regardless - until they see the strings and then they'll be pissed and storm out crying "Fake!"

Let me use Grey's Anatomy as an example. In (I think it was Season 2) we had a wonderful storyline that involved one of the doc's falling for a dying patient. When that patient died, it made me cry. I didn't feel manipulated. I felt like it was a good, reasonable part of the storyline and character arc.

Another doc lost his father that season. I cried then, too, and I also didn't feel manipulated.

Then the title character "died" during a drowning. There were all the appropriate things Ray mentioned, the mood music, the flashbacks, the heroine "meeting" the other characters who had died over the season, and then, the final piece of the puzzle, she had an encounter with her dying-now-dead mother in the space between life and death. (And you could see THAT coming a mile away.)

Give me a break. I felt totally manipulated by this entire series of events involving the title character. It's not like she was REALLY going to die. It's her show, for crying out loud.

That made me annoyed with the writers. That was the line, for me, where drama dissolved into melodrama and crud.

Does that help?

Susan G.

Manipulating the reader's feelings is part of the writer's job. I think people get their knickers in a knot when they're manipulated by withheld information or a deus ex machina ending, rather than having their emotional chain effectively yanked. I love to cry with a good book (we recently finished reading Where the Red Fern Grows *sob*).

It's our JOB to manipulate our readers - to make them see what we want them to see, hear what we want them hear, feel what we want them to feel. If it's well done, they never notice it. If it's not well done, they definitely notice, and say snotty things about us to their friends...

I agree with willie...what IS literature but one big pile of manipulation?
It's not the manipulation per se that's the problem.
(we all know the scenario...a guy who loves to be manipulated by the beautiful blond yet hates it when his mother makes him come to Sunday dinner because of guilt - right?)
I think some readers (and reviewers) blame manipulation wrongly...
Manipulation is GREAT! IMHO

You say "manipulate", I say "manipulate"...

As I read through the thread, I got the idea there were two definitions of "manipulate" being discussed. The tripping point seems to be at the level of subtlety. We don't mind being manipulated by fiction, we mind feeling manipulated by fiction. That's not a shot at anybody--all the comments were really good, depending upon which nuance was being used.

When I first read the title of the thread, the first thing that came to my mind was not so much genre--romance, whatever--but rather how I felt when I was being force-fed an agenda by a writer. Pro-this, anti-that; I've seen shows and read novels that were clearly written to advance a particular moral or social position. And that's okay, but when the circumstances/events surrounding the agenda item are so artificially contrived so as to make the author's position squeaky white and any counter to that position lower on the social order than whale dung, it frustrates me. That's when I feel manipulated--even if/when I happen to agree with the agenda item.

We have a friend who saw the movie Love Story when it first came out (which was a lonnnnnng time ago).

The friend's summary: "Yeah, I cried. But I felt used."

So, go ahead, manipulate the reader's feelings. Just make sure you call the day after, or send boxes of chocolate.

David I said:

We have a friend who saw the movie Love Story when it first came out (which was a lonnnnnng time ago).

The friend's summary: "Yeah, I cried. But I felt used."

So, go ahead, manipulate the reader's feelings. Just make sure you call the day after, or send boxes of chocolate.

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Or at the very least, buy them dinner first.

On the other hand, you could try being true to your characters and not allow your story to jerk them around.

That also works.

aruna said:

I just finished writing the most intensive scene in my whole WIP. Usually I write about 1000 words a session but this a.m. I was so carried away I lost track of time and ended up writing 2500, and my heart was breaking the whole time. I don't think the readers of this scene will notice the strings of manipuation. It was so real...!

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That's the secret, right there. You've got to feel it intensely as you write it so you can get it down on the paper for your readers to feel it.

Good for you!

My husband's learned, if he should walk into my office and find me typing and crying at the same time, he should just back away and close the door on his way out. <G>

Susan G.

It's kind of hard for me to be typing and crying at the same time at Starbucks.

I think there's definitly a difference between manipulation of your readers' feelings, and the genuine rising of emotion from the story. I can think, off the top of my head, of plenty of amateur stories I've read where the writer goes on and on about the agonizing throes of blackest pain in the darkest depths of the character's tortured soul, in an attempt to show us -- through excessive writing -- how we, in turn, should feel at the death of another character. And mostly, it doesn't work.

On the other hand, I can also think of plenty of books where sad events, sad deaths, (or happy events, but it's the sad ones that come immediately to mind) are told to me plainly, and the characters' reactions are told just as plainly, and I am left miserable because of it.

A happy example is, the ending of "In her Shoes," the novel. Or the movie, really. It's a happy ending. BUt it's told plainly, and I am left to my own devices to feel happy and better for it. The book doesn't recap all the good emotions for me, as if trying to make extra sure I felt the right things.

The Bible passage "Jesus wept." would not have been nearly so interesting if it were followed by a two-page dissertation on why he wept and why we should be weeping too.

PeeDee said:

I think there's definitly a difference between manipulation of your readers' feelings, and the genuine rising of emotion from the story. I can think, off the top of my head, of plenty of amateur stories I've read where the writer goes on and on about the agonizing throes of blackest pain in the darkest depths of the character's tortured soul, in an attempt to show us -- through excessive writing -- how we, in turn, should feel at the death of another character. And mostly, it doesn't work.

On the other hand, I can also think of plenty of books where sad events, sad deaths, (or happy events, but it's the sad ones that come immediately to mind) are told to me plainly, and the characters' reactions are told just as plainly, and I am left miserable because of it.

A happy example is, the ending of "In her Shoes," the novel. Or the movie, really. It's a happy ending. BUt it's told plainly, and I am left to my own devices to feel happy and better for it. The book doesn't recap all the good emotions for me, as if trying to make extra sure I felt the right things.

The Bible passage "Jesus wept." would not have been nearly so interesting if it were followed by a two-page dissertation on why he wept and why we should be weeping too.

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Excellent points!

When I watched the first LOTR, I was really taken by one of the final scenes where Boromir is dying and Aragon gives him his sword and then calls him 'my captain and my king.' To me, that was a perfect moment of understated grace, and whenever my kids have that DVD on, I always slip into the room when that scene comes on. (Shoot, I'm tearing up now just thinking about it!)

Every reader/viewer knows that she is having her strings pulled, but some puppeteers are just better than others

David I said:

"No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader."

--Robert Frost

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I like this a lot...but you know what? So, I'm unpubbed, and I've only completed one novel so far. But I don't think about any of that stuff. I tell my story the way that it is in my head...I let my fingers just go....let my mind unravel. I've never thought about trying to make anyone feel anything. In the end, what I have is a novel that has brought tears to my friends' eyes, given them shivers in appropriate places, and made them very protective of my MC's welfare. I didn't try to do that..that's what came out when I told my story.