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HGohwell
Jan '21

Not specifically for novel writers but you know, the new categories. And to be clear, I'm not asking for advice, I'm looking for discussion on people's different techniques and approaches.

So, whether comic or novel, how do you go about making your big scene a big punch to the gut? How do you make your viewer cry? How to make that tightness in their chest? Or even how do you make your reader cover their face and squeal at the ridiculous fluff? How do you make their heart race and have them dreading to look over their shoulder but sure someone's watching? What's your magic technique, how to you pick your big scene(s) and what do you make sure it punches your viewer hard? Or do you not?

My personal thoughts on it:

I personally think there is a difference. Some scenes just hit harder, no matter what the emotion. And I tend to think as story tellers, that impact is our goal. To impact the person on the other end. I'd say, personally, you should be feeling whatever you want your reader to feel. Of course, this is subjective, I'm a crier, so I'm in tears over emotional things at a drop of a hat, but I can only name 1 webcomic on Tapas that has made me cry and feel that tightness in my chest. And to be honest, there haven't been many manga either. I think, there's something inherently difficult about it for comics/manga, compared to things like novels or voiced works. It's easier to get in the heads of characters in novels (although when the pov isn't a close perspective, it's a lot harder) while movies and anime and cartoons, the acting there in front of you goes a long way (when it's good).

I think a lot of it comes down to dialogue. Powerful scenes have a habit of going over the top with their dialogue but that just hits m as goofy, while things like novels can get away with silence in the form of narrative and movies can have long scenes of silence and atmosphere. I often thing silence and played down dialogue is far more powerful than yelling and dramatic declarations of love. Just like I tend to find played down horror a lot more terrifying than over the top gore. So when I start coming up with my big hitter scenes I tend to think how can I have it speak with the least amount of dialogue and also when I'm thinking it through or saying it aloud, does it make me react.

What about you guys? How do you approach your biggest emotional scenes?

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HippieGhost
Jan '21

Honestly? I feel like my best scenes are the ones I personally felt while writing them. I try to discourage straight-up author insertion, but I do feel we give a piece of ourselves to every character we design. I've delved into my personal traumas when writing, and it's something I expect to have happen whether I intend it to or not. That said, there are three things I can identify as being necessary:

1: A good build-up: I don't just mean the scene itself in this case. If you're writing an emotional scene, you need to set the stakes in advance. For example, you're planning a tragic character death. What are their long-term goals? What are their dreams? Are they going to come to fruition? Who are they close to? If you're writing an act of cathartic revenge, why is the MC or whoever so dead-set on seeking it? High stakes are key.

2: Realistic tone: This is where balance of detail is going to come in. For a tragic death I'm not going to focus on the gore or the blood. I'm going to focus on the sadness of it. The scream of anguish from their dearly beloved, that faint gasp of air as their eyes glaze over. Even in an action scene, if I have someone die of tragedy, the action comes to a dead-stop as the perspective focuses on the victim. Sentence flow is important to tone here.

3: The emotional payoff: Is it a personal trauma to the character? Show their anguish. Focus on what they're feeling physically to show the reader what emotions are at play, and don't let them recover right away. Is it a victory? Give them that sigh of relief. Let the world slowly fade back into reality. Passage of time after the event is just as important as the events leading up. A character with major trauma should show signs and symptoms of that trauma after the fact. (For example, when one of my characters goes through a major trauma that leads to his depression, he self-isolates and loses his appetite.)

All in all, it all depends on the effect you're trying to have on the reader. I'm a lot more likely to focus on the blood and gore for example if it's an act of cathartic revenge, because by then the reader should want the bad guy to die and they want them to die hard.

DokiDokiTsuna
Jan '21

I would say that I do not. '_'

I feel like maybe it's a little unrealistic to expect to have that much control over your readers' thought processes? I've laughed and/or scoffed through many a 'heartbreaking' or 'terrifying' scene in my day, and I doubt I'm the only one. ^^; And it's not even that those stories were badly written; sometimes you just don't resonate that way with what the author is doing.

