Young Writers Society

Hey all! Colly here. It's been a while since I've been on YWS but I'm on vacation with my husband and a few of our friends and I've been super busy trying to write, have fun, and interact with people in the real world. Thankfully, we have a rather relaxing day tomorrow so I'm being the night owl I am and spending some time on YWS while I can.

I've been working on Dark Daughter for a little while but I've sort of hit a snag. My main character, Wynter, is a Necromancer. At the beginning of the book, she's still getting ready for her Final Exam where she'll finally be recognized as a full blown Necromancer rather than as a Necromancer In Training. She finds her mentor, a man she's known since she was thirteen, dead in his home the morning of her Final Exam. This is a rather important plot point and her reaction to finding the man who taught her everything she knows is needs to be genuine. I really need my readers to feel the depth of her shock and sorrow at the death but every time I write the scene it seems like she's too calm about it. If you were in her shoes, how would you react if you came to your mentor's house and found him shot to death in his study?

I know it's mainly based off of what kind of personality she has and how she's dealt with this in the past. And I'm totally not asking for you to tell me how she'd react. I just wanted to have a few other perspectives so that I can make sure her reaction is really, truly genuine.

Thank you so much!
Colly

Muted/dull reactions on discovery of a sudden Really Bad Thing is pretty close to how I'd react actually. The brain kicks into gear and tries to deal with tangible practical stuff first.

It's not uncommon I don't think: reacting calmly and kind of being disconnected from the emotional stuff until a later point, where a tiny thing that reminds you of the person who died suddenly blindsides you, like it's been three weeks and you were doing fine but then you end up bawling your eyes out at 3AM in your kitchen because there's strawberries in the fridge and that was their favorite fruit and your emotions are like, hey! we never DID deal with that did we, and then kick you in the face.

And some people just grieve quietly and internally, and that's fine too. Like you said, it's up to personality and stuff, but do consider grief is complicated and doesn't have to be explicit and demonstrative.

While it's not uncommon, you also need to create a general amount of connection and selling the shock to the reader. It can mean you take the reaction slightly away from 100% accurate (because while yes it can be 100% realistic that a person is perfectly calm and cool in the face of a panic-worthy situation, most people don't actually believe it's 100% realistic) in the name of making it feel right.

So, the calm and practical nature is normal, but you might have to bookend it with shock, or some transition between "ohmygodWHAT" and "okay, going to be as practical as possible here need to Fix This", then back to "... wait he's actually really dead". Or you could establish her reactions with smaller situations previously that show in the face of danger she's really calm, but breaks apart later, to set a precedent.

There's also how shock and grief are really hard emotions to portray even if you've lived through them, so that could be part of what's going on in the writing. This puts major emotional things on the list of "stuff to worry about when rewriting", because, as Jag implied, a lot of the grief process comes after the event itself. Unless you move past it and have a reference point for how it impacted her much later, you can't really figure out how to properly display the emotions in the present moment.

Is your novel written in first person POV or third person? That will change the way you write her reaction. With first person there will be more opportunities to be inside her head and really showcase her emotions. You'll have that with third person as well, but not quite as intense. Just something to also consider.