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Spacefaring Union Technical Paper #1

Methods for Achieving Emotional Impact in Fiction

Problem Statement

Fiction at its best delivers an emotional experience to readers, but making that happen often feels like a big, amorphous problem. We lavish technique to create suspense, yet the result can feel overcomplicated, as if we’re trying too hard. We raise the stakes to cosmic levels, only to find readers unmoved: cosmic stakes are everywhere in clumsy science fiction and fantasy. If readers are unmoved by the fate of the universe, what stakes are left to put on the table?

Why doesn’t escalation reliably engage readers? Because emotional relatability matters more than scale. Without that relatability, technique becomes noise. But get it right, and audiences can care deeply about a volleyball that washes up on a castaway’s beach. You just have to decide on the significance of that volleyball, and then communicate that significance effectively.

It’s not that the writing advice we receive is wrong—most of it is useful—but without context for when and how to apply it, technique alone can’t do the work. For that reason, I propose a simple division of concerns into two areas, each of which may be independently addressed in any scene: ethos (the payload: worldview, values, character, stakes, themes) and craft (the vehicle: technique, prose style, stage management). In a nutshell, if a reader says, "I don't get it," you have a craft problem. If a reader says "I don't care," you have an ethos problem.

This technical paper describes each area of concern in terms of well-known stories, proposes a critical framework based on them, then illustrates the framework application to a sample story.

I. The Primary Dimensions

Craft and ethos are both areas where you have to make selections; you don't use every literary technique in every story, and you don't put every belief and attitude you have into a story. The goal is to make appropriate choices in both areas so that those areas support each other.

1. Craft (The Vehicle)

Definition: Craft is technical skill in composition. It includes rhetoric, prose style, plotting and narrative devices, dialogue, and techniques of characterization.
Function: Craft determines Accessibility. It is the machinery which delivers the story to the reader's mind.
The Goal: To reduce friction. High craft removes obstacles between the reader's mind and the writer's intent.
Example: C.S. Lewis. His prose is so transparent and polished that his highly specific, niche ethos (Christian apologetics/allegory) becomes accessible to a global, secular audience.

2. Ethos (The Payload)

Definition: Ethos is the writer's stance toward the elements of human experience he selects to include in his story, as embodied by the characters' nature, motivations, circumstances, and goals. It is the emotional and thematic force—the specific "truth" the writer is desperate to communicate. The reader cannot read your mind; your job is to embody the themes of the story in each character's motivations, goals, and stakes in the outcome of each scene.
Function: Ethos determines Resonance. It is the reason the reader cares.
The Goal: To induce a reaction. High ethos forces the reader to confront a worldview, a feeling, or a reality.
Example: Ayn Rand. Her prose is often utilitarian and repetitive (serviceable Craft), but her Ethos (the worship of human ability and the rage against mediocrity) is so potent for a certain segment of sympathetic readers that to them, her works feel like masterpieces. But unlike Lewis, readers outside of her natural audience experience her works as emotionally inaccessible.

Craft and Ethos in application.

The late screenwriter Blake Snyder coined a term "save the cat" for a screenwriting technique to make a character more sympathetic: have him do some thing that is mildly heroic but low stakes for him, like saving a cat. The screenplay of Casablanca establishes this about Rick's ethos -- he's cynical and world weary. He even tells himself, he sticks his neck out for nobody. But then he helps a refugee woman escape by cheating for her at roulette, telling us that he's more three dimensional than all that establishing work suggested. That's "saving the cat".

Let's make an important point here. Sympathy for a character is not a thing we can put into a story; it's an effect that arises in the reader's mind from the things we can put into the story: ethos and craft. The Epstein brothers couldn't put sympathy for Rick into the screenplay, but they could do meticulous work establishing Rick's conflicted values.

You might wonder whether "save the cat" is ethos or technique. I consider it a technique, because as far as ethos is concerned, it's generic. But it doesn't matter how you classify something like that, only that you're clear on what you are communicating and how.

