Getting Emotional

One of my favorite writing quotes is:

"No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader."
-Robert Frost

I think it's so true. If I'm writing a scene that's supposed to be emotional but I'm not feeling anything, I know it's a flop. If I can't connect to it, and I have all the insight into the characters and events involved, how will anyone else be able to connect?

On the flipside, sometimes I'll be writing and suddenly I'll notice that my shoulders are all hunched up and I'm holding my breath, or my eyes are on the verge of tears and I'm surprised because I was so emotionally involved in what I was writing and what was happening to my characters that I didn't even notice I was upset too. These have been the scenes that my CPs responded to with the same kind of emotions I felt while writing them and it made the pain of having to put them on paper so worth it!

Sometimes I put off writing an emotional scene because I know it's going to be difficult to get through. Please tell me I'm not the only one who does this!

I know JK Rowling said she cried after she wrote the chapter where Sirius Black died, and again while writing key scenes in Deathly Hallows. And those were definitely emotional for me as a reader.

I always wonder how authors get through the scenes that hit me so hard I have to put the book down. Like in THE HUNGER GAMES when Rue died.

What about you, do you ever get emotional while writing? What are some of your favorite emotional scenes you've read? (No spoilers!)

Telling When You Think You're Showing

You've heard it time and time again, SHOW DON'T TELL. If you have crit partners you've probably gone cross-eyed from reading it in your ms at one time or another. But you're past that now. You've worked hard on your prose, you're showing all over the place. Or are you?

Using internal physical reactions is a quick way to show a character's emotions. You've seen sentences like these:

My heart raced with fear.
Nervousness twisted her stomach.

These sentences seem, on the surface, that they're showing but in reality, they're telling. Why? Because it tells us what emotion the character is feeling. Fear, in the first sentence, and Nervousness in the second. Chances are, if the physical reaction is appropriate to the scene, that the naming of the emotion is simply excess information. This is sometimes called tagging your emotions and it's usually unnecessary.

In this case, that extra info creates a distance between the reader and the character. In a tense or emotional situation, the reader should be right there with the character, experiencing and connecting to everything the character feels. When something happens that causes your character's heart to pound your reader feels it, when you add in "with fear" you push your reader back a step because they're forced to process an external observation.

Think about it. When you're in the middle of a scary situation, you might notice your heart is pounding but do you actually think - hey my heart is pounding because I'm afraid? No. You just feel afraid.

I work with the rule of thumb that unless a character is experiencing an emotion that is unexpected (like, rather than fear, a character's heart pounds with excitement at being chased by an axe murderer) there's no need to name it. If you've done a good job at creating your character and revealing what makes them them to the reader, they will know what your character is feeling. And even more than that, they will feel a part of that character's experience.

Trust your reader! You don't have to explain everything to them.