Writing an Emotional Rollercoaster: Making readers care about your characters and their stories is fiction’s lifeblood. It’s what hooks readers and keeps them engaged. When a reader experiences your character’s fears and anxieties as their own, when they hope alongside them, experience the rush of falling in love or the crush of defeat with them, they become invested and will keep turning the pages. They’ll burn dinner, read until three o’clock in the morning, and then press your book into their friends’ hands and order them to read it. But how do we get readers to care so much? How do we make them feel our character’s emotion as if it’s their own? Learn how to generate emotion on both the macro and micro levels by incorporating (and exploiting to their fullest) elements such as character identification, visceral reactions, deep POV, showing rather than telling, and suspense. Once you’ve learned how to make the most of the rollercoaster highs and lows of your story, once you've successfully wrung every last drop of emotion from your reader, you’ll have them heaving a satisfied sigh and racing out to buy your next book.