Writing up the emotion

I've got almost to the end of my rewrite of the novel, and I'm just about to do the big reveal of the book.  For this rewrite I'm working off chapters I've already written, quite a few years ago now.  And what I'm noticing is that there aren't enough emotional reactions from my characters when they discover the awful secret at the heart of the book.

This has consistently been a flaw in my writing.  I often make my characters too calm when faced with extreme situations.  Part of that comes from who I am.  I'm generally a quiet and peaceful person.  I rarely shout, and being hysterical or screaming at someone is just not my nature.

Which is fine when life is going along normally, but there are times when my characters do need to shout and scream.  And one of them comes at the end of this book when learn about an atrocity perpetrated on another species.  In my original version the humans all sat around saying the equivalent of "Ain't it awful?".

This time round, there's a lot more fire in the novel.  The species the atrocity was practised against are there at the reveal, so not surprisingly they're angry with the humans for what they've done.  I have my human characters being afraid that the aliens will kill them.  I think I'll have to do another pass through this to put my humans into even more danger, but already what I have is a real improvement.

In the novel I'm currently submitting I have a different problem.  I've forced my main civilian characters  to kill people to defend the planet.  They've never killed anyone before, and.i wanted to show them traumatised by what they'd done.   There I have got them crying and shouting, and being very angry.

Because I'm not very emotional myself I always think I'm overdoing these emotional outbursts by my characters.  But when I read the sections back I realise I needed that much fire.  And often when I've read others' books I've realised that they put a lot more extreme emotions into their books than I do. I often have my characters say that something is wrong or awful, but I don't often show the emotional fallout from that knowledge.

This time round I'm determined to write up the emotion.  So in my rewrite I'm thinking I'll have one of the big, powerful aliens attack the humans.  I think that should up the emotional stakes.