The HEA Cafe

Does writing make you cry?

Not because you’re banging your head against the keyboard in frustration, but because what you’re writing wrenches at you.  It should.  When you’re writing an emotionally draining scene, especially the “black moment”,  you should be feel it.

Remember Joan Wilder at the beginning of “Romancing the Stone”?  She was sobbing her way through a box of tissues while typing the end of her novel, and I laughed, but I totally understood it.  If you’re not affected by your own writing, can you expect your readers to feel the emotion coming off the page?  I was writing a scene yesterday that ended with the hero crying, and by the end of the scene, I was blowing my nose too.

I suspect for some writers it is a purely mechanical process, but I’m pleased by the number of authors who confess that they too have “Joan Wilder” moments.  I always wondered if I was just odd. After all, I’m a sucker for cheap sentimentality.  Hallmark card commercials make my eyes misty.  Give me a scene in a movie with a dying dog and music in a minor key, and I’m plowing through the tissues.

On a totally different note, you might also “feel the burn” when crafting a good sensual scene.  At least, you might feel it before you’re in the 15th reading for edits.  Some writers have to set the mood for themselves with candles, soft lighting, utter isolation.  Others can hammer them out with screaming kids running in asking for snacks.  Every writer’s different, but I know that for me, I have to be feeling something if I want my reader to be feeling something.  I wrote a scene in Captain Sinister’s Lady that still gets to me, where a young man has to leave his adoptive family because racism in his antebellum town make it impossible for him to have a decent life.  It wasn’t easy to write it.  But I took the tissues and got to work, and when I was done, I blew my nose and said, “Hey!  That’s not half bad!”

So when you’re writing those key emotional scenes, ask yourself if you’re investing enough of yourself into it–are you feeling sad over your characters, or aroused, or elated, or happy?  If not, maybe you need to give it a second look.