Writers in the Storm

A blog about writing

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March 16, 2018

Want to Push Your Protagonist Over the Edge? Add an Emotion Amplifier

Angela Ackerman

Put your character up a tree and then throw rocks at him.

This iconic advice is something every writer hears at some point and keeping it at the forefront of our minds when writing is one of the wisest things we can do. Not only must we make good on our back-jacket blurb promise that the protagonist will find themselves in an impossible situation of some kind (thanks to the twisted events we set in motion as part of the plot), we also want to ensure tension is on every page, hooking the reader and keeping them in thrall.  

Tension is that beautiful feeling of anticipatory uncertainty that we seed in the reader’s mind:

I think there’s something more going on here…

What’s the significance of that, I wonder?

Uh-oh. This doesn’t sound good…

Wait…does that mean what I think it means?

Oh my gosh, what will happen now?

Big or small, tension creates a “need to know” within the reader: Who was that creepy guy standing in the middle of the moon-lit field, watching the farmhouse? When will the protagonist’s best friend admit her feelings? Why didn’t the killer strike when he could have?

Secrets, danger, desire, problems, complications, omissions, challenges, decisions, stakes…all of these are ingredients in a tension-rich story. But, to work, they all require one very important thing: emotional investment.

THE EMOTION—TENSION CONNECTION  

Emotion and tension often go hand in hand. If emotion is low, chances are that story tension is also waning. When emotion is high and it’s written effectively, tension will most likely be on the rise. Tension is important in a story because it increases reader interest. When the hero’s outlook is grim, readers worry over his success. This worry translates into empathy with the character and a desire to keep reading to find out what happens. They become emotionally invested.

For us to encourage this emotional investment, we need to help readers feel close to our characters, meaning that effectively showing what they feel, and why, is crucial. Sometimes to keep the emotional intensity, we need to juice things up a bit. This is where emotional amplifiers come in.

WHAT IS AN EMOTION AMPLIFIER?

Hunger. Stress. Attraction. Exhaustion. Pain. Each of these is an amplifier—a state that can impact a character’s physical and mental condition and make them emotionally unstable. Amplifiers up the ante in a scene because they throw your characters off their game and make life more difficult. And because they can cause the character’s emotions to become volatile, they are much more likely to misstep and make a mistake. When their situation grows worse, readers are pulled in deeper, frantically flipping pages to find out what will happen next.

Adding the right amplifier at the worst time is akin to walking up to the tree your character is in and setting it on fire.

SPEAKING OF HUNGER…

As an example, let’s consider The Hunger Games. Tension is high throughout the story because of what’s at stake. But Collins doesn’t let it stay at that level. Instead, she ramps it up by adding stressors to Katniss’s situation. At the start of the games, Collins removes fresh water from the arena, thereby threatening dehydration and adding another life-or-death scenario for the heroine to worry about. She introduces the tracker jackers and their hallucinatory stings, increasing tension and the reader’s fear over the hero’s well-being. Like a sadistic Head Gamemaker, Collins never lets the heroine off the hook. She continues to throw Katniss new and more alarming problems that make it more and more difficult to survive an already impossible situation.

And the torture pays off. With each new amplifier, two important things are accomplished.

First, Katniss herself experiences heightened stress. Each amplifier makes it more difficult for her to think clearly and make good decisions. Poor decisions lead to more problems, which lead to heightened stress…it’s a continuing cycle that keeps the reader riveted as tension inches upward across the pages.

Secondly, these amplifiers heighten the heroine’s emotions. With each new stressor, Katniss becomes more afraid, paranoid, angry, or depressed. As readers, we feel those emotions right along with her. We’re drawn into her story and begin to root for her success in a way that guarantees we’ll keep reading the book until the very end.

LIKE ANY TOOL, USE AMPLIFIERS WITH CARE

In the case of the Hunger Games, applying amplifier after amplifier works, because the aim of the Gamekeepers is to push the tributes to their limits and break them, one by one. But this won’t be the case in every story. Consider which amplifiers might work best for your scene and choose one that offer the biggest payload. For example, if you know your character’s emotional soft spots, try an amplifier that has personal significance. It will affect them the most.

If you need help showing how your character’s behavior changes when affected by an amplifier, Becca and I created an Emotion Amplifier e-booklet as a companion to The Emotion Thesaurus. You can also find Emotion Amplifiers at One Stop for Writers, along with a helpful tutorial and tip sheet.

