Affecting the Effect

Writers as the Ultimate Manipulators

May 19, 2007 Steven Dowdle

A brief look at why writing affects people as they read, and how being an author allows one to manipulate the reader's emotions.

What is it that makes a person curl up, clasp hands over ears, and shout, “No! Don’t tell me the ending of the sixth Harry Potter book! I haven’t read it yet! Don’t tell me who dies! It will make me cry!” Why do readers—no, a better term would be participants—in entertainment find such a deep and abiding presence within literature and texts? Where does the power dwell, ultimately, that makes the “entertainment industry” thrive with billions of dollars of revenue each year? Why do people drop upwards of ten dollars to sit in a dark movie theater with perfect strangers for a two hour film? Why do people become so emotionally invested in the experience of avatars that they weep when the characters weep, cringe when the characters cringe, and vociferously defend said characters as though they were real?

This question is not new; it’s the intellectual chew-toy of many literary critics, well worn and effective at breaking into the bizarre realm of vicarious living that almost everyone enjoys at some level.

Moving beyond the idea of “connectedness” to a character, and “personal relativity” (e.g. “I relate to this character, because she, like me, has a deadbeat husband and three cats”), an exploration of who does the string pulling on these avatars reveals something deeper: Authors affect the effect on the participants.

Grammar-check: affect is the verb, an act upon something. “The tear gas started to affect me.” Effect, on the other hand, is the noun, like “special effects” or the end result of a manipulation. (Granted, an interchange between the two is possible, but simplicity proves the more adequate choice here.)

So, how does an author affect this effect? It boils down to those six (or seven, depending on the source) traits of good writing: voice, idea, content, organization, word choice, sentence fluency. Especially through voice and word choice, the rhyming two that most quickly can envelope the reader in the new vicarious world, the puppet-master author pulls strings, twists plots, and reveals character.

But this now begs the question: Why? Why is it important to know about the author’s power?

As burgeoning writers, it is essential to realize the power of each word: The effect that the words have on the reader. This effect is less about the ink on the paper and more about the strength of the human mind to be impacted and, to a certain extent, manipulated by concepts, words, and reactions. Sometimes that’s all there is: A visceral reaction to what was written. A paragraph about eating a raw lemon can make someone’s mouth pucker, or the gruesome death at a murder scene can cause, as it were, a recoil at the “sight” of it. Done only with words, the author allows access to his or her imagination, and the strength of the experience is so powerful that almost 50,000 products a year apply for an ISBN [www.isbn.org/standards/home/isbn/about_information_standards.asp] in order to continue the supply of such vicarious visions.

As the ultimate manipulators of perceptions and notions, authors and writers should be cognizant of just how much power they wield over those who participate and interact with their worlds and words. People care about the fictitious characters (even nonfiction is replete with fictitious characters in that the way a person acts, speaks, and comports oneself is only given as much attention as the writer gives him or her) because of this startling effect that the imagination can utilize, and an author can manipulate.

The copyright of the article Affecting the Effect in Writing Fiction is owned by Steven Dowdle. Permission to republish Affecting the Effect in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.