I think, rather than trying to get the reader to feel something in their bones, which is largely up to them, it's more important to accurately portray the emotions of the characters, who are actually under your control. Like, at the very least, if a reader ends up cackling through all your serious scenes, they should still be able to figure out that those scenes are supposed to be serious, simply by the way you wrote them.

And that's the most important thing. Even in stories that are badly written, I can appreciate when something is supposed to be important to the characters when they react properly and the right narrative techniques are used (appropriate imagery, word choice, music choice, etc.). I can feel invested in their struggles if I at least know what they're going for.

Ordinaryaverageguy
Jan '21

I'm not an experienced author (yet) but I read tons. I follow a method used by other authors. I don't lay out all the details. I set up a relationship & the characters & put them into the scene - and then I use a rather sparse description & let the reader fill in some of it.

skippyjoeskilling
Jan '21

  1. BUILD-UP! This is by far the most important part. My comic just had what was (hopefully) a very visceral sad chapter, and most of the sadness comes from the last 10 or so chapters showing the characters happy and helping each other and making you care about their relationship. When I knew this chapter was coming I specifically made the one before have scenes that showed off the strong point of the character's dynamics that now that it's at risk.

  2. As people have said here, show the characters reactions. Saying 'her dad just died' might make the audience register that something sad just happen, but showing her crying going through his things will make them actually feel it. That said, it's very easy to make what's supposed to be a heartbreaking scene come off as goofy. Think of how many terrible tv shows will have a character fall to the ground screaming, or look into the sunset with one dramatic tear rolling down their face, and instead of getting upset with them people just meme it to hell and back. What's going to be effective is really going to depend on the character you're writing. A stoic character actually crying for the first time can be a huge gut punch, but so can a character painfully holding it together. Let them react like real people, who tend to be very embarrassing and ugly while they're upset.
    (A super random tip I like to use for showing emotion realistically is that most people don't like to get extremely upset, especially crying, with people around. Something about a character remaining calm and then weeping in their bedroom or the bathroom always really get to me. It feels much less soap-opera-y.)

  3. In terms of actual writing technique, in the moments of extreme emotion, especially grief, I like to slow down. In one of my favorite novels, the character's mom dies early on, and an entire chapter (about 20 pages) is devoted to him in their apartment trying to convince himself that she is going to walk through the door any minute. You can feel his panic so intensely, jumping at every sound and trying to maintain his normal routine even though he knows the worst has happened. It really hits home when you have to sit in those bad emotions with the character. It's harder to capture in comics, but this scene from Something Is Killing The Children (which is a great horror comic check it out) definitely hits.

    Screen Shot 2021-01-17 at 7.04.17 PM.png1330x516 867 KB

    And it hits formats of the same reasons I already said. We already know and care about the character, it forces you to look at his pain, without it becoming at all melodramatic (you can see him trying to stop himself from crying like I said!) and then his line at the end is so childlike it really hammers in the vulnerable state he's in.

Kaydreamer
Jan '21

The big one for me is pacing. I find that most comics are too fast-paced for me to TRULY feel immersed in the tone and emotions being portrayed and that makes it difficult for me to care. There are certainly some exceptions, and they're AMAZING, I love them... but it's why I don't read many YA graphic novels despite intending to write/illustrate them as a career. Most novels don't have this problem. They can slowly build up tone until it's reverberating inside your heart, then SLAM you with that big moment. It's magical.

I feel one of the things that will define my comic-writing style will be slower-than-usual pacing, so I can have that resonance of tone while still controlling the visual narrative.

AmysGames
Jan '21

The biggest thing for me is contrast. It's hard to care when something bad happens to character you barely know. But for a character who's been there through the whole story, who the audience has shared laughs and triumphs with, it hits a lot harder. Show them at their highest before you show them at their lowest.