Simple, quick tips for improving both your writing quality and your Wattpad experience. Open, friendly, and conversational, this book will give you that little info boost you need to tackle common problems and often-overlooked issues.
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When discussing the topic of strong characters whom we want to subject to great angst, there needs to be clarification about what we mean by strong. For instance, you could be discussing a physically strong character, one that doesn't wear their emotions on their sleeve, or one who represses their emotions until they unexpectedly explode.
The type of strength we're discussing will influence how to write a mental breakdown, and since I don't know what specific sort of strength is being asked about in the question, all I can give is general advice. In all cases, you need to ensure that there's enough outside conflict in order to warrant a breakdown for the character in the first place (this applies to all characters). To do this, you'll need to exploit the character's emotional wound – the burr under their saddle in their backstory that causes them to act the way they do in the narrative.
One of my favorite examples of a "strong" character who falls into a fit of insanity is Catra, from She-Ra and the Princesses of Power (one of my favorite cartoons on Netflix). For those unfamiliar with the show, Catra had a physically and emotionally abusive childhood, and she puts on a rough-and-tumble demeanor in order not to let on just how much her mother figure, Shadow Weaver, has hurt her. She even goes so far as to pretend that she hates Shadow Weaver, even though she wants her mother's love more than anything else.
Only this isn't true. Without delving too much into spoilers for the story, Catra is heartbroken when Shadow Weaver abandons her for the final time, even though she always treated Catra terribly. Why is this? Because Catra wanted her mother's love. In spite of her rough, bullying exterior, she truly cared about Shadow Weaver (a common phenomenon with abuse victims). This explodes in a fit of sorrow that leads her to become a major villain in the series.
Catra is the emotionally-repressive sort of person, but there are other ways a character can be strong and still break down. Some characters truly do have to be truly stabbed many times in the emotional gut before they'll cave, and how much pain you put them through before that happens depends on their personality. From what I've seen, this seems to work best with more happy-go-lucky characters – Steven from Steven Universe is one example. Only after a galactic war, a shocking revelation about his mother, and repeated exposure to near-death experiences does he begin to wonder if he's going insane.
I'll give a final example, dealing with physical power – Vin, from the Mistborn trilogy. Vin is extremely powerful with Allomancy despite her small physical size, and she's been through enough trauma in her life that she expects abandonment. Thus, when her mentor figure dies in front of her, it breaks her. No amount of physical prowess can guard against emotional conflict, and though Vin doesn't go full-batty like Catra does, she does end up doubting everything she'd learned over the course of the story for a good amount of time.
What do these three examples have in common? Conflict. Every character, no matter how emotionally or physically strong they might be, has a breaking point. Creating enough friction (both external and internal) between the character and their surroundings can easily trigger a mental breakdown. Some characters will need more pressure – more heat on the grill – before they'll snap.
But eventually, they will. If you're feeling as though your character isn't breaking down when they should, there are two possibilities. One is a weak conflict in your story – in which case, learn to sharpen those writer's knives! The ladies who run this book have a fantastic article about how to heighten conflict (Tip #7: Making Readers Care). The book Create Story Conflict by Eileen Cook is also a great resource I recently consulted in order to heighten the tension in my current work-in-progress, Starwalker.
Another possibility is that you need better characters. Others have numerous resources on the topic, but in order to properly write a mental breakdown, you need to know what your character is sore about from the past. Exploiting these emotional traumas can make for a thrilling breakdown, and there are other emotional wounds you can experiment with. I recommend The Emotional Wound Thesaurus by Angela Ackerman and Becca Puglisi if you want to try something other than abuse, which is the subject of most of the stories I consume.
Knowing your characters takes a lot of practice, and it involves careful thought about who they are and what they do. If you find that your characters are consistently flat, you may benefit from outlining them before you begin writing. The owners of this book can paste a link at the end of this article to the outline I use in my own writing, but there are others out there that will be of great benefit if it's helpful to you. Overall, writing mental breakdowns for strong characters is an undertaking that boils down to heightening characters and conflict in your story. Once you're conscious of that, any character can become a madman.
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