Highway to the Danger Zone – Dark, Dirty, and Dangerous

Scenes That Grab You and Won’t Let Go

As readers we want scenes that grab us as the MC struggles with the villain and adversity. As writers we want to create scenes that are filled with emotion, rivet the reader to the book, and keep them turning pages, especially on the road to the final battle

So, today, let’s discuss some of the best “approaching-danger” scenes we’ve read or written. Whether it’s conflict building in a dark cluttered alley, an empty warehouse, a haunted house, a bar full of the enemy, a secluded dark country road, a cemetery on a moonlit night, a garbage dump, mob headquarters, or a sky cluttered with enemy jets, show us, or describe in a few paragraphs, a scene you’ve written in one of your books, or a tension-building scene in a book you particularly liked.

And, if you feel extremely creative, you can write one for us today. Here’s some high-energy music to get you in the mood:

Highway to the Danger Zone sound track

 In two or three paragraphs:

  1. Show or describe a tension-building scene in one of your books.
  2. Show or describe one of your favorite tension-building scenes in books you have read.
  3. Write one for us today.

Empathy, Emotional Resonance, and Fear

Emotion is at the heart of what makes fiction connect with a reader. People read for various reasons, but feeling suspense, or romantic love,  or a sense of wonder, or the suspicion arising from a mysterious crime, etc., and sometimes several of these at the same time, is a big part of what keeps a reader turning pages. Wanting to experience those feelings vicariously with the characters, and at the same time, experiencing the tension when those feelings are withheld or jeopardized by conflict.

In today’s Words of Wisdom excerpts, Joe Moore looks at how to create empathy so your reader will become attached to those characters, Clare Langley-Hawthorne discusses the importance of proving emotional resonance for the reader with your characters, and Laura Benedict considers the connection readers have to us via our fears.

All the posts are worth reading in full, and are linked from the date at the bottom of each excerpt.

So if empathy is the key to your reader becoming attached to your characters, what is a proven method for creating emotions?

Let’s say you want your character to be afraid—to experience fear. You could always just tell the reader that he or she is scared. That would mean little or nothing because not only is it telling, it paints an unclear picture in the mind of the reader. Scared could mean a 100 different things to a 100 different people. Now ask yourself what it felt like when you’ve experienced fear. Perhaps you were in a parking garage late at night. The sound of your high heels seemed as loud as hammer strikes. The shadows were darker than you remembered. You could see your car but it appeared miles away. Then you hear someone cough. But there’s no one around. You pick up the pace. Your heels become gunshots. You shift your gaze like a gazelle that sensed a stalking big cat as you hug your purse to your chest. Your pulse quickens. Breathing becomes shallow and frantic. Palms sweat cold. Legs shake. You press your key fob and your car’s lights flash but your vision blurs. You hear a strange cry escape your throat—a sound you’ve never made before. Your car is only yards away but you don’t feel like you’re getting closer. Were those your footfalls echoing off concrete walls or were they coming from the shadows? You reach for the door handle, your hand shaking, fear gripping you like a cloak of ice.

Here’s my point. It may not have been in a dark parking garage late at night but we’ve all felt it. Paralyzing, heart-stopping fear. In your story, you need to have your character feel the same. Describe it so that your reader will empathize. So that their hands will shake and their chest will tighten. Make them sweat, even if it’s only in their imagination. Approach every emotion your characters feel in the same manner. Use your life experience. How did you feel the first time you felt love, hate, jealousy, rejection. If you are honest in expressing true emotions through your characters, your reader will have empathy for them, and very possibly come to list them as their all-time favorite.

Joe Moore—August 3, 2016

Almost every book I’ve failed to finish or which has left me disappointed, has failed because I haven’t been able to care enough about the characters. Even in books where the plot has become thin or events have stretched credulity, emotionally deep and resonant characters have kept me reading.

In some ways, the process of providing emotional resonance mirrors the way a writer describes a character because it focuses on the feelings the character inspires in a reader. Those feelings don’t have to always be warm and fluffy, but they do need to strike a chord with a reader. The most powerful characters stay with a reader long after the book is finished.

All too often at writing classes or conferences the pieces that I’ve read or critiqued have had one major failing – the characters themselves. They are often flat on the page, cliched or simply do not ring true. So how do you create emotionally complex, relatable and ultimately resonant characters? Maybe the best starting point is to identify what not to do and work up from there.

