Hi . I am currently writing my wifes life story (at least the childhood part). She was a ward of the state during the seventies. She was given up by her drug addled mother. Her father was a abusive drunk. I have often gotten emotional writing different scenes. One scene in particular was tear inducing. Maggie (my wife) was eight. She was in the school yard. This was the school she was sent to after being placed at the first children's home. At this school, all of the children from the home were teased relentlessly. Maggie witnessed a little girl get her lunch knocked from her hands by a group of bullies. Maggie went to the girl and offered her piece of fruit. This scene always makes a lump in my throat as I have always abhorred bullies. This scene is so moving because it shows my wife's beautiful nature. There are a lot of desperately tragic scenes in this WIP, but this is the one that gets me the most.
I cry my eyeballs out. I write a scene that I'm so intensely focused on, then read what I've written and fall apart. I had a bully scene that I still can't read without tears, the happy little girl has her innocence crushed by the big bad bully, and our good guy comes to the rescue, only to face his own urge to terrify the bully. He fails, and becomes more terrifying than the bully, and the girl ends up bringing him back from the edge. He makes the bully do much more than appologise, and carries the crying girl home, then goes home only to realize he never appologised, and starts crying his eyeballs out. And now my glasses are spotted... i'm out
Very much. If I am using the right music to inspiring the scene, then my head starts to see it as a movie, then the magic happens... tears on my face
a tear mostly when I read, when a write something emotional ..I tend to over write, try to get it all across.
I'm worried about this becoming a problem with a lot of my writing because things that I am passionate about are also really emotionally difficult. I have struggled a lot with mental illness and I find a lot of connections to that and to how people and the mental health system have responded to me. I have PTSD, too. It's a balance of separating yourself enough from your characters while also making sure you can relate enough to them to speak to their experiences.
Maybe it's the 'getting older' thing, but I have cried a couple of times during the writing of my story. Mostly when the topic touches on regrets or unfulfilled wishes. These moments often come when I least expect it, and during a fairly subdued moment in the story, or when a character is being particularly stoic. I find stoicism more emotion-inducing than just about any other story situation. If a character is bottling it up, I find that usually reduces me to tears. Not only in my own writing, but in other people's writing as well. The power of understatement, maybe?
Ugh, I just reduced myself to blubbering yesterday when I had to kill off a girl who was already dead. Long story, but my lighthearted comedy just got some really serious notes in the end of it (MC's suicide, death of a ghost) that I think will make it much stronger story, but still took a lot out of me.
Yes, and my stomach gets in knots before, during, and after the writing. I try not to cry because crying gives me a terrible headache, but I'm not always good at suppressing it. The nausea never lies, though.
I don't usually get all that emotional when I write, but there is one story that really stuck with me. It was going to be some weird urban fantasy thing at first, with a half human, half demon woman protecting a city from all sorts of monsters the humans can't know about. Not so different from Buffy, Anne Rice and all that. The end result, though... In short, I focused a lot more on the half angel, half demon than I intended, and tried to see things from her side. She was raised in a lab, and bred specifically to be the ultimate killing machine. Think a female Rambo fighting monsters, and you get the idea. The problem is that she's too much like Rambo. And we've all seen "that" scene at the end of the first Rambo movie. It still brings tears in my eyes just thinking about it. He went on and on about how he was the perfect soldier in Vietnam, but when he came home, everyone hated him and called him a baby killer. Now he can't even get a job parking cars, and he can never get rid of the war inside him, in his head. I connected with my own MC in the same way, and the story quickly went from Rambo action to a Titanic-level of sadness. Instead of being the hero that saved the world, I knew the only way to end the book was to let her die, and finally find peace for the first time in her life.
The same is true in TNT for my MC. Even in peacetime, his only release from the horror of his existence is death, and it is denied.
I never get emotional, I'm happy to kill my characters because it makes it a good story and the result is so rewarding that it drains out whatever emotion I might feel for that certain character
