How to Write a Broken Heart
The question I get most often as a science fiction and fantasy author is: Where do you come up with your ideas? This article is the 10th in a daily series for Medium, analyzing the thought-by-thought process of coming up with the ideas for the daily fantasy blog about the girl who lives in her father’s dreams, The Squashbuckler Diaries.
Today’s Idea: Breaking a Little Girl’s Heart
Sometimes an idea is already there. It’s been planned. It’s been ready. You wrote up to that point, and now you know what you have to do. You, as a writer, are not looking for a new idea, but for authenticity.
Let me catch you up: Joy Shelley is a real girl who is raised by her father in his dreams. The Squashbuckler Diaries relates her day-to-day life in the dream, creating her life before the events in the book Lost in Dreams: The Forgotten Girl, which is scheduled to appear next year. Each daily slice-of-life of fantasy that is published is then followed by a Medium article about how I came up with it.
In my previous articles in Medium I’ve shown you how I’ve come with the ideas that led to this day’s post.
Joy, the girl, will find the Evil Fairy Forest King killed by General Hawk and her heart will break. Because Joy, age 5, knows that killing is bad and because her nanny died at age 2, which made death traumatic at a young age.
So the question now is not how an idea comes to be, but how to write a broken heart.
How to write a broken heart
There is only one way to write a broken heart well, and that is to feel your heart broken. The only way to write a 5-year-old girl’s broken heart is to remember what it was like to be 5 with a broken heart (boy or girl, doesn’t matter). If you don’t feel a broken heart when you write a broken heart, you are writing heartlessly, and people can feel it.
Writing is about emotion, not just words, a good turn of phrase, and plot. At every step of the story there is emotion, sometimes big, sometimes small, sometimes silly, sometimes embarrassing, and at all times revealing who and what you and your characters are.
Just like a great actress can’t have the character feel something without actually feeling it, a great writer can’t write how a character behaves with a certain emotion without actually feeling it.
Let me show you how that works inside the writer’s mind:
One: I wrote that Joy finds the body. I let the horror wash over her and the trauma of her nanny’s death return. I felt that to write it.
Two: I immediately snapped to General Hawk’s mood, who had made a calculating move out of love and protection for Joy, to kill the one villain who could lead to her death. General Hawk tried to say something. I felt what he felt.
Now there were two waves of emotion inside me, one for each character, and I flipped between the two.
Three: Joy screams and shouts at General Hawk at what he’s done. — I went through one wave of emotion.
Four: I immediately went into General Hawk, as he tries to explain his rationale calmly. What he feels is love and quaking at the emotion of betrayal from the girl he’s come to see as his own daughter.
Five: I snapped back to Joy. She doesn’t even let him speak.
And so on and so on, moving from one character to another quickly and without any effort, until Joy swears she will never speak to General Hawk (who is her best friend during the long hours when her father’s in his waking world) and runs to cry in her cabin.
And that is how this scene was created.
I hope you enjoyed that. Do check out the previous articles, and do come tomorrow for more.
