Strong feelings I've never experienced myself

It's not entirely clear to me what you want here. If you want a critique, post the entire chapter in Share Your Work. I find the excerpt itself very confusing. With so little context to go on, it's difficult to say whether or not you're conveying the emotions well.

Hmm. Well, someone who's emotional isn't going to do a very good job of running straight through the woods. He can't simply ignore everything in his path, because eventually he'll get hooked, snagged, or hit in the face. If he's running senslessly and is extremely emotional, he might get unecessarily frustrated when something does get in his way. He might yell at the branches or try to push through a patch of brambles that would simply be much easier to go around.

To me, reading that someone is tearing through the brush without difficulty suggests to me that he's extremely calm and is thinking clearly about what he's doing. Just my personal experience ... emotional people don't bushwhack well.

To address the question - how to write about things you've never experienced? What works for me is to daydream a scene. I like to work it through in my head, over and over, paying attention to each detail. Study movie scenes where the characters are going through something similar to what you're writing about.

For your scene, IMO, if the character is racing through the woods, he's not thinking about all the other stuff, especially if he hasn't eaten or slept. He's thinking about staying alive or reaching his destination.

I'd recommend posting in the Share Your Work forum with a bigger piece to get some more context. You'll get lots of valuable feedback.

Based on the thread title, I was going to come in and give a lecture on "puberty."

Barring that, it's imagination. It's pure pie-in-the-sky imagination. That's what you've got it for. If you had to just "write what you know" and interpret that literally, the world of fiction would be a grim and terrifying place.

I say go experience it. One time I had a character trapped in a narrow canyon, so I found one, and wandered through it with my notebook in hand. Amazing what you will notice when mixed into a scene in real life.

LightShadow said:

I say go experience it. One time I had a character trapped in a narrow canyon, so I found one, and wandered through it with my notebook in hand. Amazing what you will notice when mixed into a scene in real life.

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This is fun, to an extent.

When I was younger (teenager; idiot age) I decided that I would write a short story about a man being chased across a town. Except that I would go out and actually physically DO everything I intended him to do in the story.

So I did.

This included running madly down alley-ways (a lot of fun, if you're building stories in your head) and jumping and throwing myself over fences, and hiding in a slightly derelict building for an hour while I waited for the "search" to die down. It also included bolting across a free way and jumping from a fair height up.

(if this sounds insane, I should point out that I had several things I intended for him to do which, in real life when I looked at them, I realized they were stupid and went "No way." I avoided things which could end badly. I am not fond of pain.)

It was a really crummy story. It was a fun and sweaty afternoon, but it was a horrible story.

Anyway, while you can experience a canyon, you can't experience the vibrations in your hands as the wood chipper tries to grind through the leg you're holding. So somewhere in there, imagination is going to come into play anyway. I find it easier just to strengthen my imagination muscles by letting it do all the creating.

And by absorbing everything in the real world. You do that anyway. A certain piece of every writer is heartlessly examining the world around you going "Oh. So this is how people react when your father dies. Interesting, interesting."

elf_friend39 said:

He had been running for days, barely sleeping, never eating.

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Logistically, this isn't possible. Humans can't physically run for days. Hours maybe, but days? And if he's hungry and tired, well, I think he'd be more walking and stumbling. Just my 2 cents.

I got no emotion out of this. I never felt I was there, never felt (or even understood) what the stakes were. I had no feeling for the protagonist, except the vague idea he'd escaped from a recent Mel Gibson movie.

I have a really good imagination that generally fills in the blanks of what I haven't created. Imagine you are your character, sit in a quiet place, and feel it. If your imagination works anything like mine does, you should be feeling things pretty quickly.

For physical stuff, like going a week without sleep, I go online and research the effects so I get it right.

Emotional issues are a lot more subjective. I basically use a system where there are a limited number of base emotions, and most of us have felt all of them at one time or another. It's the intensities and combinations that may be unfamiliar and then it's simply a matter of combining and magnifying your own experiences in order to make it feel real on the page. It's actually kind of like painting, the base feelings are primary colors and how you tint them and put them together paints a picture. Having a thorough knowledge of psychology helps too. I studied psychology for years as a hobby before I started writing and it's been incredibly helpful.

PeeDee said:

Anyway, while you can experience a canyon, you can't experience the vibrations in your hands as the wood chipper tries to grind through the leg you're holding.

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Well, aren't you just Mr. Suck-the-fun-right-out-of-everything?

Well, you can if you want, but legally I haven't spoken to you in over a year, and I don't know what you've been up to.

Before I can comment, I need to read more so I can understand how and why the king persuaded him to kill his brother (even a long dead one.)
Maybe you could show us that scene too, because if the guy was persuaded to do this, maybe he didn't have any strong emotions about his brother and wouldn't be running through the woods at all.

elf_friend39 said:

Armis tore through vines, bushes, branches, anything that was in his path. He had been running for days, barely sleeping, never eating.
I'd appreciate any critiques on the matter...

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On the lack of sleep thing.
He's not going to think clearly at all. He'll stumble on ideas, ruminate endlessly, be just a tad paranoid, and make stupid mistakes. Somebody mentioned whacking through brambles he wouldn't normally go through (maybe perceiving a shorter route or something?). He'll maybe be kind of cranky and have trouble regulating his body temperature (the sweat evaporating as he runs will make him cold beyond what he'd reasonably feel). And if he's not drinking or eating he'll be dehydrated, have a wretched headache, and feel kind of nauseous. If he's running well at that point, he's nothing close to typical human.

elf_friend39 said:

Sometimes in my books, something very heavy or dark ends up happening to a character that I have difficulty narrating because I have never had to go through these things. There is a particular scene I'd like some advice on...

Armis tore through vines, bushes, branches, anything that was in his path. He had been running for days, barely sleeping, never eating. The whole time he had been trying to convince himself that this hadn’t happened, that the king had never persuaded him to sacrifice that first drop of blood.
What was one life worth? One drop of blood certainly seemed worth the life of his sister and her child. Liryn herself had then gotten sick. How much blood was her life worth? Armis would have given it all, and now . . . he was a slave. He had given it all. This next paragraph should start differently since you already mentioned he was trying not to believe something happened. This would be much stronger with something else like:

As he ran the king's voice echoed back at him, telling him to find and kill..." Don't say it the same way twice is all I am getting at Elf Friend.
As he ran he tried to forget that it ever happened, but he could still hear the king’s voice telling him to find and kill his only brother—the brother he had thought he’d lost in the war. He had been informed that Derrin died in prison after he was captured in battle. How was he to kill a brother long dead?

I'd appreciate any critiques on the matter...

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If you want a better critique post in the Share your Work forum where it's password protected and members can give you better feedback with more text to judge by for a given scene, show us what happened that this character is running from, you didn't even give us his name yet.

Welcome to the Absolutel Write Water Cooler Elf Friend, hope you enjoy your time here with us, we're a good group and there are a lot of talented writer's and published authors posting and working behind the scenes. So if you need anything just run a search and if you can't find it then post in the best forum for that inquiry.

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