Many new writers may feel the urge to create a quirky, one-of-a-kind character or perhaps they hope to create characters similar to those that have proven most popular in their genre (here’s where the recovering alcoholic, down at heel PI often comes into play). In either case, a writer should beware of using standard character tropes and cliches as well as going too far the other way by creating the most ‘out there’ character who sounds nothing like anyone a reader would ever meet in real life. if a character is nothing more that a series of quirks or tics then a reader is going to be just as dissatisfied as if the character is little more than a carbon copy of the stock-standard genre character. The key is (I think) to get into the head and emotions of a character in a way that displays the writer’s own unique perspective. In some ways, perhaps you have to place a little of yourself in each character (maybe not in a literal sense but certainly in an emotional sense).

Striking a chord in readers can be tricky as each reader also brings their own perspective, background, and emotions to the books they are reading. One character’s actions may pack an emotional punch for some readers and yet leave others cold. I find, for example, that parents in books often pack a huge emotional whallop for me, especially in books like Wonder or The Fault in our Stars. If I’d read these books when I was younger, I suspect different characters would have evoked a very different kind of emotional reaction. Yet there are some universal truths out there and characters that evoke strong emotions will go on to have wider resonance.

It’s hard to provide any kind of definitive ‘tip list’ for creating this kind of emotional resonance, simply because it is an illusive target (we only know it when we feel in the gut) but I think some of the elements include:

  • Going deep within a character’s psyche to understand their motivations;
  • Drawing upon your own past experiences and interactions to add depth;
  • Using action as well as interaction to draw out a character rather than description alone (this helps readers experience a character rather than just reading about them in a static sense);
  • Finding the humanity within all the characters (even your villains);
  • Exploring the inhumanity within all your characters (we all have weaknesses and foibles, prejudices and flaws that make us who we are – even if we’re not proud of them);
  • Looking for the universality of experience that strikes a chord in you the writer as you describe your characters and take them on their unique journey through your book;
  • Avoiding thinking or describing characters in terms of what they should be but rather what they are – try to step back from relying on conventions or mimicking other writer’s characters and remember no one is superhuman or a psychopath in their own mind.

Clare Langley-Hawthorne—August 15, 2016

When we write about things that frighten us, chances are there will be lots of readers who share our fears. We can exploit (terrible word, but I mean it in the nicest way) those fears and redeem ourselves through characters that may suffer for a while, but journey to overcome their fears or terrifying situations.

As humans we all have fears. They don’t have to be big, bloody fears, or deeply felt emotional fears to propel or inspire a story. They can be as small as a spider or as microscopic as damaged chromosomes. Resonance is the important thing.

Here’s a list of fears that immediately spark stories of all sorts for me:

Fear of death.

Fear of being submerged in water.

Fear of my embarrassing secrets being revealed in public.

Fear of losing a child.

Fear of being blackmailed.

Fear of being taken advantage of.

Fear of success.

Fear of being a failure.

Fear of a bug crawling in one’s ear or nose.

Fear of being watched in a lighted house from the darkness outside.

Fear of being pulled over by a fake cop on a lonesome road.

Fear of being mistaken for a criminal.

Fear of home invasion.

Fear of the apocalypse.

Fear of snakes in the house.

Fear of roaming packs of dogs.

Fear of being watched through a computer’s camera.

Fear of being kidnapped.

Fear of a child being hurt or being killed by one’s carelessness.

Fear of being judged and found wanting.

Fear of being too happy, because it can’t last.

Fear of one’s eye(s) being gouged out.

Fear of the supernatural.

Fear of random violence.

Fear of cancer.

Fear of loving too much.

Fear of poverty.

Fear of seeing open, bleeding wounds.

Fear of corpses.

Fear of being wrong.

Fear of betrayal.

Fear of snarky groups of teenage girls.

Fear of being vulnerable.

Fear of losing a lover.

Fear of losing a friendship.

As you can see from the list, many of these fears are close to being universal for humans. Readers always want to discover things in stories that they can identify with. It’s all about the resonance, and not so much about the shock value.

Laura Benedict—January 24, 2018

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Now it’s your turn to weigh in about creating and connecting emotions with your readers.

  1. Have you drawn directly on your life experience to help create emotion? Any tips on drawing on your life?
  2. How important is forging emotional resonance with your characters to you? As a reader, how important is it to experience?
  3. What fears spark or drive stories for you? Any that weren’t listed above?

***

You can join my reader group and receive a brand-new Meg Booker prequel novella.

Newly-hired librarian Meg Booker expects the extra two hours the library is open to be a piece of cake. Instead, she finds herself confronted by a mystery involving cookies.

December, 1984. Fir Grove Library, Portland, Oregon: Feathered hair. Cowled sweaters. Instant cameras. Meg has volunteered to work late at the branch during the Christmas festival. Families throng the library, looking to find items for the community treasure hunt. All goes well until odd behavior by a few patrons raises her curiosity. When cookies go missing, Meg realizes she’s stumbled into a mystery and decides she must solve it, even if it means joining the community treasure hunt and racing to the finish.

