People read to be entertained by being made to feel, not just know. Here's what Dwight Swain had to say:
Where do you find feeling?
It springs from the human heart.
As a writer, your task is to bring this heart-bound feeling to the surface in your reader: to make it well and swell and surge and churn.
Understand, feeling is in said reader from the beginning. You give him nothing he doesn’t possess already.
But emotion, for most people, too often is like some sort of slumbering giant, lulled to sleep by preoccupation with the dead facts of that outer world we call objective. When we look at a painting, we see a price tag. A trip is logistics more than pleasure. Romance dies in household routine.
Yet life without feeling is a sort of death.
Most of us know this. So, we long wistfully for speeded heartbeat, sharpened senses, brighter colors.
This search for feeling is what turns your reader to fiction; the reason why he reads your story. He seeks a reawakening: heightened pulse; richer awareness. Facts are the least of his concern. For them, he can always go to the World Almanac or Encyclopedia Britannica.
Further, Reader wants this sharpening of feeling because he needs it, emotionally speaking. Otherwise, why would he bother with your copy?
Story happens And in happening it evokes empathy in the reader. History is talked about by a voice that contains no emotion, presented by a performer whose performance we cannot view.
Again, here's Swain. This time on focusing on facts:
The snare of the objective
There are two types of mind in this world . . . two approaches to the field of fiction.
One type is that of the objectivist, the man who sees everything analytically. Three things warp his orientation:
a. He depends on facts.
b. He distrusts feelings.
c. Therefore, he tries to write mechanically.
This man may have an inclination to create. But he’s the product of an educational system that focuses on facts the way a Mohammedan zeros in on Mecca; and, in his case, the education took.
Now there’s nothing wrong with facts as such. Educators of necessity seek a common ground on which to reach their students.
But one of the characteristics of a fact is that it has a record of past performance. That’s what makes it a fact: Phenomenon X behaved and/or existed in thus-and-such a manner yesterday, last week, last month, last year. So, we have reason to anticipate that it will behave and/or exist the same way tomorrow.
This means that to deal with facts, you must devote a great deal of attention to analysis of their track records. What did they do in previous encounters, and how did they do it? They’re like cases in law: Past history dominates. First, last, and always you check precedents.
If this were as far as the matter went, there wouldn’t be any real headache. But the educators refused to let it go at that. Facts were easy to present. Knowledge of them was easy to test. In many areas they were of great practical use. Centering attention on them obviated the complications that went with dealing with each student as an individual.
So, educators in the lead, an entire society plunged into wholesale fact-worship.
When you glorify one thing, it’s generally at the expense of something else. In this case, the “something else” was feeling.
And about feelings:
Feeling, indeed, is what drives you forward. Wrapped up in your story, you face the future, not the past. The tale you tell excites you. You write out of the thrill of that excitement. Everywhere, you see new possibilities, new relationships. “What if--?” is your watchword. The rules, when you think of them, are incidental.
Which all is merely another way of saying that the writer is subjective more than objective; that his inner world is more important to him than the external one. Intuitively, he knows that “plot” and “character” and “setting” and all other analytic elements of the craft, taken apart from story, are just that: analytic; which is to say, dead, in the same way that any part of a dissected laboratory specimen is dead.
Because most readers read to feel, not analyze, they love the work of the subjectivist-turned-writer.
