Emotional scenes

If this is an absolute blocker at the moment, and this is the first draft, maybe put a placeholder with notes on what happens in that scene (example:"This is where Hero Bill confesses that he's the one who stole the cookies from the cookie jar, and Sidekick Jane tells him how her family starved to death because of that, so she storms out"), then move ahead. There's no law saying you must write in chronological order.

If you are one of those people who has to write chronologically, then try this: write it badly. Focus on one thing (for me, it's what people say and their general reaction to what other people say) and let the rest be bad. Come back and edit it once you have the blocking in.

How tight is the POV in your story?

IMO emotional scenes are easier to write when your right there in your character's head. If you're tight in there, avoid filters like 'he thought' or 'he felt'. Remember a time in your life that you went through trauma, and relive it. Feel it with him/her and write those feeling out.

Maybe try finding a song that really captures the emotional 'feel' to that scene and play it on repeat in the background. I find that helps keep me in the frame of mind for writing a particularly gut-wrenching moment.

I experienced something of the same with a few key scenes in my WIP that I had been thinking of since the start. They were not emotional scenes, but they were key to the rest of the story and were supposed to make my characters and thereby the plot change gear. Except, once I started writing, I was not happy with any of it. My prose was lame and the characterisation lamer. I felt like weeping with frustration.

In the end, I said sod it, and just wrote the scenes as lame as they came out. Bad writing, as opposed to no writing, can be fixed. Besides, I told myself, maybe the scenes would not survive once I moved past a first draft.

Only you can decided whether any of the advice you have been given will work for you, but maybe take your internal editor out to the potting shed and bean it with a metaphorical two by four.

I'm with Kat M: write a really, really, really bad first draft. For me, at least, that is the hardest part of the whole thing. From there, it's all downhill. You can rewrite as many times as you want and it will get better each time.

Basically: don't worry about it being good right now. Worry about it existing at all. Good is for later.

Writing it badly is always an option, maybe even the best option.

You could also skip the scene and write it in snippets over the next chapters. Maybe have the character be shaken up so the reader knows something big has happened, then proceed to reveal what happened through a series of flashbacks/dreams/dialog/exposition.

Once the reader sees that something big has happened, they'll wonder what that is. Giving them the answer a little bit at a time can be really enticing for the reader.

Adding to the voice of -- allow yourself to write without keeping the text to any kind of form you had your heart set on. So, allow yourself to write without keeping to a standard.

What is preventing you from writing it? I'm not asking you to answer this here, but rather to look into the question yourself. Like, if someone had put a trauma they had faced personally into a story, a person could be not as ready as they thought to deal with that trauma, and find themselves dreading the writing of it. But if you're reluctant (where someone could be having strong anxiety about it), and concerns of 'getting it right' are stopping you - then for now just get the the jist of it, the meat, essence what have you down and then go to the next step. Hope that makes sense.

Stormbringer said:

I’ve come to a gut wrenching, disturbing and emotional scene in my novel and have been having a hard time working myself up to writing it. I feel as though I need to be in a certain mental state to tackle it and make it actually sound anything beyond stale and flat. I was just wondering if anyone had some ideas or ways in which to coax oneself into the right mindset to write difficult scenes such as these.

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Hm...that's a bit concerning, as it's not really good to let your emotional state dictate when you write....I mean, I know how it is, emotions are what they are. Hm. Is there a song connected to the kind of emotion you're going for in this scene? Maybe something you could listen to to get you in that state of mind? Maybe an old memory, or a location?

Nerdilydone said:

Hm...that's a bit concerning, as it's not really good to let your emotional state dictate when you write....

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Huh, that's interesting. My emotional state absolutely dictates when I write, and often what I write. To each their own.

To the OP: I had a scene in my third book that was really, really rough to write. I wrote around it for weeks, and one day I woke up and felt strong enough to do it. (I cried through the whole thing.) So I'm definitely a write-around-it person, but you should do what feels like it'll work for you.

lizmonster said:

Huh, that's interesting. My emotional state absolutely dictates when I write, and often what I write. To each their own.

