2,098 words today, 47,082 total. Less than three thousand words to the goal for the month, though a LOT more than that to finish the story.
One of the scenes I wrote this week was difficult. It was something I knew was going to happen from the moment I started the story, but as I wrote I got to know one of the characters involved better and became somewhat attached to him. Getting to know him better also made the scene harsher than originally planned, as he turned out to be a much better man than I’d originally envisaged. This made his fate harder to write, and also made the circumstances leading to it a bit harder to come up with. While the necessary misjudgement was still in character for him, it required more provocation than I had originally envisaged.
There are two things in my experience that can make a scene hard to write. The first is an inability to actually write it – writers block, a lack of motivation, or what I call ‘writers goop’ when the scene just doesn’t want to come.
The other is when the scene is painful or uncomfortable. The most common of these is when the storyline and events taking place in the story call for awful things to happen to characters you’re writing and have become attached to. This is what I had this week, and is often a good sign for your story – the last thing we want to read is a power fantasy where the good guys romp through the bad guys with no injuries, no setbacks, and no failures. Struggle through and get used to doing bad things to your characters – and then have them rise above it!
Scenes can be uncomfortable for many reasons. There are topics we don’t like to touch on – rape, torture, cold blooded murder. There’s a scene in one novel of mine (this may count as a spoiler, but given the degree of revision that story is slated for, you’ll have forgotten it by the time you’re likely to ever see the book) where, as part of a general moral decline on the part of the protagonist, he tortures a man for information and then kills him in cold blood. That scene, while not overly long, took a while to write. It wasn’t comfortable, and I’m totally okay with not being comfortable writing torture pr0n.
A similar scene is going to come up towards the end of Fealty, where our protagonist ends up cold bloodedly condemning someone to a pretty horrible fate. He doesn’t really have a choice, but it still ends up being a pretty cold blooded call when he makes it. That scene will be hard to write, mostly to get across to the reader the degree of both conflict and of cold blooded practicality going through the characters head.
Usually, the scenes that are hard to write because they’re uncomfortable are very necessary to the story. Unless you’re writing torture pr0n or something similiar, they’re unlikely to come up horrendously often, and should be used sparingly – they’ll often be just as shocking to the reader as they are uncomfortable to the writer. Used well and at the right time, they’ll add a certain extra bite to your story.
Namaste,
Glynn Stewart
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