Writing that moves the reader - and delays that all-important cup of tea

Recent Global Story Competitions have been characterised by the arrival of a number of very powerful stories and another arrived today.

They have been stories which show the writers’ instinctive understanding for the way readers can be moved and I thought it would be useful to recap my thoughts on the subject,.

For a start, what do I mean? Well, in my view, good writing is about triggers. What is the point if the reader gets to the end of your story, shrugs and goes to make a cup of tea, their life unchanged by your efforts?

How much better if, before they go and make that cup of tea, they sit for a few moments and think back on what they have read?

Maybe they will feel emotional, maybe they will feel moved to tears, maybe they will say a silent prayer for a remembered loved one, maybe they will smile at memories, maybe they will laugh at jokes just read, maybe they simply cared for the people in the story they just read. As long as they feel something.

Tales that bring forth such reactions often draw in some way on the writer’s own experiences but they also trigger something in readers they have never met. And we all have those triggers inside us. Fears, insecurities, emotions, experiences. Like everyone, I have had, still have, deep sadness in my life. Loved ones lost and damaged, deaths witnessed, things unsaid, lives un-lived.

So when I read some stories, they trigger something deep within me. It will not happen with all stories but it happens with a fair proportion that I see entered into our competitions. For others, different stories will move them and in different ways.

Now, I am not saying that to succeed a story needs to have all that power - we should never lose sight of craft, of the sheer joy of good writing - but if it has the ability to move someone somewhere then it’s achieved something special.

I think that sometimes writers forget the power in our hands when we pick up that pen, switch on that computer. Yes, it’s fiction but in so many stories you can see the truth running through it.

That is certainly the case with my own writing. In a way, my characters tell parts of my life story. Changed, adapted, developed but part of my life story for all that. Does it trigger something in the reader? Do you know, I reckon it might just do for some of them. Not all of them but for some.

And did the writer who entered today’s story trigger something in me as I read it? Well, I didn’t go off to make that cup of tea straightaway. I reckon that answers the question.
John Dean