Farewell, My Cookie is a prequel novella to the Meg Booker Librarian Mysteries—a cozy library mystery series set in the 1980s.

Sweet Emotion

by James Scott Bell
@jamesscottbell

The other morning, as is my wont (and I want what I wont when I want it) I took a fresh cup of joe and my AlphaSmart to the backyard for some thinking, pondering, and writing time. The joe was brewed in my moka pot, a gift to mankind from the Italian inventor Alfonso Bialetti. Usually I take it black, but we happened to have some Coffeemate Sweet Italian Cream in the fridge. I thought the key word was Italian, but as it turns out the emphasis should be on sweet. This stuff is a sugar bomb. You need less than a dollop of regular cream. My hand trembled, and I poured in a touch too much.

Which almost ruined the coffee. I soldiered on, but the enjoyment of the brew was lessened considerably.

Which naturally got me thinking about this as a metaphor for writing.

Emotion in our fiction is a sweetener. In the right amount it makes the story beautiful and tasty. Too much can ruin it.

So the trick is putting in just the right amount. But how do we measure?

Start with genre. On one end of the scale is hardboiled. At the other end is romance. In between is everything else. The mistake of the hardboiled school is avoiding emotion. The mistake of the romantics is larding it on.

There are ways around both these mistakes.

Scene and Sequel

Let’s begin with the basic premise that what’s going on inside your Lead is of abiding interest to your readers. They want to know about the emotions, not just the actions.

The latter component, action, is what the great writing teacher Dwight Swain called scene. The former he called sequel. There’s a definite structure to both.

A scene is made up of Objective, Obstacles, and Outcome.

A sequel is Emotion, Analysis, and Decision…the Decision leading to the next action scene.

Jim Butcher has said that the key to the popularity of his Dresden Files is sequel:

This basic structure for sequels is pretty much the ENTIRE secret of my success. I do it like this in every freaking book I write. I know it works because check it out. People like my books. They like them for some of the special effects, sure, and for some of the story ideas sometimes–but mostly it’s because they find themselves caring about what happens to the characters, and that happens in sequels.

For more on this, see the definitive text on scene and sequel by Swain disciple Jack Bickham.

Showing and Telling

There are times when telling the emotion is fine. I have a little “intensity scale” in my brain which measures the intensity of a moment. When it’s relatively low, I tell. When high, I show. Here’s what I mean.

A woman is slightly worried when her husband hasn’t called for a couple of hours. You might tell it like this: A trickle of worry hit Pam. Usually Steve would let her know if he was going to be late. There is no need to go into the physiological effects of worry on her body. The moment isn’t intense enough.

But what if she doesn’t hear from him that night? Or the following day? Now it’s intense, so you show: Hands trembling, she punched the number for his office. When the receptionist answered Pam’s throat clenched like a fist clutching her vocal cords.

Overwrite and Edit

Now, when you got to those big emotions, I have a suggestion. This can be done as you write, or you can do it when you edit your draft.

Open a new document and do some focused freewriting on the emotion. This means you don’t stop and edit, you just let it flow. Write in the POV of the character. Let the character tell you how she’s feeling. Let her go on and on, giving you the color of it, the taste of it, the metaphors of it. Do the most obvious feeling first, but then go on to another emotion, one you didn’t anticipate at first. Maybe even the opposite emotion. We’re a tangle of complexities, and that’s what makes for compelling characters, too.

Set that document aside for fifteen minutes. Come back to it and pull out the best parts, the parts that are most gripping and original. Put them in the book.

Example

From the hardest of the hardboileds, Mickey Spillane, comes his PI Mike Hammer in One Lonely Night. Hammer’s backstory includes heavy combat in WWII, lots of kills, and what we would today call PTSD. He deals with his ghosts by shooting bad guys and boozing. So when a judge rakes him over the coals in front of a crowded courtroom, calling him a lowlife killer who doesn’t belong in a civilized world, Hammer can’t forget it. As he’s driving he gets a look at himself in the rear view mirror, and hates what he sees.

I used to be able to look at myself and grin without giving a damn about how ugly it made me look. Now I was looking at myself the same way those people did back there. I was looking at a big guy with an ugly reputation, a guy who had no earthly reason for existing in a decent, normal society. That’s what the judge had said.

I was sweating and cold at the same time. Maybe it did happen to me over there. Maybe I did have a taste for death. Maybe I liked it too much to taste anything else. Maybe I was twisted and rotted inside. Maybe I would be washed down the sewer with the rest of all the rottenness sometime. What was stopping it from happening now? Why was I me with some kind of lucky charm around my neck that kept me going when I was better off dead?

That’s why I parked the car and started walking in the rain. I didn’t want to look in that damn mirror any more.

Go thou and do likewise.