Contrasting Emotions in Your Writing

I was thinking today about a couple of real life experiences which gave me a jolt because of the way in which strong emotions were contrasted.

One was my memory of Princess Diana's funeral. Like many other people, I was deeply affected by her sudden death and was really upset in the run-up to her funeral. I found the day of her funeral very emotional, heart-breaking, something I knew I would remember for the rest of my life.

On that day, there was a huge outpouring of grief in London. It seemed as if the whole country had gone into mourning for her.

So it came as a shock to me to see wedding cars arriving at the house of one of my neighbours up the road. I realised that for many people this was a desperately sad day, a day of mourning, but my neighbours were celebrating the wedding of their only daughter.

I found it very hard to reconcile the two. How could they possibly go and enjoy themselves at a wedding when The People's Princess was being buried?

When the bride set off in her wedding finery in a posh limousine, I knew that the family must have been planning this special occasion for months, years even. It was due to a quirk of fate that it coincided with the funeral of The Princess of Wales. No one could have possibly foreseen her untimely death.

Another occasion which was also full of mixed emotions was the day my best friend gave birth to her first child. As promised, her husband rang to tell me the news and give me details of the baby, her name, birth weight and so on.

I was surprised to hear he didn't sound at all happy considering he'd just become a father, so I asked him if he'd been up all night at the hospital. It was then that he told me his mother had just died. She had been seriously ill in hospital for quite some time, but had held on just long enough to see her new grandchild come into the world.

So my friend and her husband found themselves preparing to bring home their newborn baby and arrange a family funeral at the same time.

This is the way things turn out sometimes. It is very difficult to reconcile mixed emotions like these at the time, but can you see how for a writer they could add depth and complexity to a plot?

Life isn't all ha, ha, hee, hee. Let our writing reflect that.