: Re: How can I get my readers in the gut? Braveheart. Titanic. Lord of the Rings. What do these movies (movies, not books) have in common? Besides great musical scores, they have what I call Gut

@Speyer920

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The best advice I can give is that your readers won't care about what happens to your characters if you don't. You have to want them to succeed when you write their story or it will come off as generic and with no impact or lasting memory.

I once read a series of books and at the end of the third one, the main male lead was killed off. At the start of the fourth, the author actually apologised to his readers, saying that he knew it was hard to read and admitted it was even harder to write and promised there was a good reason behind it. Having read the rest of the books, I now know it was the right thing to do but it has stuck with me all this time after.

Years of watching (and reading) mean we want the hero to succeed, we want the couple in love to make it, we want good to triumph over evil but these in themselves aren't enough to make it a GEA as you call it.

The viewer / reader has to have time to get emotionally involved in the characters in these events taking place and it makes the GEA that much more powerful to watch.

This doesn't mean you have to leave them until the end of the book, just to have enough groundwork to make any event have a potential to be a GEA. I myself killed the girlfriend of my male lead in the first chapter but the entire chapter was setting up them getting ready for a date, he was going to propose etc. before they got attacked and she was killed.

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