that is not what i meant. you're telling not showing. for the scene to have an oompf you need to build suspense/pressure. start slowly until you reach the conclusion. do not spell out the answer.
here's an example.
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doctor sees the child lying on his back, motionless and the father sitting on his knees beside him pumping his chest.
he rushes to them and stops the father. the father is frantic and begs the doctor to help and the doctor assures him and starts inspecting the kid. he methodically checks his breathing, pulse, throat, etc.
then, perhaps, he notices a puddle of blood forming below his head. he turns the kid's head slowly and finds his neck covered in blood. he locates the wound and the rock. he is then horrified as he makes the connection.
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it is rarely a good idea to spell out the answer. having the reader make out the answer makes for a much more satisfying reading experience. here you have guided the reader to the desired conclusion, slowly building up the scene and revealing the twist in a shocking manner.
you are 40 years too young to grammar police me bucko
Ohhh, I see! Thank you so much. This solution solved the two problems of trying to convey the revelation with an impact and trying to be concise! It's my bad for misunderstanding the reply.
First off, I like this scene. Keep it up.
what in actual hell had happened. ---> what in the actual hell happened
This man, though not intentionally, had killed his son. Doing chest compressions on the son whilst his neck was resting on a sharp piece of rubble, he was basically pushing his son's neck into the sharp stone everytime he performed CPR. Jono closed his eyes in anguish, but he turned away and tried to run back to the middle-aged lady.
I feel it's missing a sound. The exact moment/action of death. Something like the man pressed down with a crunch or the boy's chest wheezed or Pressing down there was a snap or as he pressed down....
Ah, my bad! The scene basically starts with the son already dead, kind of a few minutes before the character arrives. The father as stated before had become ignorant from his denial and desperation that the character who just stumbled into the scene had noticed that the son was already dead way before the father did.
(I actually just yapped on the paragraphs below, you can ignore them if you want to.)
The main point of this scene was to increase the stakes by taking up the character's time by luring him into situations where there was no one to save. The first time, the character was 'lured' to help a dad who seemed to be bleeding from his head but in reality was just drunk and red wine had spilled from his bottle, and his daughter was too panicked to connect the dots so the character ended up spending a lot of time believing that he was going to save a person's life and instead ended up wasting his time on someone not even in danger. Then, the second scene where he's about to go back to the person he's supposed to help, the father calls out to the character for help to save his already dead son.
I wanted him to waste time going into situations where he thought he would save another person, so when he gets back to the person who was actually in danger and wasn't just drunk or already dead. The character realizes that he wasted too much time and got that person killed, then start blaming the 'idiocy' of the people who begged for his help. Basically he took a risk to try and save as much lives as possible and ended up failing to save the one person that was in actual danger.