To the OP: I had a scene in my third book that was really, really rough to write. I wrote around it for weeks, and one day I woke up and felt strong enough to do it. (I cried through the whole thing.) So I'm definitely a write-around-it person, but you should do what feels like it'll work for you.

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+1 to both paragraphs

Nerdilydone said:

Is there a song connected to the kind of emotion you're going for in this scene? Maybe something you could listen to to get you in that state of mind? Maybe an old memory, or a location?

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I absolutely +1 this advice for pretty much anything that requires an emotional/ambient/other state of mind.

lizmonster said:

Huh, that's interesting. My emotional state absolutely dictates when I write, and often what I write. To each their own.

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Me too, to an extent. Strong emotions can keep me from writing, and I've sometimes chosen not to write when my emotions are volatile (or, conversely, to write to avoid real-world emotion until I'm in a space to deal with it).

I'm curious—you don't have to share if you don't want to—how you manage it so that you produce work in a timely manner?

lizmonster said:

Huh, that's interesting. My emotional state absolutely dictates when I write, and often what I write. To each their own.

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How unfortunate. Emotions help writing, but the will must have control when the emotions are saying "ugh...I don't wanna write..." You know what I'm saying?

lizmonster said:

Huh, that's interesting. My emotional state absolutely dictates when I write, and often what I write. To each their own.

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Nerdilydone said:

How unfortunate. Emotions help writing, but the will must have control when the emotions are saying "ugh...I don't wanna write..." You know what I'm saying?

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I think lizmonster's "to each their own" covered it. "The will must have control" isn't a must for everyone. Willing oneself to write can and does work for some but is a productivity killer for others--and there are all manner of shades in between.

My emotional state doesn't ever stop me writing, but all the same my writing is consistently better when I'm at either extreme end of states. Or so I've found. My readers pick out the scenes I wrote on bad days pretty often. This might be just me noticing them picking those scenes out and not picking out others ones, however.

Nerdilydone said:

How unfortunate.

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Maybe. I don't find it bothersome, though.

Nerdilydone said:

Emotions help writing, but the will must have control when the emotions are saying "ugh...I don't wanna write..." You know what I'm saying?

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I know what you're saying, but I'm not talking about issues with being motivated to write. I'm well aware the muse often visits after the work gets started.

For certain kinds of scenes - usually very emotional ones - I need to be, to a certain extent, dispassionate. If I'm writing something that hits close to the bone, I need emotional distance to be able to craft the words properly. For especially upsetting scenes, it can be hard to get enough distance. I strike when I can, but sometimes that means writing out of sequence.

One of my tricks is to look at scenes from my favourite books and take keywords as a starting point to get the flow going (note, this is not the same as plagiarism which is copying ad verbatim and just altering character names!)

Another trick I have adopted which gets me over the self-conciousness I experience when I go to start a sustained period of writing, it to opene a separate file and copy a paragraph (again, this does not end up ad verbatim in the actual book!). I close the file, then start writing my story. The physical act seems to get my fingers moving across the keyboard and the ideas flowing.

For me, writing an emotional scene is all about finding those feelings within myself.

I'm old, and have experienced a lot in my life - I've loved, and enjoyed friends, but have also been betrayed, abandoned, injured physically, and had friends die... one while I held her. A young (teenage) student of mine died in a car crash, and at his funeral I had to hold his mother back from jumping into the grave with him. I mentally take myself to those places when I need to write emotional scenes.

Regardless of background, I believe we all can take ourselves to sad / happy / emotional places through our imagination. Doing that, and writing from that place is my suggestions as to how to handle it.

So many good ideas and tips here.

