Nathan Bransford - The Forums

Ever have a character that came so to life that it opened your heart and made you cry?

Yesterday, going deeper into Donald Maass' Breakout Novel Workbook, once again I was astounded at the power in these exercises.
I was working to develop two side characters along their own plot lines (not just in support of the main plot).
And, wow, did they come forward taking on deeper lives and stories of their own and, well, just lit up the world and touched me so deeply.

No, but I've written scenes that did. On the rewrite of my very last scene, at the very end there was a little twist that just kind of wrote itself on the page and then...wow.

Yes, and scenes and settings and ideas and events, though I attribute some of my emotional responses to the metabolic throes of a traumatic midlife crisis. My sense of humor changed too. I find less hilarity in schadenfreude now and more in ironies. I've laughed so hard I cried.

Yes. I have a little boy in my story who breaks my heart. The protagonist finds him in deplorable conditions, and from an adult's POV he should be miserable, but he's very circumspect about his situation. It's life as he knows it. He's so fragile, and yet he's no lost cause. He goes through hell in the story, but I gave him a happy ending. Had to. I wouldn't have forgiven myself if I hadn't.

I had a couple of scenes that when editing brought me close to tears.

Absolutely. The two main characters in my novel and WIP break my heart, but they warm it too, so I forgive them.

Isn't it nice when our characters and our story are that real?

A good sign. That's how it should be.

I've gotten really mad at stuff one of my characters did. I wanted to yell at him. It's strange how we have total control of the words we write, but the characters just have personalities of their own that start to control us a little bit... Also I love laughing at stuff I wrote myself. It's a really great feeling.

I've done a couple of really awful things to my characters, but I was too busy putting them back together afterwards to cry. In my very first novel, I did something that I didn't consider too awful until I reread it a couple days later. That little scene pried a couple of tears loose.

Yeah - there was a character I was killing off and it was a very upsetting, emotional scene that I had to stop writing and go back to later. I just wasn't emotionally ready to do it.

Actually I did not cry, but I was close to it. The last two volumes of my WIP is full with emotional scenes and Volume 3 has the best moments in the last chapters where I was capable to feel the loss and the hopeless strugling of the MC. To me these scenes was the hardest to write, but a good and sad atmospheric music is capable to help to write it anytime.

One of my MC made me have to take a minute away from the screen bc I was pulling from my own emotional experience and it scared the hell out of me. It was like I was in her head completely and felt like I was going to be consumed.

Yes! There are some things about my characters that make me cry just to think about them. I don't even need to be reading the manuscript. I probably went through at least ten boxes of Kleenex while writing my book. There were some days when that was all I did all day long...write and cry. It's incredibly cathartic and makes you sleep great. I also get pissed off at my characters...my male main character acts like a real dickhead for part of the book and I was mad at my husband for an entire week while I was writing that part...I totally took it out on him. I couldn't help it, he was the nearest man in sight.

side note: as one of the lucky people on the planet who've read cheekychook's first book, I can say that her characters made me cry (and laugh and smile) too.

I get so attached to my characters that I can't help but cry when I kill them. Even if I know they'll be coming back in richly creative ways, it's still terribly depressing when I have to maul them to death or they say something profound or stupid. Or when the ones mourning them say something cute.

I also laugh a lot, make fun of them, and have crack conversations that never happened but I could totally see in a parody version of the book. I'm too involved. I live and breathe my characters. They are my life.

[sigh]

I feel like the author guy in Inkheart, only I don't think I would want to go to the world of my books. There's some majorily scary crap there. XD

Most definitely. I've run the gambit of emotions when writing my characters. Silly jokes make me laugh; a mercy killing of a mortally wounded boy made me wipe tears off of my keyboard; a first kiss gave me goosebumps and warm fuzzies. I feel like that's when I finally know a scene is good enough. When it toys with my emotions after the umpteenth time of reading it, I leave it alone.