Maximizing Emotional Impact: How To Keep Your Audience Engaged Scene by Scene

We'll be using Birthright #1 as
an example (below).

In many ways movies, books and comics are like a personally-engineered roller coaster ride: we take the audience to the bottom of despair, lift them back up and make them cry from sheer joy, take them around the corner to face an unfathomable danger, make them laugh as the hero goofs around with his nemesis, and then make them anxious as he subsequently gets bludgeoned to near death. We let the reader share in the despair of the hero as he crawls away from the scene, having lost all hope in himself.  Then we take them to the cathartic moment when the hero realizes the change he must make within himself to defeat impossible odds. In the end, we leave the audience soaring as evil is vanquished from the hero's world - world that is now forever changed due to the hero's (and the audience's) ordeal, but changed for the better.

What the above sequence does is simply setup a series of scenes (which together form the full narrative), where each scene reverses the emotional tone at its beginning to an opposite emotion by its end. The audience is literally taken from shock to relief, from fear to comedy, from emerging victory to desperate defeat, from hopelessness to Eureka, and from a battle against impossible odds to a real victory and lasting emotional growth for the main character.

Just imagine all the emotions your readers were subjected to in the various twists and turns of the story!

Birthright - the building of a perfect scene

Birthright #1, a comic by writer Joshua Williamson, artist Andrei Bressan and colorist Adriano Lucas illustrates this twisting and turning of a scene in an awesome, fast paced intro:

Bliss

The book opens with a scene of family bliss. Father and son are playing catch. The father wants to talk to mom privately on the phone, so he throws the ball deep into the woods (behind this hill).

A Family United

Writer Joshua Williamson deepens the sense of bliss and strong family ties as we see the boy's mother and brother secretly prepare a birthday party for the boy while the father keeps him busy.

A family divided

Although the father was well intentioned in throwing the ball into the woods, it leads to a terrible tragedy: he cannot find his son. We can see stress building up and a seed of discord in the family is planted, beautifully illustrated by the conversation between father and mother turning tenser.

Despair

Remember how this scene started with bliss? The creators of birthright have now turned the scene into its very opposite. The emotional pay off comes exactly because this scene ends in such a dramatically different tone compared to its opening.

None of these deeply emotional moments happen automatically. We must craft them scene by scene, intentionally causing the dramatic shifts in emotional tone that together create the roller coaster  effect that's so satisfying.

Anatomy of a Scene

Every scene must create a meaningful change in the life of its characters, a change that draws on an underlying conflict to dramatically transform its emotional tone into its exact opposite. Study your scenes. If any of them don't have this dynamic, you don't have a scene.

1. Reversal

Take a piece of paper and write down the emotional tone of your scene (+ for positive, - for negative). Read to the end of the scene and again write down the emotional tone (+ or -). The two should be reversed. This turns every scene into a mini-story with a beginning, a middle and an end.

In the above example, the scene has 3 acts:

Act 1: Beginning

The status quo of a happy family is shown. Everything is positive: a lovely day, a happy father and son playing ball, a mother and brother who secretly prepare the son's birthday party. You can see how writer Joshua is building our sense of feeling good about this world with the introduction of every new element.

Act 2: Complications

The father realizes his son hasn't returned, goes into the woods and tries to find his son. Tension is building and the mom is obviously starting to point the finger at the father.

Act 3: Reversal

You can feel hearts breaking as the father stands alone in a now frightening environment full of threatening shadows. He is alone and in despair at lost his son.  Contrast this with the sunny hills and happy smiles in the beginning of the scene. Emotional changes like this must occur in every scene if you want to keep your audience engaged. The roller coaster effect comes when you string your scenes so that the + and - are in opposing movements: +-/-+/+-/-+/+-/-+.  If you end a scene low, start the next scene also at a low and take it to a high. This isn't really necessary, and Birthright definitely doesn't treat all of its scenes in this fashion, but the more you can stick to this kind of rhythm, the stronger your audience's emotional reaction will be.

2. Conflict

The reversal must take place around a central conflict. (Only one conflict per scene, please - help your audiences to connect with each scene by keeping it simple.) The conflict usually comes to the foreground in Act 2 of the scene (Complications). In Birthright  the conversation between father and mother helps us to feel the losing of the son more personally, more deeply. It also symbolizes the conflict with reality in an interpersonal way, as you can feel the blame starting to rise up. We NEED the conflict to be resolved, but because this scene started on a positive note, we MUST also be disappointed, frustrated in our desires.

Crafting Strong Scene Sequences

And there you have it in a nutshell: the secret formula to creating an emotionally gripping story is reversing the emotional tone back and forth through a sequence of scenes, using conflict as the fulcrum.

It's important to make sure that the emotional reversal in scene 2 has a bigger impact than that in scene 1. Then keep it going, only giving the reader a few breathers here and there as we take the pressure off for a bit (usually at the beginning and in the middle of ACT 2). In fact, comics are generally so short, that we often don't have to worry too much about putting in more than one breather. One will do, and afterwards we'll keep ratcheting up the emotions right until the cliffhanger.

One thing to keep in  mind is that if you don't keep upping the emotional stakes as the story progresses, the reader may be able to inoculate him or herself against the emotional ups and downs.  You can prevent this by always making sure that each subsequent scene is more emotionally intense than the last.

If you can do this, you will have emotionally engaging stories that will keep your readers looking for more.

Further reading: How to make every scene a great scene - a checklist

Good luck and write well!