Those Emotions are Wrong

My biffle has been reading through Modern Monsters, and I'm enough of an anxious busybody that I keep checking in on the google document she's reading to read her comments.

In one of the stories, someone attacks the main character. It's supposed to be a shocking moment of violence, but my biffle's response was along the lines of “Yeah! Get her!”

I was horrified. “If you want the main character to be beaten, I've done something wrong.  This is bad.”

“No,” she said, “You elicited an emotional response. That's a good thing.”

“But it's not the response I want, and it's going to make is so the ending doesn't work.” And, indeed, the ending didn't work for her.

My initial gut instinct was to reject everything she said because she was just wrong, and then to rationalize that decision with the fact that the two of us consistently treat violence in fiction differently. But visceral rejections like this are the ones to which I really need to pay attention, because they mean that deep down I knew something was wrong. Also, it was completely unfair to my awesome biffle, who was taking the time to read my draft and tell me what she thought. I spent the day coming up with a frantic list of ways to make the main character more sympathetic and to make what's happening more clear, which I think are going to turn out to be really important edits that give it some of the polish it was lacking.

But this got me thinking about a lot of things.

1. Can I control my reader's emotions? On the one hand, of course not! How presumptive of me! There's always going to be someone who feels differently than I expect, and I see it all the time as a reader where I can tell the author wants me to feel one way and I burst out laughing instead. Was that a misfire on their part, or does that work on most people and I'm just the weird one out? Is it just a numbers game: most people will feel pathos for this lost puppy? On the other hand, there are definitely ways emotions can be manipulated. On the other side of the spectrum, there are the unearned tears I shed at the end of a movie when the music swells and there's one really good line, but the character didn't earn those tears. It's probably somewhere in the middle and going too far in either direction is a lazy way out.

2. My friend noted that the ending didn't work. For her, the middle wasn't a problem, but she noted what she was feeling. One thing I've learned from this short story exercise is that the problem isn't really the ending, and isn't even really the middle. The problem is the beginning, where that character is not set up correctly. That's were I need to do most of the work.