EMOTIONAL CLIMAXES

As usual, I’m stuck on the ending of the current opus and procrastinating by letting my mind wander. I’m sitting here wishing I was one of those brilliant wordsmiths who can come up with ways of conveying emotion during action scenes that don’t sound trite.

The English language seems to be extremely limited in words or phrases that express feelings. One quickly tires of “I feel” and “She cried.” But in a very emotional book, it also becomes repetitive to constantly use sweating palms and clenching fists and pounding hearts to get across the character’s emotion. So by the time I reach the climactic end, where I really need to up the drama scale, I’ve run out of words and phrases to express all the fear and joy that a true climax demands.

I know emotions ought to be conveyed by the actions of the characters, but in romance, that just doesn’t seem to satisfy. Romance readers expect an explicit description of ecstasy and terror that is currently beyond my abilities. I’d much rather the heroine just whack a door upside the villain’s head and fall ecstatically into the hero’s arms and be done with it. Instead—especially at the end of a book—I have to pull together all her thoughts and feelings into some culminating lesson that the reader has impatiently read a hundred thousand words to reach. And I feel hopelessly inadequate to the task.

The heroine cannot just cry, “Hurry, follow your guardians to the dock!” to convey her panic. She must also weep inside at losing the boy she thought of as her brother, then gird her proverbial loins to fling herself back into the melee, and nearly expire of lust at seeing the hero beating off the villains, then think twelve other thoughts about how they can ever be together again after this. It’s daunting, I tell you.

I’m off to pull out old favorites to see how they accomplish this great feat. Any suggestions of favorite endings welcomed!