Class Blog - Persuasion

(I apologize for the lateness on this, we had a bit of an internet outage here at home)

Lessons Learned

Persuasion can be very hit or miss at times, even for those of us who understand it's workings. I'm not saying that I myself am some master of persuasion, but I do know what it is to make others feel what I want them to feel and think how I want them to think. It is the essence of creative writing to persuade your audience to accept the fiction as possible facts, to see the world for a short time as something it isn't, and to understand and empathize with a person they can never ever meet. But many times in real life, I find my methods of trying to persuade others will be unaccepted or even met with hostility.

This is why a person that understands persuasion is not ruled by it. They accept it and seek to know what they are being persuaded towards, and many times might modify the outcome to be closer to what both parties want.

I've met people that do not understand persuasion, and they are some of the most creatively dead people inside. They have little they want to imagine about, except what they might be told to imagine, and they almost need to look to their leaders to know what opinions to parrot back. Both sides of the American political arena have people like this, as well as most people that subscribe to any extremist point of view. These are people that do not understand persuasion because many times they do not want to.

All they want is to be led to the grass they should eat and be told which cliffs are better to jump off of.

Application

I apply persuasion to how I write, a I had said before. I'm likely to be going into advertising or marketing in the near future, and I understand what it means to both manipulate and to persuade.

The best persuasion in fiction happens with the pairing of logic and emotion, the moments where an audience is asked to consider what might be a possible fact, and then accept new and more outlandish facts for the sake of belief suspension. It is once this use of unreal facts is established that emotions can be invested and can be used to make more facts feel real.

In the end, though, writers only have to heavily use the "co-op problem solving" when they want people to keep coming back, often in the form of sequels. It's a bargain between writer and audience that the next installment will either give as much impact as previously, if not more. And when a writer cannot deliver, then that is less trust that the audience then has in them.