One thing I've found to be true (for myself) in writing fiction, which I've only been doing for a couple years, and also true for working through data analysis / synthesizing data into coherent understanding, which I did for far longer, is that the subconscious will happily work on a problem if you 'ask it to.' Sort of, if you are putting a little intentionality toward the problem your subconscious will mull it over and one day it will be easier.

Lots of the tips above fit this, for me. All of them have an awareness of the scene that needs to be written, and a lot of them say that it will eventually happen and reach a form you're happy with.

As far as the specific tip that is useful to me, I'm probably in the 'write around it / stick placeholding-text there' camp.

Paradoxically, I generally find it easiest to write the more emotional scenes when I'm in the best of moods. I'm afraid that if you only write an emotional scene when you've gotten yourself into an "emotional" head-space, you might end up with a scene where the emotion is overblown. The best way to get across strong emotions is not to slather it on, but to hit just the right buttons in your reader. If you're reaching for it, the strain will show. I find that I need to be loose and let it flow, which I can't do if I'm telling myself, "Okay, time for The Big Emotional Scene."

I know this is a little contrary to what others have said and might seem counter-intuitive. But it's my opinion that it doesn't matter what you feel about your writing, per se; it's what you make your readers feel.

One hundred percent agreement here, Angeliz2k. It doesn't matter what you feel; it's what you make your readers feel.

The writer's job is to take what's so terribly moving in his/her head and consciously--even dispassionately--get that into words that will evoke that same feeling in the reader.

And you can't evaluate your work clearly when you're wrought.

angeliz2k said:

Paradoxically, I generally find it easiest to write the more emotional scenes when I'm in the best of moods. I'm afraid that if you only write an emotional scene when you've gotten yourself into an "emotional" head-space, you might end up with a scene where the emotion is overblown. The best way to get across strong emotions is not to slather it on, but to hit just the right buttons in your reader. If you're reaching for it, the strain will show. I find that I need to be loose and let it flow, which I can't do if I'm telling myself, "Okay, time for The Big Emotional Scene."

I know this is a little contrary to what others have said and might seem counter-intuitive. But it's my opinion that it doesn't matter what you feel about your writing, per se; it's what you make your readers feel.

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I'll go out on a limb and slightly disagree.

First - I think SK went far overboard when describing the death of the MC's son in Pet Sematary - I actually quit reading and never went back to it. Heavy handedness in emotional scenes does NOT work for me.

With that said though, I use past experiences as reference when I'm writing emotional scenes. Of course we all process things differently, but without being able to go there, at least in our imagination, I think the scene wouldn't feel genuine - either flat or overdone.

In the movie '40 year old virgin' Steve Carell described a woman's breast as being like a bag of sand. Funny, but it points to the fact that unless you have experienced something at least close to your scene, you aren't likely to get it right.

That said though, IMO a light hand is best. Give the reader just enough that their imagination kicks in and they relate to the scene and what our character is going through.

tiddlywinks said:

Maybe try finding a song that really captures the emotional 'feel' to that scene and play it on repeat in the background. I find that helps keep me in the frame of mind for writing a particularly gut-wrenching moment.

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I've used this for a while now. You can do a search on YouTube for "most emotional music" (as silly as that sounds) and see what you find. Some of the songs on HDSoundI's channel, as well as many of Tehishter's piano performances, often do it for me.

I agree with others here that your motivation for writing should not depend on external things--music, drugs, etc. But I often find that if my emotional state is too distant from that of the scene I need to write, the scene doesn't ring as true. Of course, I'm still quite a young writer, and maybe this will improve with time.

For me, when I write, I'm usually in a calm state, because my feelings can dictate my writing abilities.

What I do, is when I'm mad, sad, or hurt in real life, I remember what I thought and what I felt. I take notes of those thoughts (mainly relying on memory, but you could write them down), and when I come to a scene that requires a character to be mad or sad, then I insert what I was feeling back then.

Sometimes when I go back to edit, I'll re-read a scene or line and think "oh, that was when I was crying over this or upset over that.) Same thing for when my character needs to feel pain.