Does Your Writing Move You to Tears?

What a good topic with which to March into spring! Please excuse the poor pun, but that’s where my head is at this morning as I’m already a little freaked with how fast this year is already moving.

Our March Round Robin topic is: Are you ever emotionally drained by writing certain scenes, and how real are your characters to you?

The simple answer to that, for me, is yes, and very real. To elaborate, I truly believe that if an author is not moved by the characters they create, then how can that author expect his or her readers to fully engage with those characters and finish reading the book?

I’m blessed, I think, by the fact that my characters come to me quite easily. I will have an image of them and usually their names, too. What happens to them after that depends on what they tell me, and that’s a statement that I believe only another author can truly appreciate.

In my very first western contemporary romance, my heroine’s grandmother had been active in the French underground movement during World War II. Please don’t ask me how I went from a ranch in southern Alberta to a damp basement in Paris where resistance fighters were making Molotov cocktails. It was all Charmaine St. Claire’s fault. As that was my first attempt at a contemporary novel, to say I was confused is putting it mildly, which is probably the reason that has become ‘the book under the bed’. If it ever sees the light of day, it will probably be a trilogy as, if I write Charmaine’s story, then I have to write her husband Robert’s story, too, before I ever get back on track with the contemporary story which started it all.

I didn’t set out to write trilogies or a linked series, but my characters became so real to me I didn’t want to let them go. Why waste a perfectly good character? I cried when I wrote the reason Lord Randolph Buxton didn’t want to father children in Cold Gold, the first book of The Buxton Chronicles. I ached for Pinkerton agent Stuart Montgomery’s unrequited love in the second book and cried again in the third book when Lady Serena Buxton, after shouldering so many worries during World War I then has to contend with Randolph’s shell shock when he returns from the front.

I don’t remember actually crying when writing either His Dark Enchantress or His Ocean Vixen, my

two Regency romances. Both books see the heroines in some quite dire situations and I felt their pain when writing some of those scenes. I’m not sure if I imbued my characters with my own emotions, or if they influenced me. I only know I wrote several scenes for both books with clenched teeth and sweating palms as I put my heroines through paces I would never choose for myself.

And to help restore my shattered nerves after writing an emotional scene I might, just might, resort to a glass of Writers Tears Irish whiskey!

Visit these authors and see how they deal with emotional scenes and what they might use as a pick-me-up.

Marci Baun http://www.marcibaun.com/blog/
Margaret Fieland http://margaretfieland.wordpress.com
Judith Copek http://lynx-sis.blogspot.com/
A.J. Maguire http://ajmaguire.wordpress.com/
Connie Vines http://mizging.blogspot.com/
Rachael Kosinski http://rachaelkosinski.weebly.com/
Dr. Bob Rich htt http://wp.me/p3Xihq-Wo
Heather Haven http://heatherhavenstories.com/blog/
Beverley Bateman http://beverleybateman.blogspot.ca/
Kay Sisk http://www.kaysisk.com/blog
Diane Bator http://dbator.blogspot.ca/
Helena Fairfax http://www.helenafairfax.com
Skye Taylor http://www.skye-writer.com/blogging_by_the_sea
Rhobin Courtright http://www.rhobinleecourtright.com