The Power of Immersion: You Can Connect with Readers Without Being John Green
Paul Zak's Immersion Research and Novelists
A long time ago, one of my editors said, “Carrie. You have to blog. You just need to channel your inner John Green.”
I gasped. “But I have no inner John Green.”
"No nerd fighter in you?” they said.
I stared at my never-used fist and my stuffed gnome next to my laptop and said, “There’s a lot of nerd, I guess. But no fighter. I’m more of a gnome.”
“Ha. Yeah. Don’t need a gnome. Give me your John Green.”
I felt like I’d failed before I even began.
Sometimes I still have a really hard time blogging (or even just making a social media post). I think for me, blogging or social media is a bit like writing fiction is for other people when they are blocking on it, and my internal editor is all, “DUDE, NOBODY IS GOING TO WANT TO READ THAT. IT IS BORING. IT IS NOT FUNNY. NEITHER IS IT POIGNANT. YOU ARE NOT JOHN GREEN. YOU DO NOT HAVE NERD FIGHTERS. YOU ARE NOT COOL. DO NOT BLOG. DO NOT BLOG.”
My internal editor does that sometimes when I write stories, too.
However, when I write stories I can shut him up because my internal cheerleader is all, “CAWWIE. IT IS TOTALLY OKAY, BABYCAKES, BECAUSE YOU HAVE TIME TO REVISE AND NOBODY IS GOING TO READ THIS RIGHT AWAY AND THE FIRST READERS WILL BE YOUR AGENT AND 8,000 EDITORS OF AWESOME AND PROOFREADERS. SO DO NOT WORRY. JUST WRITE.”
My inner cheerleader is super sweet, but the problem is that when I blog it is just me spewing and thinking and spewing. There is no agent reader. There are no editor readers. There is just the immediacy of real-life, unknown readers.
That is sort of scary.
And sometimes those readers will send me emails saying I’m the anti-Christ. And there was that one person who called (yes, I answered it) and told me that Satan had claimed my soul. That was a fun time. Also, last time I picked up a phone with UNKNOWN number on the screen.
So, for a long time, I’ve dealt with this by posting a picture of my dog or my cat and using them as daily conduits for my thoughts. I know! I know! Totally wimpy, but they are must cuter than I am, and hopefully, their souls haven’t already been claimed by the devil.
And from now on (if you’ve read this and remember) whenever you see a random picture of one of my pets, you can think, “OH. CARRIE IS TOO WIMPY TO BLOG WITH JUST HER OWN WORDS RIGHT NOW.”
Because I’ve done this so much, people have connected to my dogs and cats over the years and care about them. There’s an attachment that has happened, and I find that fascinating. There are some people who want to know how Sparty the Dog is, why I haven’t posted about Cloud the Cat in the last five days. Randomly, I’ve created an emotional connection between my book readers (and regular friends) and my animals that’s probably a lot stronger than their connection to me or my actual books.
There’s an author and scientist named Paul Zak who studies cognitive neuroscience and psychology and relates it to marketing. What he focuses on a lot is immersion. And he has a 2021 blog post about marketing via immersion. He talks about vanity metrics (the clicks, etc. an ad gets), but then delves into how they are inaccurate.
He writes,
“The classic advertising model called AIDA was developed in 1898 by American ad man Elias St. Elmo Lewis. The acronym stands for Attention, Interest, Desire, and Action. St. Elmo Lewis wrote that ‘attention is to be concentrated and render every other portion of the ad display subordinate to that.’ Advertisers since then have privileged attention over the other three attributes.
“Attention is easily measured. It's the Nielsen box showing that a TV show is on; it is some proportion of newspaper or magazine subscribers to whom one can ascribe ad impressions; and it is a proportion of foot and car traffic going by billboards. In the age of the internet, attention got even easier to measure: impressions, clicks, shares, likes. Congratulations, your ad got attention. Where are the sales?”
What does this have to do with writing?
Well, as writers, we are constantly selling our novel to readers, right? We have to get their attention to pick up the book (back cover, blurb, word-of-mouth) and then hope they are interested and stay interested (the first two elements of AIDA).
And what keeps them interested we call the hook, the desire not only to find out what happens next but to care what happens next in the story. We want the readers to become emotionally connected to the characters, invested.
There’s a reason for that, and Zak researched this for advertisements and what advertisements made people take action. And what he found was this,
“Attention opens the door to action, but it was the neurologic signature of emotional resonance that caused people to act. Emotional resonance is the degree to which a message produces an emotional echo in the brain. This is related to empathy in people and message content. It is associated with the brain's release of the neurochemical oxytocin. Emotional resonance is nonbinary, it varies millisecond by millisecond and when it reaches a crescendo, people take action. Emotion is what drives decisions.”
And it’s also what drives readers.
So how do we do that?
NowNovel has a post about setting and says it immerses readers.
The Creative Pen has a post (2020) about creating characters readers care about to hook them, which is a well-written riff off the work of Maas and Butler.
The Write Practice has a similar post.
But right now, it’s Zak’s piece in the Harvard Business Review (not about novels particularly) that really resonates with me. He writes (about his research):
“We discovered that, in order to motivate a desire to help others, a story must first sustain attention – a scarce resource in the brain – by developing tension during the narrative. If the story is able to create that tension, then it is likely that attentive viewers/listeners will come to share the emotions of the characters in it, and after it ends, likely to continue mimicking the feelings and behaviors of those characters. This explains the feeling of dominance you have after James Bond saves the world, and your motivation to work out after watching the Spartans fight in 300.”
It isn’t just about the main character being sympathetic or relatable; it’s also about the tension, that “will they or won’t they” wonder. It’s part of the reason you watch a sports event. You want to know via the tension of the live action, if they will win. If you’re emotionally connected to one of the players? You’re even more immersed because you’re living their story of the game with them.
“My experiments show that character-driven stories with emotional content result in a better understanding of the key points a speaker wishes to make and enable better recall of these points weeks later,” he writes.
That’s a lot of power, right? That’s why novels still matter. And story too.
He writes, “When you want to motivate, persuade, or be remembered, start with a story of human struggle and eventual triumph. It will capture people’s hearts – by first attracting their brains.”
Go after their brains, writers, then you can get their hearts.
WRITING EXERCISE OF AWESOME
This exercise is from the Writing Cooperative’s article about creating emotional connection. It doesn’t have to do with story, but in making story better with evocative words.
A PLACE TO SUBMIT
Alchemy and Miracles Anthology Gilbert and Hall Press
We are currently looking for pieces that fall under the theme of nature woven into words.
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All are welcome here.
Closes on Wednesday, June 21, 2023 11:59 PM MDT
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