: How can I get my readers in the gut? Braveheart. Titanic. Lord of the Rings. What do these movies (movies, not books) have in common? Besides great musical scores, they have what I call Gut

Everything you've shown has a simple formula. Show the reader a possibility that could be, that they can hope for. Give them every reason for wanting that possibility. But, every step along the way your characters or your setting defines that hope as impossibility. When you finally get to the moment it will be tragically inevitable and undesirable, but your reader will also acknowledge this is the only way it could happen.

It's a simple loss principle and it's built into all of us. One day we all die. But we grow attached to the people around us. When the illusion of permanence is shattered we must grapple with the reality that the thing or person we have lost had to happen, that there is no way around it. But there should be many excuses that a person could make as to why that person deserved better. It's ultimately the conflict of what people feel is deserved and what actually is.

In some ways it's more interesting to think about how people fail to write these parts successfully. The most common thing is the "everyone is stupid, if only they could think" bit.

For that reason when you write a tragedy many of your choices will determine whether your tragedy is justified. Even just picking a time and place can make your story work in different ways. Without spoiling anything, consider the recent stranger things. That story doesn't work in a world where it's not the 80s. Not being able to call people or use facebook drastically changes risk and social interaction. When the tragedies happen, part of what "locks" them in is the inevitable restraints that society puts on the characters. Also, the preconceptions many of those characters hold that would not be held today locks the characters in positions of helplessness that furthers the tragic elements of the story. Meanwhile as a 21st century viewer you have all of these ideas about how it could be, but you know: "No, this is right. This is how those people would act. This loss was unavoidable for them, because the time, place, and people make it so." The other side of the coin for Stranger Things is the nostalgia. Everyone in it, everything in it is extremely relate-able so the emotional investment happens. You want more for these people who are trying their hardest and it's not enough.

Tragedy = Inevitability + Hope + Connection + Loss

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The best advice I can give is that your readers won't care about what happens to your characters if you don't. You have to want them to succeed when you write their story or it will come off as generic and with no impact or lasting memory.

I once read a series of books and at the end of the third one, the main male lead was killed off. At the start of the fourth, the author actually apologised to his readers, saying that he knew it was hard to read and admitted it was even harder to write and promised there was a good reason behind it. Having read the rest of the books, I now know it was the right thing to do but it has stuck with me all this time after.

Years of watching (and reading) mean we want the hero to succeed, we want the couple in love to make it, we want good to triumph over evil but these in themselves aren't enough to make it a GEA as you call it.

The viewer / reader has to have time to get emotionally involved in the characters in these events taking place and it makes the GEA that much more powerful to watch.

This doesn't mean you have to leave them until the end of the book, just to have enough groundwork to make any event have a potential to be a GEA. I myself killed the girlfriend of my male lead in the first chapter but the entire chapter was setting up them getting ready for a date, he was going to propose etc. before they got attacked and she was killed.

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TL;DR You need to have a well-developed Character with a well-known set of Skills, who adheres to a certain Moral above all else. The reader must share the same Moral, or they will have no recourse to relate. The Moral must be put to the Ultimate Test, wherein the Character's Skill is shown to be at its Strongest, and Moral is at its Loudest.

Seems to me like all these examples are just a jarring use of slapping you in the face with the 'moral of the story' which has been worked up to all along.

Wallace fought so that his people could have Freedom. Screaming Freedom! at the precipice of ultimate change emotionally reinforces all that we have been working towards. It inspires everyone, giving the notion that 'This is it, this is what we have all been waiting for'

When Jack has been so chivalrous and loving this whole time, and now he finally, willingly, pays the ultimate price for the love of his life, it speaks to the reader. It reinforces all the things we have previously known about Jack, and washes everyone with remorse for Jack's beautiful, frozen soul.

When good-old Samwise Gamgee inspires poor burdned Frodo, even at the Fringes of Middle Earth and on the literal edge of Doom, when all hope seems lost, (I'm getting chills just writing this) he is showing the audience his true colors, which they already knew about him. He is reinforcing our ideas about him, in the best way, by doing what he does best, in the clutch.

"Doing what they do best, when it counts" speaks for all of these scenarios, and many climactic moments, in general. Whether its a wacky group of like-minded people, coming together to take down a larger-than-life opponent using their individual skills (Oceans 11), or a hyperintelligent detective consistently solving the crime (Sherlock Holmes), we get a rush when people use their well-known skills to solve unorthodox or seemingly impossible problems.

It becomes a punch in the gut if misfortune befalls the actor, but they still solve the problem they set out to solve (Jack). If they don't even solve the problem, that's pretty tragic, and if the character is crafted to be well-liked, the effect is more jarring than heart breaking. cough cough song of ice and fire

I'd say LoTR and Braveheart aren't so much gut-punching as heart-wrenching, but they all serve to draw a supreme level of empathy towards the actor. Because they all did what they do best, and their morals shone, to the extreme and in some cases to the end.

EDIT: I'd like to extend a nuance of this recipe, and in doing so give a shoutout to Stephen King's The Dark Tower Series.

Roland is known to love his surrogate son, Jake. Roland is also known to be responsible for Jake's deaths (multiple), in pursuit of his Ultimate Goal. The Betrayal seed as been set... And then Jake dies for the final time.

additional spoilers in link
darktower.wikia.com/wiki/Jake's_Eulogy
It's utterly gut-punching, heart-wrenching, mind-quailing (to steal another King phrase) all in one.

I knew I shouldn't have expected anything else, but when it happened, and Roland let his guard down ever so briefly to give us a glimpse into his terrible inner turmoil, and saw Jake off with such love, remorse, loyalty, and compassion, it really tore me up.

It reinforced multiple things, Roland's drive towards the Ultimate Goal above all else, and the very tragic effect this had on his life. The juxtaposition of the two Morals existing at once, (pursuit and love, respectively), and the former consuming the latter, causing terrible grief.

I would wager that the more "layers" of a character you can make as raw as possible in the right moment, the more emotionally impacting the scene will be.

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