by Jason Wu
In many romance stories, there will come a time when a breakup will happen between characters. Sometimes it will happen to the main character, sometimes it won't. Whatever the case is, that breakup serves to be an important part of the story. But with a concept so complicated, how does a writer effectively write about a breakup, especially from the point of view of the one whose heart was broken? There are a lot of moving parts to this idea of a breakup, but there are 3 main ideas to it. The initial wave of emotions along with the desperate fight to save the relationship, the period of time with elevated emotions where nothing feels right, and finally, the start of the actual healing process. This will not summarize all types of breakups, but it would help to provide some sort of an idea on what one is like. For those who haven’t experienced what it is like to be the one who was heartbroken, this will be extremely helpful.
When a breakup happens, one’s mind stops working. Stunned and shocked are just part of the wave of emotions that hit you hard. Once the explanation of why the other person wants to breakup, you will want to do anything to fix it, even if that means going back in time. But, none of that’s ever going to happen, because when it's done, it’s over. You should write your character feeling lots of regret for all the things they have done wrong, and even regret a few things that weren’t even the character’s fault. Next up, waterfalls of tears. The character is going to cry, and cry a lot. They just lost someone that meant everything and forever. The heartbroken will shut down. That’s going to happen for a few days.
Next is the healing process, and this stage can last anywhere from weeks to months, depending on the person and how much that relationship meant to them. It can vary from type to type as well. That being said, if the relationship was toxic for them, with enough discussions with family and friends or getting advice from trusted individuals, they may be able to recover much quicker. But, say it was a good relationship and that there was no toxicity in it, it’s sadly going to take a long time to recover because getting over that person is going to be even harder. There will be lots of venting to friends and even more of figuring things out and how to pick oneself up from the ground to keep moving. This stage is hard and it’s a challenge for the heartbroken. This is that moment where a character decides that enough is enough and he or she is going to do something about how sad or depressed they are feeling. Again, let me reiterate that this stage can go in any direction and these examples that I have listed are just a few of the many possibilities. The healing stage will be accompanied by a glow up stage or a self improvement stage, wherein the character decides to fix themselves about all the things that were a flaw in that relationship. This can be a good thing but sometimes can lead to the development of negative traits. For example, they could learn how to control the types of comments they make or it could end up with the person becoming less and less open and more closed off in terms of their thoughts. Maybe the one who was on the bad end of the stick will be afraid to love again. Many things can happen, it’s all dependent on the writer’s mind.
Writing subjects like breakups is certainly tough, it’s a rather complicated thing that you’ll learn more things about as time goes on, and maybe even have to go through one, but you’ll learn more about them and in turn know how to write them better. There’s no better way to get better at writing them than doing practice prompts on your own. It can help make sure that you are timing each point of the breakup correctly, and seeing if you wrote the breakup down so perfectly that it drives the plot forward better than ever.
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