Why Your Most Emotional Scenes Aren't Doing What You Think They're Doing

A version of vulnerability appears in a lot of fiction on bookshelves these days that looks like the real thing but isn’t quite there when you start poking at it and asking questions of it.

It has the right ingredients, it has a character saying something true, something personal they’ve been carrying, but when the scene ends the reader has felt or witnessed the emotion without feeling the weight of it that the writer, most probably, intended the reader to feel.

Essentially, something passed through the scene that should have changed it and didn’t.

I want to talk about why that happens. Because I think it’s a very commonly misunderstood problem and it often goes undiagnosed in emotional writing. The fix isn’t what most writers reach for, if they even get as far as catching it.