When an important or dramatic moment happens to a character in a novel and you want it to land with power, it’s important to show their reaction. It helps the reader feel the events on the character’s behalf, and we learn a lot about the character based on how they react.
But sometimes writers flub these dramatic moments and they end up feeling flat or heavy-handed.
Before I get to some tips on how to handle dramatic moments for maximum effect, here’s what not to do.
Don’t just tell the reader what the character is feeling
“Show don’t tell” is often a misunderstood bit of writing advice, but this is one area where it’s absolutely correct. When you just tell us what the character is feeling, we miss all the individuality that goes along with seeing how someone responds in a more specific way.
For instance:
The lead raccoon, a fifty pound behemoth that looked like a mean masked bear with a striped tail, rose on its heels and punched Nathan in the face.
Nathan was shocked.
Yeah, of course Nathan would be shocked when he was accosted by a mutant raccoon. Telling us Nathan is shocked is both a) obvious from context, and b) a really flat and generic reaction. Trust the reader to make basic inferences based on the context.
What does Nathan do when he’s shocked? What does he think just happened? How is he thinking through his options now?
Show us the reaction.
Don’t resort to generic gestures or “gesture explosions”
Another mistake writers often make is to show either a really standard reaction to a dramatic moment or they’ll go the other direction and start sledgehammering the reader with an endless string of reactions.
For instance:
The lead raccoon, a fifty pound behemoth that looked like a mean masked bear with a striped tail, rose on its heels and punched Nathan in the face.
Nathan gasped.
or
The lead raccoon, a fifty pound behemoth that looked like a mean masked bear with a striped tail, rose on its heels and punched Nathan in the face.
Nathan gasped and grabbed his face, his heart pounding, and stumbled backward. Sweat appeared on his back and he held a trembling hand to his face where the raccoon punched him, a knot appearing in his stomach.
Do you see the problems here?
In the first one, it’s a really generic way of showing a character’s reaction. Gasping is a pretty universal response to a dramatic moment, so we’re missing seeing a more specific and individualized gesture. We don’t learn much about Nathan by seeing him gasp.
In the second one, all the gestures run together and quickly reach diminishing returns. It feels like a gesture grenade just went off, hence my nickname “gesture explosions.” We would get the gist with a lot less.
If you’re going to include a gesture, make it specific and individualized and don’t overdo it. Pick one or two representative gestures and leave it at that.
Don’t psychologically diagnose your character
A specific variation of “telling” that has crept into more and more manuscripts that cross my desk lately is the psychological diagnosis.
For instance:
The lead raccoon, a fifty pound behemoth that looked like a mean masked bear with a striped tail, rose on its heels and punched Nathan in the face.
Nathan felt acutely anxious.
Much like a generic gesture like a sigh, a psychological diagnosis just doesn’t tell us very much. “Anxious” is a state of mind that covers a panoply of manifestations. Your anxious might be to chew your nails while your heart pounds, my anxious might be to crawl under a weighted blanket in a cold sweat.
It can also feel too self-aware in the moment for a character to zoom out from the dramatic situation they find themselves in and swiftly diagnose themselves in an overly precise way.
Unless the psychological diagnosis has a very specific bearing in the plot (like the character literally receives one from a psychologist), steer clear and instead show us how your character acts when they are anxious, depressed, manic, or whatever it is.
In other words, show us the symptoms, not the diagnosis.
Now. Here’s what to do instead.
Choose specific gestures and thought processes
Particularly if you’re writing in first person or third person limited, I’m a big believer in the power of gestures and thought processes to show how a character is reacting.
Gestures alone in response to a dramatic moment can feel like meaningless stage direction. If all we see is a physical reaction, we’re missing understanding what the character thinks just happened and it can be difficult to know what to take from it.
For instance, if Nathan just “stumbled back,” we won’t necessarily grasp the significance. Is he mad? Scared? Strategic?
But if you both show the physical reaction and open up his thoughts, we have a much clearer sense of where his head is at:
The lead raccoon, a fifty pound behemoth that looked like a mean masked bear with a striped tail, rose on its heels and punched Nathan in the face.
Nathan stumbled back. What was that for? And where had this pack of giant trash pandas come from?
He would find out what kind of pizza they were eating and defeat these monsters once and for all.
Showing a physical reaction along with the thought processes helps us both visualize the scene and it orients us around how the character is processing what happened, how they feel about it, and what they want to do next.
Show uncontainable emotions reverberating
Often when something dramatic happens to a character, they need to keep it together in the moment. Maybe they’re in shock, maybe they need to focus on defeating the bad guy, maybe they don’t want to give a bully the satisfaction of seeing them upset.
When the dramatic moment is a really huge one that upends a character’s understanding of the world or themselves, it may trigger a cascade of emotions that shouldn’t be easy for the character to contain.
The best way to think about a truly dramatic moment landing on a character is to think of it like a gallon of water poured into a full tank, or a straw that breaks the camel’s back. The character can’t keep it together. The emotion has to come out somehow.
So even if they don’t react in the moment, that emotion is still jostling inside of them until it finds an outlet.
For instance:
The lead raccoon, a fifty pound behemoth that looked like a mean masked bear with a striped tail, rose on its heels and punched Nathan in the face.
Nathan stumbled back. What was that for? And where had this pack of giant trash pandas come from?
He would find out what kind of pizza they were eating and defeat these monsters once and for all. But not now. Too many razor sharp claws for him to handle.
Nathan scrambled through the bushes and ran along the dusky road toward home. His cheek stung nearly as much as his pride. He couldn’t believe he was running away. What kind of a raccoon detective was he? He imagined the cascading laughter he’d hear when he walked into the station on Monday morning.
He reached the entrance to his building and nearly collided with Ms. Jenkins, the saintly widow who always seemed to have pink rollers in her hair no matter the time of day.
“Nice evening, isn’t it young man?” she trilled.
“What about it is nice?!” Nathan shouted.
Here, we see Nathan take the punch, but it keeps churning through his thought processes. He can’t just run away and leave it at that because the emotion keeps gnawing at his system. Then it explodes out and he takes it out on poor Ms. Jenkins.
We learn an immense amount about characters by seeing them trying to process emotions. What are the things they fear? How do they think through their options?
When the emotion is eventually released, what form does it take? Do they get nasty? Overly effacing? Calculating?
Show the emotion boiling over and the reader will feel how important the moment was for the character. And they’ll learn a whole lot more about what makes them tick.
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Art: Raten laveur by Charles d’Orbigny
Julie Jones says
This is so helpful. I really appreciate all your craft tips, but especially at the line-by-line level. *What are the things they fear?* I’m flagging this article for when it’s time to edit my first draft. Thanks!
JOHN T. SHEA says
The lead raccoon, a fifty pound behemoth that looked like a mean masked bear with a striped tail, rose on its heels and punched Nathan in the face.
Nathan picked up the machine gun his cousin Rocket had loaned to him and mowed down the whole ungodly gang of raccoons!
V.M. Sang says
Gosh. Thanks for this. I’m currently editing the first draft of my no el. This is extremely helpful.
And especially line-by-line examples. I know I’m guilty of simple showing, (he shrugged, she sighed etc). This will help me improve that.
Ceridwen Hall says
I love these examples (though they are playing into my racoon phobia)! When I look at reactions I like to thinking of bridging the outer action to the inner world–this helps me avoid generic gestures and focus on the feeling that is driving the action (and the plot) forward.
Colin Guest says
Many thanks for the information. I knew something was missing in my writing. I will now go back and change various things.