Have you used Emotion Amplifiers to increase the tension and up the stakes? Let me know in the comments!

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Angela Ackerman is a writing coach, international speaker, and co-author of the bestselling book, The Emotion Thesaurus: A Writer’s Guide to Character Expression, as well as five others. Her books are available in six languages, are sourced by US universities, and are used by novelists, screenwriters, editors, and psychologists around the world. Angela is also the co-founder of the popular site Writers Helping Writers, as well as One Stop for Writers, an innovative online library built to help writers elevate their storytelling. Find her on Facebook, Twitter, an

23 comments on “Want to Push Your Protagonist Over the Edge? Add an Emotion Amplifier”

  1. Such a great reminder, Angela - thanks as always, for your wisdom. Around the middle of the WIP, I tend to forget this - and it can be the impetus!

    1. Amplifiers can be great for revision, I find. As we analyze scenes, we can look for opportunities to juice the scene up just a bit more. Plus too, if we need the character to make a costly mistake, sometimes an amplifier is what is the difference from the readers buying in that it could actually happen, to them not. Amplifiers can be so very helpful 🙂

  2. Thanks for the great reminder! It's one of the things I need to remember as I go back and add layers to my first draft.

    1. Yes, I love these when revising. Amplifiers can help create credibility when we need to have the character screw up, and it helps to make it believable (plus, readers identify with how certain circumstances can get under your skin. 😉

  3. I'm literally keeping your One Stop Shop for Writers, with the Emotion Thesaurus and Emotion Amplifier Thesaurus at my fingers, open in my browser while revising my novel. I sometimes pause, go click over to your subscription site (so worth the money!), and then jump back into my work in progress armed with great information like this. I'm sure you didn't intend for this post to be a plug for your site, but too bad—I'm loving it all too much not to say something! And thank you for this great post. 🙂

    1. Julie, you are the best, thank you! And I am so glad you are getting value from the site. I love having it all there in one place too. And amplifiers are one of those small things that can make such a big difference...and not just for the main character, but all characters. Even the antagonist has to make mistakes, and as readers, we all relate to how certain things can make us more volatile, so it helps us believe in the situation when these miscalculations happen. 😉

  4. Good stuff, Angela...how about having a protagonist kill a man everyone believes is responsible for killing others in her group, only for her to find out later that the man was innocent--all in the middle of a blizzard in the mountains...and the protagonist is a young widower, wondering if she'll ever see her child again?

  5. As long as you show how these miscalculations come about, go for it. We all know a time where we misread events and saw something that wasn't there. In your case though, the stakes are super high, so you will have to show through the protagonist's eyes in a way that a) explains why they interpret the situation as they do...but also after the fact, also contain the clues to show that the protagonist's viewpoint was mistaken. It's a tall order but will be terrific when you pull it off! 🙂

  6. This is filled with concrete examples which is what I need. Sustaining tension is not one of my strengths. How does one add elements of emotion to historical research that appears dry, stuffy, routine on the surface?

    1. Try looking it a different way - historical is full of boundaries, which supplies lots of great opportunities for friction. People had defined roles and rules to go with those roles: what were women allowed to do vs. men? The rich vs. the poor? Educated vs not? What type of courage would it take to step outside those roles and rules...and how high would the stakes need to be to risk the punishment if caught? Lots of great situations can come about that will amp things up and create tension. 🙂

  7. Angela, thanks! I especially like the list of tension builders, ending with "What will happen now?" which is what keeps readers up at night. I remember to this day how Puzo's The Godfather grabbed me like that and would not let go. When was that? 1970? Excellent post!

    1. Yes, amplifiers are great if they have a legitimate reason for being there (not a plot device) and the description adds to the story (characterizes, shows emotion, furthers the plot, supplies tension, etc.) rather than bloats it with unnecessary word count.

  8. […] https://writersinthestormblog.com/2018/03/want-to-push-your-protagonist-over-the-edge-add-an-emotion-… “This iconic advice is something every writer hears at some point and keeping it at the forefront of our minds when writing is one of the wisest things we can do. Not only must we make good on our back-jacket blurb promise that the protagonist will find themselves in an impossible situation of some kind (thanks to the twisted events we set in motion as part of the plot), we also want to ensure tension is on every page, hooking the reader and keeping them in thrall.”   […]

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