By Books Writer Denise Turney

Good books touch emotional cores. It’s these emotional stories, written by emerging writers and established authors that resonate with readers. Even more, readers love stories that fuel them with emotion and transport them away from their everyday lives. But novelists can’t just transport readers, they have to create characters, dialogue and plots that dig up deep emotion. In fact, emotion may be the key difference that separates average books from top sellers.

Characters Drive Storytelling

Another benefit readers look for in storytelling is for characters to take surprising risks. They also seek tension, the type of suspense that creates an emotional connection between characters and readers. Now, here’s a key.

To achieve great storytelling, dialogue, character development and a tense, believable plot aren’t enough. Readers must be able to get inside the minds of your books characters. They need to feel like they know the characters personally. Even more, readers need to understand character motivations, fears and strengths.

Elements In Best Books To Read

One way to do this is to have a character make a vow she does not intend to keep. For example, a real estate manager could vow to her team that she loves her job and plans to continue managing at the real estate firm after she completes her psychology master’s degree when, in actuality, what she really wants is to retire and start a nonprofit counseling agency in order to avoid facing a financial scandal that’s on the verge of being exposed at the real estate firm.

But writers can’t just spring the contrast on readers. Instead, they have to build tension and reveal the struggle between what characters say and do. It’s this slow build of tension that’s found in the best books to read. And it can take years of fiction writing for authors to acquire this skill.

Also, whether it’s an autobiography or work of fiction, writers need to take readers to places that readers haven’t been before. It’s easy to do this with science fiction books, not as easy with contemporary fiction.

Classic Emotional Stories

This is where the mental workings of characters helps to strengthen stories. Ralph Ellison pulls this off in Invisible Man. Ellison masterfully takes readers inside the mind of the book’s main character, an African American man who leaves the South and relocates to New York. The move doesn’t bring the man what he’d expected it to. It’s from here that Ellison takes the man into a basement where the tautness, the powerful emotion of the storytelling takes over.

Invisible Man left an imprint on me when I read the book. Ralph Ellison’s writing skill blessed my soul. His writing took me into that basement with the book’s main character. Before I knew it, I was pulling, literally rooting, for that man to do what it took to win, to get back on his feet and rise.

Knowing this, it’s highly recommended that writers who want their stories to become among the best books to read, invest the time to actually read powerful books. Surprisingly an autobiography could help writers spot ways to sharpen their characters.

After all, when you think about it, don’t the best books of all time have such deeply developed characters that the characters feel like real people? But don’t just read books until you unconsciously spot the elements of great characterization, keep writing to develop your own voice, your own powerful writing style.