How to Use Emotional Triggers in Your Fiction Writing

Tap into your readers’ deepest emotions to create unforgettable stories

Photo by Andres Molina on Unsplash

The first time I read Dream a Little Dream by Susan Elizabeth Phillips, I almost had to put the book down — not because I didn’t like it, but because it hit me so hard, so fast. It was published in 1998, the year my son was born. I read it a year or two after it was released, when I was a young mother.

The novel opens with a scene that’s seared into my memory: Rachel Stone, a widowed and desperate single mother, broke and starving, offers her body to a stranger in exchange for a job and food. She’s not seducing him — she’s surviving and trying to keep her five-year-old son safe. To do that, she is willing to be humiliated and vulnerable with a man who is emotionally dead and turns her away. As a reader, I was gutted. As a writer, I was in awe.

Phillips didn’t just introduce a character; she triggered a flood of emotion. Empathy, shame, hope, and anger. And I couldn’t stop reading. Of course, I couldn’t. Phillips is a master at creating emotional triggers that are raw, relatable, and instantly humanizing. The fact that her character, Rachel, was willing to put her dignity on the line for her child’s survival tugs hard at readers’ sense of injustice, compassion, and maternal…