II. The Quadrants of Interaction

1. High Craft + High Ethos (The Masterpiece)

The Result: Broadly effective, enduring literature. The work is technically brilliant and spiritually resonant.
Example: John Updike's "A&P". The prose is exquisite (High Craft), and the story captures a universal, painful moment of youthful principle colliding with reality (High Ethos).

2. Low Craft + High Ethos (The Cult Bestseller)

The Result: The guilty pleasure. The "inexplicable" success. Critics mock the prose, but the right readers will be addicted to the feeling.
Example: Dan Brown, Twilight, Fan-fiction. Don’t let the mockery deceive you. These writers have achieved something remarkable: an emotional connection with a readership. Chalking their success up to readers being “stupid” isn’t just lazy and elitist criticism; it’s a missed opportunity to learn from a rare achievement. Regardless of how “unrespectable” a success may seem, it's worth studying. Focusing exclusively on their craft deficiencies doesn't help you. Studying what makes them work despite their shortcomings does.

3. High Craft + Low Ethos (The "Workshop" Story)

The Result: Technically impressive but not moving.
Example: Literary Fiction Exercises. This does not refer to the genre as a whole (the best of which belongs in the Masterpiece quadrant), but rather to the stereotype of the academic "workshop story." The prose is polished (High Craft), but the work exists to demonstrate the writer's mastery of technique. This is the kind of story one can submit with pride to an instructor, but does not intend to publish.

4. Low Craft + Low Ethos (The Slush Pile)

The Result: Incoherent or boring. The story fails because it lacks both the skill to be readable and the stance to be meaningful.
Examples: Too numerous to mention. Producing something in this quadrant is what we’re trying to avoid by organizing our focus into craft and ethos. Importantly, this quadrant describes a stage of development, not a type of writer. When you succeed with either focus, you have something to be proud of: either a journeyman piece that demonstrates your craft mastery, or a story that will connect with someone.

III. Emergent Effects: Voice, Immersion, Humor, Wonder, and Engagement

Voice, humor, wonder, and engagement are all things we want to achieve in a story. But they are not things we can put into the story. They are effects that emerge from the things we can control, namely craft and ethos.

Voice

Voice is the impression that characters (especially including the narrator) are memorable and distinctive. Twain achieves this in Huckleberry Finn through a combination of craft (careful study and rendering of dialect) and ethos (Huck's ironic conviction that he is being a bad person). The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy achieves voice by having the narration take the character of "the book"—crafted to be dry and somewhat pedantic while it discusses the most outlandish "facts" of the universe with an ironically dispassionate attitude (ethos).

In J.D. Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye, the "Voice" of Holden Caulfield emerges because Salinger used rigorous technical skill (repetition, hyperbole, de-escalation) to perfectly articulate a specific Ethos (adolescent cynicism and the fear of corruption).

Immersion & Engagement

Immersion is the feeling that arises in the reader that he is in the story world experiencing the story—usually with the protagonist. There are numerous technical prerequisites for this, one of which theater people would call scene "blocking": the reader needs to keep track of where everyone and everything that is important is on the "stage." If readers lose track of something important, then they have to stop and figure out what happened to it. On the other hand, if you are too detailed, the reader loses track of important things under unimportant detail. Considerable judgment is required to choose what needs to be said, and what the reader can be safely left to fill in for himself. Likewise, enough sensory detail can help make a scene vivid, but at some point you're making your prose style the focus, not the scene.

Immersion also requires attention to ethos: why are these details you are deploying important? Significance is what fuels the reader's processing of the otherwise meaningless details you are making them process. In Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone, Rowling works through the absurd and deliberately overcomplicated rules of Quidditch. But every reader completes the scene with a perfect understanding of the game, because mastering those details is critical to Harry finding his place in a new world. There are stakes in the scene, which are meaningful enough for the reader that his immersion rises to engagement: immersion x emotional investment = engagement.

