Tips for Emotional Scenes

Let's face it, writing emotional scenes are like walking on a tightrope with nothing below you. They can so easily get sappy or cliche, they can turn into something same ol'-same ol' and they can be tedious to read. On the other side they might seem robotic and useless and not really important, not the pivotal scene that you wanted. So I'm here to give you some tips that I think work well.

First off, avoid saying words like love, sweet, life, eyes and stuff like that excessively, only use them once in a while. By eyes I mean don't go into deep description about one character looking into another one's eyes and seeing their soul, say it once but don't say it again. Avoid going into all the tears and sobs and heart-wrenching things. Once again, you can mention it, but don't say stuff like 'her heart was torn to bits by him leaving and life seemed like a pointless masquerade. She cried for days and hours refusing to leave her room.' Okay, so that's not too too bad, if I went into paragraphs upon paragraphs of this, I would feel sick to my stomach. I kid you not.

But you want say show a lot of emotion so it's important, make the scene stick in the reader's memory. Don't say 'She loved him, and once he was gone, she was very sad.' Lame. Lame, lame, lame. That's saying that the characters don't really care about each other. It's just putting words on a page, not making a masterpiece.

So here's a simple mix between the two.

"After he left, everything was a let down, she started to look for things to make her life more miserable then it already was. She would stay in her room for days just crying out of rage and overwhelming sadness. She loved him, but he left her."

See, not too sappy, not to un-sappy. Make it stick in the reader's memories, make them love it and want to read it again. Though I have to say I love the masquerade line, don't steal it, I'll be using it soon. ;)