How to Craft an Emotional Payoff, Part 3 (Writing Emotion: Discovery)

The Writing Emotion series observes one emotion at a time in a story that does it well. The idea is to understand better how to do our most important job as storytellers (no matter the genre): make readers feel.

The objective of these posts is less about learning to convey a specific emotion (joy, sorrow, anxiousness, etc.) and more about studying what is going on underneath a scene that makes the emotionality of it more compelling for the characters and the reader alike—

It’s about learning to write emotion.

Emotion: Discovery
Story: New Girl (Season 2)

Spoilers Ahead
(This scene appears in Episode 19 of Season 2.)

Discovery: the action or process of discovering or being discovered.

Scene from the story:

Why Discovery? What does that even mean?

I went back and forth a lot as I tried to pinpoint the primary emotion of this scene. Ultimately, rather than discussing a single, specific emotion, I landed on something a little more complicated: discovery.

For me, discovery encompasses the idea of curiosity, excitement, and vulnerability. And in this case, specifically, you can see the addition of emotions like frustration and lust, as well.

Because this scene involves such a journey of emotion (see Lessons 1 & 3 below), I wanted to look at it more as that journey than as a single example of a primary emotion.

Lesson 1: Peel back the layers

In these posts I like to focus on one emotion: the primary emotion for the most amount of people (including the reader, who always takes priority). However, one emotion at a time is simply not how humans work.

This scene with Nick and Jess starts fairly clean, with Nick’s hesitancy and Jess’s anger. Then something interesting happens—the scene begins pulling back layers, one at a time.

As mentioned, Jess begins the scene angry at Nick. Then, as they talk, she gets defensive. As more is revealed (and as Nick lets more vulnerability show) she becomes curious, then lustful, then frustrated. Layers are pulled back, one by one, until the scene explodes with emotionality.

Lesson 2: Extend the tension (see the two previous posts for examples of breaking tension in different ways/scenarios here and here)

Some scenes are tied up in a nice little bow. I sometimes like to think of these scenes as mini stories in and of themselves. On the other side of the spectrum, we sometimes encounter scenes that end on a cliffhanger: a major reveal or threatening situation that occurs before the scene is cut off without resolve.

This scene lies somewhere in the middle. It’s not exactly a cliffhanger—we know that Jess and Nick have finally acted on their feelings. But it’s also not resolved. The tension is extended, keeping us on the line for scenes to come as the story explores what Jess and Nick will do next.

The story, rather than giving us a cliffhanger or a resolved ending, simply took a new turn with new information that continues to move things forward.

Lesson 3: Consider the color palette

I thought about discussing tone in this lesson. A romantic comedy vs. a dark fantasy vs. a literary fiction will all have extremely different tones. But the thing is, emotion is universal despite the tone.

New Girl is a sitcom, but it has moments of sadness, betrayal, and anger. The same emotions you might find in a drama. In other words, the tone may be different, but the underlying emotions can be the same.

So instead, consider the color palette. If every scene in a story had a color palette (that is likely an offshoot of the larger story’s palette/tone) you could use that palette as context to think about how to approach universal emotions within that single scene.

Is the scene’s palette bright and vibrant? Dark and moody?

There still may be lots of individual emotions with their single colors, but together all of the emotions in a scene make up the palette. This New Girl scene is a high moment (like the top of a roller coaster), but it’s bright and vibrant with its use of humor and exaggerated emotion.

Some high-intensity moments in other stories (or at other points in this story) might have dark color palettes. They may be frightening or disturbing. Still, others might be even lighter than this New Girl scene with the use of a whimsical or awe-inspiring color palette.

A single book, with a single voice and tone, might have a different color palette for each scene.

Throwback: Micro-obstacles

In the post on Connection, we saw the use of handcuffs as a micro-obstacle that upped the emotionality of the scene. Here, another example of a micro-obstacle can be found in Nick’s injured hand.