Often in speculative fiction there is an object—say the One Ring in The Lord of the Rings—with cosmic significance that embodies stakes. But relying on cosmic stakes to increase engagement is a mistake. In Harry Potter Rowling used stakes (proving himself) to produce tension by putting those stakes in jeopardy (Harry's uncertainty about his ability to fly). Stakes don't have to be cosmic to produce tension; in some ways cosmic stakes are harder to work with. Something of personal significance, put in jeopardy, is enough. The choice of jeopardy is a craft issue. The technique you use doesn't fundamentally alter the ethos of the story, it's just a choice of narrative mechanism (e.g. ticking time bomb).

Wonder

Wonder is an emotion that readers experience if (A) they are experiencing immersion and (B) they are confronted with something magical, whether literally so in fantasy, or functionally so in science fiction. Experiencing this is one of the main reasons people read speculative fiction, but too often we fail to achieve this because we rely on genre tropes that everyone takes for granted, e.g., faster-than-light travel. So in principle the formula should be simple: immersion x magic x novelty equals wonder, but it is genuinely challenging to find something original enough to create wonder.

Also note the potential for emotional clutter if you try to put all these emotional beats into a scene. But sometimes you can use an effect as a secondary color. For example, a "Cool" gizmo or technique can provide a low-grade sense of Wonder that textures the world without stopping the reader in their tracks to admire the gizmo.

Humor and Humor-like Effects

Humor is far too broad and philosophically difficult to treat here, but it's clearly another effect that emerges from the interaction of craft and ethos. Craft sets up the humor by creating and then subverting expectations. Clearly humor is a form of engagement, but the ethos determines the nature of the humor. Punching down focuses a joke against an out-group, but change the ethos and the joke can do something much more challenging: elicit sympathy.

The craft of setting up and paying off a joke can also be used to achieve other, non-humorous effects: building tension and then relieving tension with a reversal of expectations, for example. Or what I call "the joke that hurts": setting up expectations and then dashing them with a sudden revelation. The craft for this is almost identical to setting up a gag, but the emotional character of the result is dependent upon ethos.

IV. Case Study: Craft and Ethos in The Keystone

To illustrate this, we can look at "Just Five Minutes" (the prologue to The Keystone, available at https://spacefaringunion.com/just-five-minutes/) as a working model. The goal of this scene was to establish a protagonist who is technically hyper-competent but emotionally vulnerable, and to generate engagement through the tragedy of a violent misunderstanding.

SYMPATHY & VOICE

Narration (The Filter of Conscience)

  • The Mechanism: The narrative is tightly filtered through Kate’s consciousness. We don't just see the action; we see her hypothesis of why the attack is happening ("He thinks I'm a slaver").
  • The Intended Effect (Ethos): This filter is designed to establish Kate not as an invader, but as a reluctant participant. The goal is to create a tragedy: the reader knows she is a peaceful explorer, but also knows she must kill a "Great Achilles" who is heroically defending his home against a threat he has misidentified. The Ethos here is Reluctance: she apologizes ("I'm so sorry") before pulling the trigger.

Blocking and Stakes

  • The Mechanism: The scene relies on "checkmate" logic. Kate uses non-lethal tools (darts, stingers) until the geometry of the scene (the log, the ranges) and the skill of the opponent leave her with zero options.
  • The Intended Effect (Ethos): This precise blocking is required to justify the use of the lethal Anti-Personnel Round. The craft proves to the reader that she did everything possible to avoid the kill, preserving her moral standing as an explorer rather than a murderer.

Monologue

  • The Mechanism: Kate says "I'm sorry" before killing Achilles.
  • **The Intended Effect (Ethos): ** This is a direct way of communicating that Kate doesn't want to kill. This would be clumsy and unconvincing on its own -- "telling not showing" in writing jargon. But I expect it to
    land because we have been through elaborate high stakes blocking showing the extreme measures showing Kate avoiding the kill.

