I've written a chick lit novel in third person POV, from my main character's perspective - using lots internal thoughts to keep it immediate and give her a distintive voice.

My question; in trying to be concise I think I might have edited out some of the emotion. How can I crank this up - I want my readers to cry goddamn it - Does anyone have any tips?

Can you give us an example, Jude, of what you mean?
Susiex

This is quite a pivotal scene in my novel, but I just don't know if its pulling on the reader's heart strings enough:

Mazie took a deep breath, willing Jeff to give her something – anything! – to work with. Did he really expect her to walk away from four-year relationship, without so much of a hint of interest from him? Ok, so things weren’t right with Ollie and she’d kind of, well, maybe, decided they never would be, especially while Chloe was around. But telling everyone that, saying it out loud, took whole new level of guts. Surely Jeff could understand that, after how hard he’d found it ending things with Stephanie.

Or was that was his point? Was he testing her? Trying to make it hard to check her feelings for him? She gulped. Well, if that was the difference between happy ever after and goodbye for good, she was willing to put herself out there.

‘That’s the plan,’ she said. ‘Just need to tell him that.’

Squelch! Mazie felt her stomach go. Fuck. Did she really mean that? A hush settled over the booth. She picked at a drip of hardening wax on the candle between them, hardly daring to meet Jeff’s gaze. Phew! She shouldn’t be drinking with these tablets she was on, but somehow the alcohol was helping her see things more clearly.

Any tips?

Gosh, that's tricky! Obviously it depends what's been set up before this scene. Can only suggest a couple of things (and I don't write in your genre, so they may not fit).

In a couple of places here you could maybe leave it more up to the reader to feel the feelings, rather than telling us through your MC's reactions - just tiny little things like dropping 'she gulped' and 'phew'. Let the reader follow her thought-processes and the way these thoughts are making her feel - love her stomach 'going', for example, because as a reader I could physically feel that, whereas I can't feel 'she gulped' or 'phew'.

The other thing is perhaps to use what's happening outside your MC to crank up the emotion. What is Jeff doing? How is he looking at her - or is he looking elsewhere? What does it feel like for her to be sitting opposite Jeff and watching his reponses? I'm a great believer in symbols, too. If Jeff were fiddling with an item on the table, like a knife (if, for example, she was scared he was about to metaphorically stab her with his response). I often find my emotions really being pulled at when I'm presented with quite a small detail which is meaningful.

Hope this is of some help,
Susiex

Thanks Susie angela. Love the knife detail. Brilliant!