That was the moment that made me want to write the book. Knowing this, I spend a lot of time as a writer asking myself “What are the most intense moments in this book?” and “how should this book end?” When I sat down to write The Fixer, there was one moment that stuck out in my head, one that I knew from the very beginning would be one of the most emotionally intense scenes in the entire book. When readers look back on the reading experience, by and large, they’re going to evaluate that experience based on the most intense moment and the last moment.

And if you can stack two HUGE surprises close enough together that they encode as a single moment, all the better. If you’re going for plot twists, one HUGE surprise will have more of an impact than a dozen tiny ones. If you’re writing tragedy, making someone sob hard once is going to leave more of an impression than making them tear up a dozen different times. What does that mean for writers and readers? Well, one thing that it suggests-to me-is that if you’re writing comedy, it’s more important to have one super hilarious laugh-until-you-cry moment than it is have to have a ton of different moments that make people chuckle. In fact, there’s reason to believe that when we evaluate experiences, we’re really only evaluating two things: the most intense moment and the last moment. You get similar results with positive experiences: everything else being equal, people prefer the thing that ended on a higher note.

Logically, the answer should be the first one-it’s identical to the second, except that it has thirty second less pain at the end. Afterward, they’re asked which of the two experiences they would rather repeat. In the other condition, they’re asked to put their hands in painfully cold water for sixty seconds and then to put their hands in slightly less cold, but still painful water for another thirty seconds. In one condition, people are asked to put their hands in painfully cold water for sixty seconds. The gist of the experiment goes something like this. There’s a famous experiment that looks at people’s perceptions of pain. So I thought I’d take the FIXER blog tour as an opportunity to give readers a look into the way my scientist and writer selves work together when I sit down to write a new book.

And the answer is that everything I learn about the power of stories from a scientific standpoint changes the way I write. One of the questions I get a lot as a writer who has a double life as a psychology professor studying the science of books, movies, and television shows is whether or not my work looking at the psychology of stories affects the way I write them. She’s stopping by on the blog tour for her new novel, THE FIXER (published from Bloomsbury USA). We are happy to welcome Jennifer Lynn Barnes to TLT today.

The fixer jennifer lynn barnes book 3