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I knocked several times but no one answered. No more than that. Any emotional response to knocking and getting no answer has to be set up in advance. Show us that a reply was expected. Show us...
Answer
#4: Attribution notice removed
by
System
·
2020-01-03T20:41:57Z (almost 5 years ago)
Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/37232 License name: CC BY-SA 3.0 License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/
#3: Attribution notice added
by
System
·
2019-12-08T09:13:45Z (almost 5 years ago)
Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/37232 License name: CC BY-SA 3.0 License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/
#2: Initial revision
by
System
·
2019-12-08T09:13:45Z (almost 5 years ago)
> I knocked several times but no one answered. No more than that. Any emotional response to knocking and getting no answer has to be set up in advance. Show us that a reply was expected. Show us that much depends on the reply. Show us that the lack of a reply is a sign of great peril. Then just say, > I knocked several times but no one answered. If you have set it up correctly, we feel all the emotions that attend that event, and we know the character feels them too. Emotions are like jokes. You have to set them up right so that the punchline can be simple and direct. The simple direct punchline allows the whole joke, the whole emotion to hit us at once. Emotions, like laugher, are sudden. They are triggered by the right word or action in the right circumstances. You can't build them from scratch in the reporting of an event. You can't create them by reporting them at all. Whenever a scene feels forced or labored, the cause is always the same. The writer is trying to generate in the moment the emotions that they should have set up previously so that they could trigger them in the moment. There is no way to fix scenes like this except by going back and doing the setup properly.
#1: Imported from external source
by
System
·
2018-06-26T03:27:34Z (over 6 years ago)
Original score: 3