Hi all
As the title says, how can you achieve the maximum punch in the guts of the brain of the reader that later on it makes him remember that scene in your book in x circumstance?
let me explain further…
As I started to think about how to formulate this question I asked myself: so… what scene did punched my guts? thinking apart from the fewer and most recent series/movies I have consumed, one of the better examples that came to my mind was the red wedding (from the Game of thrones series for those who don’t know), maybe for a lot of you that could be the one too, but, I’m not a great and broader consumer so I know there should be more and maybe better examples. I’m trying to think about how to do that, that moment of “WHAT THE F#CK1N6 HELL!!!” that leaves you speechless, with your mind trying to figure out how all the promises that were building up from the first scene are pretty much not going to happen, how that is going to evolve from that point, to what, but… but how… and it just ends here!? did I missed something?.. but not necessarily ( read “in the same way” if you don’t want the spoiler → )murdering half of the characters without any minuscule promise that they would be back somehow.
Rising the stakes as I understand is a way of doing it, but to what point it starts to be obvious that the things in play begin to seem exaggerated (as I have read somewhere on the forum, the example of the MC having to always save the world from x/y/z thing, again, and again, and sometimes again too) or “the hero” is being pushed beyond the bottom of its misery just for the sake of making the impact even greater? doing it progressively in a long path is a way of going around that problem? or it would be better to go easy and then jump out to a pool from a few million kilometers high like the example given? (I’m sure that there is a parody somewhere, in which the hero has to sacrifice something or else, the villain kills his dog, but also, the brother of the dog looses its partner, but also, the girl he loves would dump him, but also… and so on till it stops being interesting)
Another blurred example:
On one of the last spider-man movies, the whole movie was like a cliche, as we’ve seen since the first one, but then something happened that I didn’t expect. The good guy fights the bad one and bla bla bla, and the girl wants to help and then they start to fall (slow motion camera effect) the good guy punches the bad one and then dives down and save the girl… oh… what? wait, no, she just fainted… on the next scene it would seems that she died but she is going to surprise the… ohh… f#ck…
Maybe I’m a little bit late for myself as I have almost finished the first book of the series, and I’ve already have a long road of ideas to use for the coming ones, but I really could steal learn from your ideas to try to enhance the story as I’m sure it have a lot of room to.
For any examples given it would be appreciated to be at least explained in a few words using spoiler tags, as I don’t really have much culture around anime/probably some really famous movie/recent series that everyone talks about/etc.
So, if you still don’t know how to answer here are some simpler questions that could help… maybe.
1- What are the punch in the guts of your brain that till this day you still remember how you felt when you saw/read/imagine that scene?
2- How you achieve that in a story?
3- Do you want to achieve that in your story?
4- Why? /Why not?
5- I guess this only happens when the reader is really invested on the story right?
6- Am I over-thinking what is simply known as a plot twist or it is really a lot more complex?
7- Would you like to adopt me as your boyfriend? ←(only intended as kind of a joke for female hetero)
And that’s all. Thanks for your time, have a great life!