Early drafts are hard work. You might be tempted to make sure your readers can rest easy during your storytelling. Using smiles would seem to put everybody in a happy place. Heavy smiling, though, gets in the way of what we like to do while we read: imagining “the feels,” as some readers call emotions.
The smiling makes us less curious. When we are told that a character smiled, and then read a line of dialogue, or we watch that character smiling during a scene, we get shortchanged. “It’s going to be all right in here,” all of these smiles say. When that line gets conveyed, we blow a hole in The Good Ship Tension.”
Tension is vital. What will happen next is the number one thing to keep a reader engaged. Lisa Cron tells us this in her lectures and workshops around her masterwork Wired for Story. If you’re a LinkedIn member who pays for a subscription, there’s a superb two-hour lecture in LinkedIn Learning, including a transcript.
She says story’s real breakthroughs are things that trigger the sense of pleasure we feel when a story hooks us. “It’s not lyrical language, great characters, realistic dialogue, or even vivid images,” Cron says. “Curiosity is the trigger. In other words, the desire to find out what happens next. That feeling of pleasure, it’s actually a rush of the neural transmitter dopamine.”
Smiling, over and over, swamps the good work of curiosity. You can type smiles into the draft that gets your book off the launchpad, but rest assured you want to wipe away those smiles if you want to get your story into orbit.
Yes, happiness is our desired landing spot for a story — but warming to it should take a long while, or at least be cooled off repeatedly along the journey to The End.
The dopamine is our reward for following our curiosity until we find the answer. “This information is a game-changer for writers, especially given how often we’re led to believe that having a way with words is what hooks readers,”” Cron says. “In fact, words are the handmaiden of story.”
