Thread: Creating an emotional scene

i am writing my novel at the moment and i am trying to make it more emotional as the main characters just lost their parents. it is in the guys point of view and i have trouble writing in that perspective. maybe some examples of an emotional scene will help but i dont know where to start looking for some.

thanks
Mist

I hear that crying is emotional. Rumour has it, anyway.

I'm guessing there'll be some posts about how guys bury their emotions deep inside, how they bottle it up, how they don't or can't feel anything at all. Horse shit.

What would you do if you lost your parents? Can you even fathom it? It might do to collect some information from people who have lost their parents, suddenly, or from old age, or from sickness, or in places like Wal-mart and Walt Disney World. I can't help you there.

Does your character keep to himself? I'm guessing he does. So maybe he shuts himself down even more. Maybe he digs a hole and hides from the world. Or maybe he decides that life is short, got to live to the fullest, et cetera.

Does he have siblings? How do they get along? Will he estrange himself from them? Will he bond closer? Is he an only child? He probably is.

Who your character is as a person and how he reacts to tragedy plays a large part into developing an emotional reaction. The two most commonly used devices are sadness (via tears, depression) and anger (at himself, at his parents, etc).

Aside from offering examples that might inspire you, no one can answer this for you. This is the kind of thing that has to come from you -- based on your experience, your imagination, you capacity to empathize and yes, what you might have read or even what you've seen on TV or in movies. Only you can combine and distill all that and hopefully write something that works.

On top of all that, it depends on your characters, because people grieve and display emotions differently. Grieving especially is manifested in many and often very unexpected ways, which would give you wide latitude in how it's portrayed. This may sound extreme, but it's almost like if have to ask, you shouldn't be doing it.

You might be approaching this wrong. Sitting down to write "an emotional scene" will probably just result in melodrama.

Understand your characters, and write the scene according to how they act.

What is your main character like? Does he talk about his emotions or not?

I would suggest just listening to your characters. Sometimes I have to take a break and do other things while I ponder how a character will react to a situation. I may have to think of twelve different things they would do or say, and consider which is most likely. It gives you options and teaches you a little more about them.

And realize that they may not cry. Sometimes I find that the most likely reaction is not what I expected, in which case I need to figure out what is more important for the story: The event or the reaction. Either I will have to get the truest reaction out of my character, or I will be forced to change the event to get that reaction out of the character.

Character driven:
Jimmy watched the last breath leave his mother's mouth. He felt nothing. He was surprised what little he felt. It was like she had already been dead for years.

But if I really need the emotion for the story, then I need make something happen that will make him cry (or whatever his reaction would be)

Event Driven:
Jimmy's eyes widened with terror as the speeding car made contact with his dog. Time slowed down at that split second. Every detail of that moment was instantly burned into his head. After what could have been an hour in that second, time resumed. His do flew across the intersection and into a stop sign. His body dropped lifelessly to the ground, and Jimmy knew that his life would never be the same. He had lost his only true companion. The only one who ever cared about him. The only one who ever truly loved him.

Hope that helps you

If you want to make your novel poignant and moving, I think your best bet is to make the characters as honest and genuine as you can, rather than them just saying the appropriate lines and moving on without any life. Make them real, imperfect people, and play on their personal flaws, and the reader should sympathize.

Asking yourself, "How would I react?" is a great way to assess how realistically someone is behaving. And in time, as you become more aware of the different personalities out there, you will even be able to guess how quite different psychological compositions would react. The guy who wrote Anton Chigurh for No Country For Old Men (the novel), Cormac McCarthy, was familiar with sociopathic killers, although he himself is not a sociopathic killer.

Short version of above posts, keep your characters real, not robots, and it should ring with people more.

To approach this from male or female perspective you should understand the stages of grief.

You should know your character. Their reactions should be true to what they would do not in some way forced.

Originally Posted by caelum

Short version of above posts, keep your characters real, not robots, and it should ring with people more.

What if your character is a robot?

Then you can look at the depressed robot from Hitchhiker's as an example, and give yours sympathizing qualities! Making robots with human emotions is pretty boring, though, and that's what always seems to happen. There need to be more terminators.

For anyone who's curious about the stages Foxee was talking about, there's a video from Robot Chicken that goes into detail. Link here.

The five stages of grief might be loosely applicable to someone who's dealing with terminal illness, or really, something that applies to oneself -- even something like divorce or job loss.

But I think you would find that if you asked grief counselors -- people who actually work with folks who have lost loved ones -- they would tell you that ordered, prescribed stages of grief just don't exist. In fact, there has never been a study conducted or any clinical evidence to support the theory.

So, I'll stick to what I said previously: Grieving is manifested in many and often very unexpected ways, which would give you wide latitude in how it's portrayed.

In other words, no two people grieve alike. And you could use that to your advantage. Show the siblings as grieving and dealing with things very differently -- that's a very real source of conflict among survivors.