What tips can you give a novice writer when writing high intensity/emotional scenes, like the scenes where Kore is having a mental breakdown and/or dissociates? (At least I assume that's what happens when Persephone, the red-eyed version of her, comes out. Please correct me if I'm wrong, I don't have a dissociative disorder.)
You'll have to bear with me as I'm not as good at giving tangible tips when it comes to writing compared to drawing. I just haven't worked from the same kind of framework with my writing as I have with my art, so giving any real "steps" or anything isn't really quite as possible.
When it comes to those high-intensity scenes, what's important first is to establish the stakes. Those stakes can be as simple as "I caught you hanging out with another guy!" or as complicated as "I caught you messing with the space-time continuum!" but regardless of what they are, they should have a prominent significance to the character experiencing them. This will help the actual 'blow up' carry a lot more weight. The emotional blow-ups mean nothing if we don't know the significance of why that blow-up is happening for that character.
This is where it's just important to understand your characters. You don't need to give away every aspect of their personality upfront, but you can show those aspects through how they act and react to other people and things around them.
No two characters will approach a problem the exact same way (not unless you're fine with having zero conflict in your story which maybe you are, it depends on the story haha) and so the angle they approach a problem or situation from will be motivated by their own personal values, biases, fears, and motivations.
ex. catching your girlfriend snuggling up with another guy on a bench isn't a big deal to someone who's confident in their relationship or completely trustworthy of their partner or even just naive, but to someone who isn't those things, the stakes will be much higher.
The better you understand your characters, the more naturally you'll be able to write the conflicts they get into. If they're someone who's controlling, let them approach the situation from an angle of fighting for control; if they're a people-pleaser, let them approach the situation from the angle of trying to make the other person happy.
Y'know Newton's third law of motion, "for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction"? Funnily enough, this can apply to human psychology as well. For every conflict or problem or roadblock a character approaches, show the reader how that's affected them through their reaction. Maybe they're someone with a calm head on their shoulders who always handles problems with grace; or maybe they're someone who cries over spilled milk or blows up over every little thing.
How your character reacts to a situation helps inform the reader as to what kind of person they are, and most of all, that reaction can further drive the plot forward. And that also includes subverting those reactions as well. Like, that calm-headed person who never overreacts? Maybe there's one specific button for them that tips them over the edge that they need to learn to deal with.
That skittish person who overreacts to every single thing? Maybe in a particular type of crisis situation they become an unexpected anchor who's able to pull the rest of the party through.
And remember that the reader can only understand what you show them / tell them. If you want to express that a character is finally 'blowing up' after the pot has boiled over, you need to be intentional in showing the temperature going up and up and up so that the reader can understand why that character is finally losing it.
And on the flipside, if you want to express that a character doesn't handle conflict well, you need to show that by making them lose it after the temperature's barely gone up a degree.
And most of all, when it comes to depicting very real-life things like mental breakdowns, splitting, emotional outbursts, etc. what's important above everything else is empathy. And no, that does not mean forgiving them or passing off their actions as 'justified'. It just means you, the author, being empathetic to their struggles, so that you can show through their characterization why they are the way that they are. So that the reader can understand.
It's important to keep in mind that even people who blow up over the 'tiniest things' often have a reason for it, it's not "coming out of nowhere", if anything it's often the final straw. Speaking from personal experience as an autistic person, it's often not the big and super stressful stuff that triggers meltdowns - it's that one small inconvenient thing that happens after the big stressful stuff has passed. The nervous system is already over-loaded, it's trying to manage all the sources of stress while also trying to recover at the same time... and then bam, you just spilled a glass of milk, and you're out of paper towel, and it all comes crashing down.
And let's say if your character is doomed to be a villain, show us WHY they're doomed. Maybe they're unwilling to change, maybe their ego is bigger than their motivation to get better, maybe there aren't any systems in place to help them, maybe they were led to believe they couldn't be any better because they're surrounded by enablers. You can make a character who's both empathetic and unapologetically evil, without reducing their traits to absolutes, or reducing them to a mere stereotype, or concluding that anyone who experiences these things is a "lost cause".
In Kore's case, we obviously haven't revealed the exact why's of her situation, but our goal is still to help you, the reader, feel the why's, even if you can't tangibly identify them yet. We know she's a fish out of water, living in Olympus after living in the Mortal Realm her whole life; we know that she's in her first ever serious relationship, and that she evidently doesn't know how to navigate that relationship; and most of all, we know that she has a tendency to bottle up her emotions, to hide what she's really feeling from people and even from herself.
This is the fuse for the dynamite that is Persephone, and that is the fuse you all feel burning away each and every time the temperature is turned up on her.
Anyways, this post took forever to write because I kept going back to edit things (as this wound up going on a million different tangents unrelated to your actual question lmao) but I hope it helps! Remember too that it takes practice, it's okay if your first or fifth or tenth character / story isn't perfect or doesn't get across what you tried to get across! Take every attempt as a learning experience, and keep writing.
titsay
turnnoffyourmind
gamechangershow
s-u-f-j-a-n-s-t-e-v-e-n-s
germansingergirl
romaincrisis
