Emotional Guru
David Farland teaches that reading is an emotional exercise. The things we read mix with our imagination to create real emotions while experiencing a story.
He goes on to describe it as a stress exercise. We read about people in a stressful situation and our brain feels as though we are actually experiencing the stress. It works the same for other emotions too.
Lucky for us, it’s not real. That underlying safety is what makes people read in the first place. We all want to experience incredible adventures, but it’s scary and you could get hurt or die. But you can’t die just reading about it … at least I don’t think so. And yet your brain gets to experience it as if it were actually happening to you. There’s nothing better.
It’s like weight lifting for our emotional muscles. The more we experience this emotion in story form, the more we are capable of handling it in our lives. We are exercising our emotional strength!
This is where you come in, dear writer. You’re the emotional guru that is to guide people through this stress exercise. You are supposed to make them scared, worried, stressed, uncertain, terrified, elated, unbearably embarrassed, grateful, and on and on.
The better you do this, the better you equip your readers to be stronger emotionally. And the stronger people are emotionally, the better people they will be.
You’re improving the world one reader, one story at a time. Get them young and they’ll be so much better for the duration of their life.
So take your readers on a painful, emotional journey and they’ll love you for it.
We’ve been a secret organization for a long time, but we’re out in public now. Learn about us. If you write, join us.
