I am constantly tempted to skip over the heavy, emotional scenes. I want to shield my characters from prying eyes. I don’t want people to see them standing at their fathers’ graves with red, puffy eyes and snot dripping down their faces.
Besides, these kinds of scenes—loving, fighting, grieving—take a lot of energy to write and they never feel good to me. I go over them again and again until the characters feel like cardboard people I’m manipulating for my own ends. Everything they do and say feels forced and cheesy.
As I’ve already said, context matters. These emotional scenes aren’t embarrassing and cheesy when they happen to characters we know and love.
Besides that…
The reader needs to experience emotion with the POV character:
My parents hated making phone calls to any of their grown, and absent, children. My father—a child of the depression—was a penny-pincher in the extreme. Even when we called him on our own dimes, he’d hang up after a few minutes with, “You can’t afford this. Time to hang up now.” So we didn’t call often. But I did call every year on my parents’ birthdays and on my own birthday.
One year I called on my birthday and they told me that my aunt—the one aunt I was very close to—had died ten days earlier.
“She died?” I said. “And you didn’t call me?”
“Well, we knew you’d be calling on your birthday and we could tell you then,” my mom answered.
As with life, so with fiction. You don’t cheat people out of grieving when someone they love dies. You don’t wait and tell them weeks or months after the fact.
I was recently reminded of my parents’ bizarre method of saving a few cents on a long-distance phone charges as I was reading a book that I loved, loved, loved. This book was going to be my next favorite. I was gearing up to rave about it to all my friends….
And….
Boom! I fell out of love with the turn of a page. I fell so hard that I couldn’t finish the book. I was so shocked and felt so cheated that I couldn’t bring myself to trust the author again. I wasn’t willing to put myself back into her hands. When we start a book we’re trusting the author not to waste our time. We trust him to answer our questions by the end of the book. We suspend our disbelief and trust that in the story world everything will make sense eventually. And we trust that the emotional journey we take with the character will come to a satisfying conclusion.
So why did I feel so cheated? At the end of one chapter a character I really liked—the main character’s mother—is injured. She collapses onto the floor, an ambulance comes, the paramedics wheel her out, and the curtain falls before we are told how serious the injury is.
The next chapter opens…
…three months in the future.
The POV character and her friend are discussing the DEATH 
of the mother as if it’s old news, when to my mind she has just fallen, injured, mere moments before.
I felt like I’d been punched in the gut. I quickly flipped back to see if I had somehow skipped a chapter. No. On the previous page the character was wheeled out on a gurney, still alive. And then we skipped forward three months and got a three-sentence summarization of her death.
It was bad enough that the mother died, but I could have forgiven that. What I couldn’t get over was that the author gave me the news in such an abrupt, cruel way, three months after the fact. I was bonded with the POV character. When her mother died, my mother died. And I wasn’t given any time to grieve.
I struggled through one more chapter, then put the book down and never picked it up again. I simply couldn’t reattach myself to the heroine. We were in two different places. She was over her mother’s death and I was still reeling from it. It was a breach I couldn’t get over.
We have to write the hard scenes. The reader has to live through what the character lives through. No, we do not have to show the sex or violence, but we have to show the emotion the character is experiencing, whether it’s wildly crazy love or dismal mourning.
Is it common for writers to struggle with the temptation to skip emotional scenes, or am I just an odd duck?
A very powerful post, Sally. And no you are not an odd duck. Not i the least. I can so relate.
Vicky Alvear Shecter´s last [type] ..Hot Enough to Melt Metal
I don’t mind writing emotional scenes, up to a point. No doubt, I think some human interactions deserve privacy, but I don’t think grief is one (except when a reporter shoves a mic in front of the mother grieving the sudden loss of her son and says, How do you feel. Then I don’t so much think she deserves privacy as he deserves a swift kick!
). I don’t think anger is or fear or even love. I don’t think I care so much that I’m writing those things for the public to read because I’m not thinking about the public. I’m thinking about who’s with my characters and how they would or would not express their emotion in front of those people. Readers, for me, aren’t part of the equation. Hmmm. Maybe they should be. 
Rebecca LuElla Miller´s last [type] ..Who Owns Fiction
Glad I’m not alone, Vicky.
Becky, I think we might write best when we forget the reader. Knowing there are readers who may not approve of the way our characters grieve or fight or make love, can paralyze us, if we let it.
I don’t really think about the readers as I’m writing. But I still have a hard time writing strong emotion. It drains me. Maybe it’s because it so often sounds cheesy. It’s hard to come up with fresh ways to show you character crying or kissing, but when you try to twist the clichés you sometimes come up with weird stuff.
I mean, how many new ways are there to show a character grieving or enjoying a first kiss? And then, because I wrote it, I’m not reading along in the same way other readers are. I’ve spent so much time with it that it all feels forced.