Attitude Mirroring

  • The Mechanism: Kate interprets her opponent's silence and skill not as malice, but as "dignity and pride," explicitly comparing him to "Achilles." The narrative never objectively confirms if the native is noble; we only know that Kate sees him that way.
  • The Intended Effect (Ethos): This exploits the psychological reality that how we judge others reflects upon ourselves. By attributing nobility to an unknown enemy, Kate effectively establishes her own nobility to the reader. It defines her character not by how she fights, but by the respect she accords to those she fights.

STORY ENGAGEMENT

Time Management and Stakes

  • The Mechanism: A repeated countdown motif (“just five minutes”) structures the narrative. Each action—extracting the arrow, treating her wound—is calibrated against this ticking clock.
  • The Intended Effect (Ethos): The temporal constraint functions to make Kate’s choices morally vivid. The reader can see the cost of her decisions: she is weighing risk against urgency while remaining committed to her principles.

IMMERSION & WONDER

Technological Realism (The Undignified Reality)

  • The Mechanism: The sci-fi healing is depicted with humiliating clinical realism. It involves urinary catheters, mirrors, and lying to the machine about the wound type to get the right treatment.
  • The Intended Effect (Ethos): This grounds the speculative elements. It strips away the glamour of future technology to show that even in a space-faring future, pain and medical vulnerability are messy, undignified, and human. This makes the magical abilities of the healing machine feel more credible. Ironically by stripping the process of glamour, it becomes more wonder-inducing.

The "Cool" Factor (Secondary Wonder)

  • The Mechanism: The Scout Rifle is described not as a holy relic but as a "lethally over-engineered" tool. Nonetheless see Kate manipulating its specific tactical modes (pyrotechnic, stinger, APR) with practiced ease.
  • The Intended Effect (Ethos): This provides "Cool"—a low-grade form of Wonder. It offers the satisfaction of competence and high-tech gadgetry without demanding the awe of a major plot reveal. It textures the scene with sci-fi pleasure while leaving space for the primary emotion (Tragedy) to land.

HUMOR & PATHOS

The Joke That Hurts

  • The Mechanism: The repeated motif of “just five minutes” sets up a survivalist expectation—that she needs time to heal or escape. The reversal occurs when those hard-won minutes are revealed to be allocated not for survival, but to write a final letter to Archie.
  • The Intended Effect (Ethos): The "joke" structure suddenly upends the reader's understanding of what the story is about. It's not about a struggle for survival, but a struggle to express love. That adds a completely new dimensions to Kate's ethos.

Character Sympathy

  • The Mechanism: Once it is revealed that Kate has gone though all this in order to express love, she is unable to.
  • The Intended Effect (Ethos): Kate's hyper-competence and toughness is painfully contrasted with her inability to express feelings.

  • The Mechanism: After her failure to express her emotions, Kate forces herself through brutal and undignified medical procedure.
  • The Intended Effect (Ethos): Contrasts with her inability to write a simple letter.

Conclusions

Trying to put an effect like reader engagement or wonder into a manuscript as if they were ingredients leads to simply copying what worked for you in other books. That's not a bad thing, but thinking of them as effects that arise from the interaction of craft and ethos gives you a lot more artistic freedom.

But be warned: prioritizing Ethos makes rejection feel personal.

When a reader puts down your book because the pacing is slow or the dialogue is clunky, they are rejecting your Craft. That is a technical failure; it is a problem with the vehicle that you can fix.

But when a reader puts down your book because they simply don't care about what you care about, they are rejecting your Ethos. That feels like a rejection of you.

Do not let this deter you, because universal appeal is impossible. A story about an underdog succeeding against impossible odds may thrill you, but some people hate reading about underdogs. Your "truth" will inevitably ring false to someone else. That is not a failure of your writing; it is the inevitable consequence of having a specific point of view. To get the right reader to love your work, you must accept that others will inherently reject it.