#the next question will be 'how do i ramble on for 13 paragraphs while simultaneously ignoring answering the question'

[vowel-in-thug]

Hello Gemma, do you have advice on how to make writing more emotional or to increase its emotional impact? Thank you!

hello there! i’m not sure but i’m happy to make something up!

step one: weep openly onto your keyboard and let your tears do the typing.

no okay not that. i don’t know? and by that i mean i have an idea but i guess it’s two-fold. i’m just guessing though, when you say “emotional” you mean “sad or upsetting”? because if it’s positive emotions my tactic is basically just “how gross can i make this be without puking all over myself.” so how to give something sad or upsetting emotional resonance.

first of all, i don’t think i ever actually write anything traumatic. like, in the moment of tragedy. i’ve written a couple fights scenes, but that’s just like who is hitting what and where and how and why. fight scenes are pretty basic on the surface (although choreography is a bitch, though i’ve found that they never read as stilted as it feels to write). but the fact that they’re pretty basic kind of goes towards my point: sadness is about what happens after.

when upsetting things are happening, people typically respond one way: shock. there’s a numbness, there’s a helplessness, everything sort of retreats. you may cry, you may not. you may scream, you may not. but emotionally, there’s almost a kind of disconnect that is difficult, for me anyway, to make compelling.

things i’ve written that i think are particularly sad are usually being told to someone else by the person who experienced them. for example, flint’s hamiltons story in the cowboy au, silver’s story about his abusive caretaker in that older one with the cigar, thomas’s story of how his hand was broken in the second smallpox fic. and i like writing this way because i like writing things i understand. it’s so much fucking easier writing things you understand. i have never been as abused as silver was in that story, but i know about telling someone something upsetting about my life and then trying to laugh it off as a joke. i know about telling someone something, not thinking much of it anymore, but they’re reaction throws into sharp relief just how fucked up it was. the survival is part of what makes things sad. it’s not death that breaks my heart, it’s who gets left behind. 

and not only will you have someone who experienced a strong emotion in a position to reflect on it: old fears, healed wounds, understood personality traits, etc – but now you have someone new who is experiencing this strong emotion for the first time, but not having the sad or upsetting thing actually happening to them. in essence, the characters becomes your readers. 

to put this in a Black Sails situation: we never see thomas being dragged away to bedlam, fighting and screaming and miranda’s confusion and desperation and thomas clinging to miranda and telling her to take care of james, etc etc. i’m not saying it wouldn’t have been compelling. but we’d only seen thomas a few short scenes before that, so it’s easy to understand why they didn’t do it that way. instead, for james to return and see miranda, silent and staring into a fire. miranda, thinking she’s out of tears but then james comes back and she has to go through it again and they come back. miranda, who we’ve seen and been puzzled by for a season and a half, and we finally understand her pain. and james, far more upset than we’ve ever seen him in 13 episodes, james for the first time ever at a total loss for dealing with a situation, james who cannot control the outcome, james turning into flint – this scene has such emotional impact that will linger, let’s face it BS fans, for the rest of our damned lives. and it’s incredibly intentional too – thomas is just gone, just like that. now we know the ghost that’s been haunting flint and miranda these years, and that scene is appropriately haunting.

as for any kind of other emotional impact – anger, jealousy, anxiousness, etc. i mean. we’re not monkeys at a typewriter making shakespeare. even if your story and your character’s story are worlds apart, you have felt the same things your characters have felt. and i don’t mean use it in a dumb zen way. i mean what things physically occur to you when you get angry. for instance, my ears get really, really hot when i’m angry. when i’m anxious, my stomach churns and not only will my hands shake but i will just stare at my hands shaking. when i’m jealous of someone, i will think of anything to keep myself thinking about it, to the point where i feel guilty thinking about what i’m jealous about. we experience emotions in different ways, and even if your ears don’t get hot when you’re angry, i think it’s a pretty understood response. when you’re feeling a strong emotion, you’re just sort of rendered down to biological responses we can’t control. if the outside story is distressing to the character, than a majority of what’s described should be the internal world. 

like i’ve never hyperventilated before, but as soon as a character is described as doing so, i always check my breathing, and it will always speed up. we’re all just sacks of meat and nerves anyway so you might as well ramp them up to 11 and describe how being camera shy makes someone’s toenails hurt and i’ll be like “bitttttchh yes me too the fuck”

i hope there was at least a single sentence in here that was helpful