Tips On Writing Intense Scenes
-- A lot of people come to me with questions about writing more intense, emotional scenes, so I figured I’d make a list of tips for those of you who would find it useful. This article isn’t as much about action-intense scenes, but some things may apply. This is mainly focused on writing intense scenes that invoke a lot of emotion from your readers, so I hope it helps. Happy writing!
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Emotional scenes are usually the more intense ones in a story, but this can be a very slippery slope to tread on, because a lot of writers can go overboard on the actual emotion. Overloading a scene with cheesy emotion will bring your reader out of it or corner them. Your reader’s reactions shouldn’t be limited by the pressure to cry when your character does. Your reader should feel the intended emotion because they feel they’re inside of it, mostly due to subtext and surrounding details, not because of pressure from the events to feel what the character is feeling.
You Don’t Have To Be Unrealistic To Invoke Emotion
Your characters don’t need to display inconsistent traits or do things that will shock your reader purely out of “I can’t believe so-and-so would do that”. You also don’t need to have a groundbreaking event in your scene for it to be intense. Sometimes the most intense scenes are the most mundane ones that are more internal reflection than anything, especially following larger events.
Tone will play more of a role in making the scene intense than the actual events will. I have a whole article on perfecting a scene here, but to put it simply, you should have a healthy mixture of body language, intentional dialogue tags, and context that build the tone of your scene.
Word choice is a super important aspect of what makes a scene more intense for your reader. There are powerful words you can use to bring forth certain universal associations and reactions from your reader. For instance, instead of saying “cut, broken, sad”, you could put it as “sliced, shattered, miserable”. I am not saying you should use a thesaurus for this. That will take it to the level of being unnatural and forced. Just use upgraded versions of simple words you might use to describe how someone feels or whatever is going on.
Your readers probably haven’t been through the same thing as your character, but most humans have felt the same form of emotions in different dosages and different contexts. This is the recipe for relation that makes scenes more hard-hitting for your reader. If your character lost a family member in a car accident, describe their emotions in a way that most people can connect to. Maybe not everyone has been through that same experience, but most people can relate to the aspect of loss and tragedy.
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