Writing dramatic scenes - I need help!

Ooh. Sounds interesting Mega. Reminds me of something familiar...

Anyway, perhaps you could make the members of the group have a fight or disagreement over it, leaving the main to slip away during the night. The side character, upon discovering this, feels betrayed and leaves with his friends.

To get them back together, perhaps the main could just show up on the doorstep of the side character and they reunite and decide to travel together again. Do be sure to give them plenty of time to steam over it though.

Let me know how you go. I'm always happy to help (when I can get on )

 

For writing things that are dramatic or tense, there's a few general things that could help you out.

1. Pacing. This is at the top because it is the most important piece of this, in my opinion. If you make your scene occur too fast, it will have no impact. If you make your scene occur too slow, the audience will get bored or lost and be separated from the emotion they're supposed to be feeling. Pacing is always important, but if you want a section to have more impact you've got to nail your pacing of the scene.

Pacing can involve grammar and formatting, not just things that are actually happening in the scene. Pacing is marginally affected by the length of your sentences, the type of sentence you use, and the spacing of the section. For example:

This is a segment with slow pacing. Though its contents could probably be intense with context, it on its own does not elicit much emotion. This is partially because my word choice and sequence of events is rather dull. But secondarily, my sentences and formatting also draw it out. I've used no simple sentences, instead using mostly compound sentences. I've also not separated the actions beyond what's grammatically appropriate for dialogue. Both of these aspects make the section read slower due to the natural pause that commas give, the length of the sentences, and the more regular and clustered feel.

To make this more dramatic, along with choosing more exciting diction, I could format it something like this:

While still not very compelling (it's hard to be compelling in an isolated segment, cut me some slack I'm not that good) it is far more engaging than the previous example. Formatting and its affects on pacing are things that could probably be seen as nitpicks, but that honestly are important to constructing a compelling story.

How quickly events play out also affects pacing, and it is the most major way in which pacing is affected. If you have a chapter of 1,000 words where your characters reunite after a long time, then beat a big baddie, then discuss and work through their issues with each other, then holy shit your pacing is way too fast. Not only does this mean that each of those big important things will have been glanced over at best, but you're moving the story by too fast for your readers to get invested in anything that's happening! It'll be about as dramatic as somebody attempting to give you the three sentence version of the entire Lord of the Rings trilogy, and probably about that confusing.

This can be hard to do as the writer, since you already know everything about the story and you can sometimes unintentionally go too fast because you're using the knowledge of the story you already have to infer things. Remember though, your reader can't do that. So if you think you might be going too fast (or too slow, that's just as bad) ask somebody honest to proofread your work and make sure it makes sense and flows well.

Oh god I've typed out a wall. Okay, uh, tl;dr:

Keep an eye on your sentence structure and word choice, make sure to keep it varied and use dramatic words. Don't cram all your action into too little a time frame, let your characters and actions breathe and give them enough space to have impact. Get somebody who won't just say "yeah it's good" to proofread your stuff if you really feel uncertain.

Wait a second didn't this start out as a list? Fuck, I'm tired. I'll edit this later maybe.

 

No problem Mega. Hope it turns out well!