Yesterday, in Doctor’s Notes, I talked about connecting the reader to the character by showing the appropriate emotions. But what if you have a tough guy, like my Rafe Noble, who is a bull rider. He doesn’t walk around weeping, that’s for sure.

Still, he’s hurting. His best friend has been killed, his life is in shambles, and worses, he’s just gotten his heart broken by beautiful Kat Breckenridge. I didn’t want to show him curling up into a ball in the cab of his truck. But I wanted the losses to pile up on him, and take him down.

So, I looked for the thing that mattered the MOST to Rafe, the thing he clung to for safety. If you have taken any of my plotting classes, you know I like to pinpoint their “security blanket”, and at the dark moment, rip it away. Rafe’s security is his career. It’s who he is, and he’s used it his entire life to protect his heart. Only this time, it’s backfired on him, and he’s utterly broken.

*****

Rafe slammed his way upstairs, banged open his bedroom door. The entire house shook. Crossing the room, he ripped his Bobby Russell poster off the wall, and grabbed the box of video tapes he’d dug out for Kat. He took his trophies and his two championship buckles and the scrapbook he’d kept for himself over the years and shoved them into his PBR duffle bag. Then he threw them all over his shoulder and thumped back down the stairs.

He took the back roads to the burial mound, driving as fast as he could before he dropped one of the axels. The heat slithered down his back in a line of grimy sweat. He stopped at the bottom of the hill, lugged out the bag and muscled himself up the hill.

He threw sticks and twigs together, then, taking a lighter he’d found in Piper’s glove compartment, right next to her emergency supply of candles, he knelt and lit the blaze.

The flame crackled as it devoured the tiny sticks, then the kindling and finally the larger pieces of wood he added for fuel. The flame showed no distinction between the fragile and the hearty, biting into the wood with tongues of orange, red and yellow.

Rafe pulled over the duffle. Opened it. And instead of dumping the entire thing on the flames, pulled the items out, one by one. His posters. They burned in a second, curling into tight balls. The scrapbook. The fire started on the edges, burning away the accomplishments, the defeats. Then the tapes. The smell of plastic burning made his eyes water and sent black smoke into the now bruised sky. The trophies would take hours to fully burn, but their plastic mounts deformed and caved in on themselves. And then the buckles. Both of them he dropped into the flames, feeling his throat thicken. He closed his eyes, smelling a bull’s hide, dirty and sweaty, feeling the adrenaline spike through his body, the jarring as every muscle, every bone screamed in pain. He felt the rush of relief as he let go and rolled off the back hip of the bull, found his feet and ran to safety.

He heard the crowd roar.

The flames crackled, spitting and popping as they devoured his life. The bull-rider. The man Kitty claimed she believed in.

Rafe drew up his good knee, crossed his arms atop it, buried his head into the basket it created, and for the first time since his mother died, even during Manuel’s funeral, even in the dark months that followed, Rafe let himself cry.

*****

Instead of naming all the emotions that rage through him, I used the destruction of the “trophies” of his life to illustrate his broken heart, his broken life. It’s not until we see how thorough it is that I let him cry. I like this scene because it goes deeper than simply naming emotions to get at the heart of the matter. When you’re writing an emotional scene, look deeper and ask yourself, what is the one thing I could make my character do that illustrates their loss without naming the emotion? Try it – it’s a great exercise!

Oh, and if you’d like to know who Rafe is — go to Who’s Rafe!

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