There are four emotions believed to be felt the strongest by humans – fear, anger, sorrow and joy. When writing a book, do you just pick one? How do you want your reader to feel when reading your book? One of the easiest ways to draw an emotion out of the reader is to have the character feel the same way. Humans play off of each other’s emotions, if your character is feeling sad, make the reader feel sad with them. Books that form emotional connections between the characters and the readers are the books that do best overall.
“The Song of Achilles” is a powerful story going through the motions of childhood, adulthood and finally death. The book focuses on the lives of Achilles and Patroclus, one a warrior and one a healer. Despite their differences, the two go on an amazing life journey together and find a peace within one another they never thought possible. But, like any well-written Greek story, theirs ends in tragedy. This book is filled with emotional twists and turns, it makes you smile, it makes you angry and it makes you sob. Despite this vast range of emotions, the book somehow manages to keep you wanting to come back for more.
Madeline Miller takes a story that in its truest form is violent and harsh, and turns it into a story of a love that is stronger than all else. As The Guardian said “Madeline Miller has found the lover beneath the bloodshed and fury” (Haynes, 2011). It is the act of toeing the line between different emotions that draws in a reader. If your book is just full of sadness, no one is going to want to read it, you need to have happy moments to offset the sad ones. In this case, the book does not have a happy ending, and it doesn’t need one. Miller is able to pull emotions from the reader that the original Greek tale was not able to do, and she did so without really changing the ending. She gave us the opportunity to understand the characters of Patroclus and Achilles in a new way.
Another good reason to write a book that pulls strong emotions from the reader is because that makes them more likely to want to share those emotions with others inadvertently making more press for your book. Chris Olsen, a fairly popular TikTok creator, not known for reading, released a video exclaiming that he had “never felt so much emotional pain”. The comments on this post are mostly about how the book was so sad, but a must-read. Having an influencer such as Olsen sharing his emotions about the book brought it to his followers’ attention and made them want to read it.
In reading, emotions are something the reader is going to seek out, especially emotions they would prefer to avoid in their real life. Seeing someone else experience emotions such as sadness can make one’s own easier to understand. Many authors write using their own emotions, making the book feel more real and relatable. In a book such as “The Song of Achilles” the emotion of losing a lover can be very real for anyone, and it can normalize these feelings for the reader. In this society men feeling emotions such as sadness is frowned upon, this book opens the doors on this issue. You have two men who discover this beautiful love for each other only to have it ripped away just as fast in an inevitable turn of events. Both Patroclus and Achilles demonstrate their emotions in different ways and show their own stages of grief. This book, despite not taking place in our current society, has very real emotions which is why it attracts the attention of readers as much as it does.
Miller is known for her mythological retellings and plays off of the idea of the Greek tragedy, reshaping well-known stories in a way that will draw in a modern reader. When creating a retelling, it is important to make the reader feel different than they may have felt when reading the original. Without making those edits, your story will not stand out in a substantial enough way to make it worth reading. Miller has said that she wrote this book out of anger and frustration at the way Patroclus and Achilles’ story and relationship was being presented, “I knew that interpreting their relationship as romantic was a very old idea, and I was angry at the way homophobia was erasing this reading” (Miller, 2021). Readers thrive off of the emotions they feel when reading, for most it is an escape from their normal everyday lives, and as an author, it is your job to create those emotions with only words.
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