Emotive writing is one of the best ways you can get an audience. People want to know that they are listening to another human being, which is why invoking emotion is one of the things that I’ve talked about in this blog.

Writing with emotion is a skill that may not be intuitive at first but is easily learnable, but how?

Well first thing’s first, ask yourself what feeling would you like your audience to feel. What is the feeling. Do you want them to feel inspired, scared, shocked?

News use shock writing to make people feel scared. This is what draws headlines.

Dramas use emotions such as sadness and conflict to draw its viewers in, garnering a weekly audience especially in popular series.

YouTubers use “shock”, “funny” – they make people laugh.

These are the emotions you want to include in your writing. At least here at my blog, the main emotion I use is inspiration.

I’ve been through a lot in my personal life and came out on top. That’s why I want you to know that you are capable so much more than what you currently are. Your business, whatever stage it’s at, can be better.

All you need is just a couple of ideas to apply and it’ll be taken to the next level.

So why exactly are emotions contagious, it’s because as human beings, unless you’re a psychopath, we connect with each other using emotions. Emotions are what make people trust or not trust someone else.

With that being said, let’s go through each emotion in detail:

The Emotions of Influence

Fear

Fear is the topic of the day. People are addicted to fear, you can see it in their eyes. Ukraine/Russia, perhaps an escalation into WW3.

COVID-19, dangerous pandemic that may wipe humanity off the face of this Earth.

Recent curious murder case involving a daughter and her boyfriend in the middle of paradise, Phuket.

These are typical news headlines you see around the world, but they catch eyeballs. Because simply of the fact that they are fear based. People are always there to avoid something that may play a threat on their life, and so if there is a threat out there people want to become informed in that threat. Hence, using fear is a great way to grab people’s attention.

Curiosity

“Hmmm, do aliens exist?”

“Does the illuminati exist?”

“COVID-19 vaccines are a conspiracy to change people’s DNA?”

Some of these questions may sound outrageous, crazy – but what it sure does is get a lot of views. This is because people are naturally curious. If it’s something they’ve never heard about, people want to know what is it.

Topics such as the unknown, the supernatural, the mysteries of the world, these are the things that people are always curious to hear about.

They don’t necessarily need to be about some crazy, out-there topic. You can write about topics that are educational, that can help people better understand themselves and the world. This is to feed people’s natural desire for learning and self-betterment.

Inspiration

Inspiration, the person that could not walk suddenly is able to walk again.

The person that was once a failure, a high school dropout now has an underdog story and becomes a multi-millionaire.

What about the fat guy that has got rejected his whole life, tries his best to lose weight and asks the most popular girl in class out to prom. She says yes.

Stories like these are inspiring because it shows our innate human desire to become better, to evolve, to become a better person. When people hear stories of inspiration, they naturally feel the need to go out and do things.

Take Trump for example – he’s been through already six bankruptcies. He won the 2016 election through being the complete underdog that everyone didn’t expect to win and yet he won.

Stories like that pull a hamstring at your heart because they show you the possibilities, of what can or cannot be done. People live lives of quiet desperation, so they want to feel inspired and motivated.

In the end of the day, people are capable of far more than you can imagine, what they lack however is the permission to become that person. That’s where inspiration writing comes in. YOU are the one that gets to give people that permission.

Status

A cool new club just opened. Guy that owns like 10 Rolex watches that comes from the richest family in Indonesia. What’s the 10 best way to earn more money in 2024 to be your own boss.

People are always attracted to status because it gives them validation of their self-esteem. Anything that would make a person BECOME “cooler” you bet it’s going to be a good topic to write about.

Just remember what Charlie Munger said: “It’s not greed that runs the world, it’s envy.” Status appeals to human nature need to be better than others.

Pride

Pride is a tricky emotion. You want to make people feel that what they are doing right now is the right thing to do. That they’ve come far. That they’ve achieved a lot already.

People want to feel prouder about themselves, about their country, and their own accomplishments. When you create content that makes people think: “I already know that, I already know that I’m good, I already know that I’m a pretty cool person.” That’s appealing to pride, to a person’s ego.

The best thing you can do is to stroke someone’s ego.

Lust/Sex

I don’t want to go into much detail into this topic. To put it briefly, sex sells. Full stop. Let’s insert a picture of a cute Asian girl to prove my point.

Sadness

There’s a beauty in tragedy that is not apparent in the surface. Sadness tells a story, a story of a situation that slowly spiraled out of control. A person’s life, everything that’s seemingly good, great family, friends group, suddenly out of nowhere – the fire nation came and killed everyone he ever knew or love. He now seeks revenge.

You see, this kind of story – it’s the opposite of the hero’s journey. Sadness is the villain’s journey. A person that had everything loses it all – it’s tragic, sad but makes for an amazing story.

Sadness is kind of a part of human nature if you think about it. The fact that one day we’re all in this giant ball planet called Earth going into nowhere, with no purpose is sad fact of life. While sad things are happening around the world on a daily basis.

People relate with sadness a lot more than the positive emotions. A person that’s always happy, has no dark side – we don’t relate to that. We relate to people that have a bit of a dark side. It’s intriguing because it’s the truth. The world is a nasty place, sadness appeals to that.

Happiness

Happiness ALSO is a, contagious emotion. Showing success stories, of where people are living their best lives. Of being content in life. I guess happiness is a goal that everyone is striving for and you can never go wrong with making people feel happy.

Fun

Fun is different from happiness. I’m talking about fun like going to the club. Chilling with your friends after work. The most common things for fun, especially for a young audience are social gatherings (large ones) like going to the club, chilling at a dive bar, smoking up some w***, huge banquet of a dinner. If you notice, most things that are popular involve other people – this is the element of fun. It’s not about “fun” so to say, but the perception of fun. Which is always going to involve others.

There’s a second element of fun which is travel, going to cool places, doing new cool s***, going on that new adventure. It all makes up for crazy stories.

Fun is contagious. Show more of it.

Avoid using Too much Negative Emotions

Negative emotions are great to use sporadically, but if you use them too much people may get fed up with it. I do my best to be ethical in the marketing I do because negativity can very well turn against you if you misuse it.

Sprinkle the negative emotions from place to place, time to time but don’t use it every time. There’s a limit to how much negativity can handle – and overuse of this can make people go crazy.

How to Master Emotive Writing

Well there’s no simple way to improve in this skill. I’ve gotten better at it over time. Also, to add, there are some niches that don’t require emotive writing for example in corporate. However this is a fact, the most viral campaigns are the ones that utilize emotion frequently& strategically in their writing.

The best way to improve at emotive writing is to pre-plan your work. Have a few key points when you’re planning to know what kind of emotion you want your audience to feel. Do you want them to feel angry, sad, inspired, riled up? After you have a rough idea of what kind of emotion you want your audience to feel, write while keeping the emotion you want them to feel.

What does help however is writing in a quiet space, because when you’re in a quiet space you can really feel the emotions that are inside you yourself. You can’t influence others if you can’t influence yourself. And through that, you can transfer those emotions to the people through your writing.

I think also the second way to improve your emotive writing ability is to go out there and have new experiences. I think as marketers, business owners, we can be so stuck in our business, locking ourselves from other people so we can focus.

But how influential your writing will always be proportional to how well you understand people, and how well you can also work with other people. This skill will always be directly related to your own self-improvement. So do crazy shit, go and travel, meet new people, ask that girl/guy out, go hiking.

These things add to the crazy stories and angles you can create within your writing. Your writing will not feel bland, boring. The biggest sin you can do in marketing, is to be boring.

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