Jul 10 2009
Writing Tip of the Day: Be Careful With Crying Characters
This is our inaugural guest post. Thanks, Marissa! If you’d like to provide writing advice, please send me a sample post of up to 500 words at superheronation-at-gmail-dot-com. — B. Mac
Just recently, I tripped over a very interesting fact of writing: “If your character cries, your reader doesn’t have to.”
Think about it. Which would you rather read: A character bawling her eyes out? Or a character shivering, her eyes squeezed shut and her breathing labored, trying to deal with grief without bursting into tears?
This is probably a painfully obvious statement, but usually, crying is meant to convey sadness. Grief. Loss. That’s not it’s only purpose, however. Most of the time, the author brings their character to tears to garner some sort of reader-character sympathy. The reader sees that Character A is so sad that they’re crying, and so the reader feels sad as well.
Look at movies, though. The saddest parts are never when the character is sitting there bawling, are they? I bet you can’t name one time when the memorably poignant moment is when the character is doing nothing but crying. That’s just it: Crying loses the reader’s sympathy.
Having a character cry is usually the cheap way out. There are so many thoughts, feelings, actions associated with grief that plopping your character into the sobbing stereotype would cheat both the character and the reader. If you want your reader to feel something too, I’d recommend either removing the crying altogether and focusing on other symptoms of sadness, or easing up to the crying stage and not giving it much focus.
Now think about this: How does your character respond to sadness, grief, or loss? It depends on their personality, so it’s really up to you as the author to figure it out. Do they shiver for a while, until it all builds up, then explosively punch an inanimate object? Do they try to take deep breaths, calm themself down? Etc. Just don’t go straight from zero to sobbing. (After all, you wouldn’t have an angry character suddenly punch someone in the face without showing his anger building up, right?
The Emotional Thesaurus does a great job listing symptoms of sadness to help you start small and gradually escalate.
Sorry about the massive delay in fixing it up, I couldn’t figure out how to work the controls. (A good reason you should never put me at the wheel of a plane.)
I think this is a great first-article. And you do have a point. (I’m not biased because you’re my friend, am I?)
Maybe a little, but I appreciate the sentiment either way. Glad to know it was useful.
You already know that I think this is awesome:) Great job, and I really liked that link to the Emotion Thesaurus.
Interesting article, it had a lot of good points and that thesaurus link was particularly handy, so very nicely done.
Something I’ve always found to be powerful and moving when handled correctly is crying in situations that don’t call for it or expectedly, especially when it is used as a cliffhanger for a short period, such as a chapter in a novel or at the end of a monthly comic book. This power hinges on the reader not possessing exacting knowledge of what caused the outburst, so I’d strongly advise against having the narrator or lead POV as the emotive one, unless your skills have been proven to such a degree that you and your thousands or millions of faithful readers can trust you to properly handle an unreliable narrator.
If you lack that many fans, do not attempt an unreliable narrator, because as this web site has stated strongly dozens of times, it isn’t coy, it isn’t smart, it’s just frustrating if you aren’t a strong enough writer to handle it.
Again, I thought this article was great, as it pointed out the various hazards, offered solutions and didn’t rule out usage entirely.
Yeah, D and Lightning Man, the Emotion Thesaurus is very very handy.
Thank you, Lightning Man, for your support.
The crying you’re describing might work, yeah, as long as there is a reason, even if it isn’t known. But you did well in advising people to be careful. What may seem like a good reason to them might seem stupid to the reader (“BUT HER FATHER DIED TEN YEARS AGO AND SHE JUST NOW THOUGHT ABOUT IT AGAIN,” in an otherwise happy scene, for example).
What I was referring to is when a character would naturally be sad. If the author heads straight to crying, that glosses over the whole emotional process, and the reader feels gypped.
I have to agree–actual crying is often a one way ticket to skim reading or cliches. Or both. Much better to accurately describe what is causing the intense desire to cry so the reader feels the same ache and can empathize, and of course, the MC’s struggle to keep from giving in and dissolving into tears.
Thanks for mentioning my Emotion Thesaurus!
Good point on the crying. I’ve only cried at a novel twice in my life and it wasn’t when the main protagonist was drowning in their own tears. It was when a main character died in first person and there was so many melachony thoughts going around that it just brought me to tears. The second time is when the dog dies in a book and it was there for the longest time and I’m an animal lover so that didn’t help the water works.
I read a book once where the main character cried for AN ENTIRE CHAPTER! I’m not joking. I think the book was pulled off the market or something but it was almost to the point of annoyance and hilarity because the reason for crying was so stupid: their boy friend of two weeks broke up with them. I can understand if it was their boyfriend of two years but that was ridiculous.
I didn’t cry, but today I found the death of a minor character in Play Dead pretty moving. The hero is trying to save him from drowning in a sinking school bus and has his hands on him, so you think it might happen, but the character has his football pads on and can’t fit through the window.
In my humble opinion, crying should not occur at the drop of the hat (unless, of course, the character is extremely over the top and it’s being played for laughs as opposed to seriously). I, for one, find it a lot more meaningful if the crying is coming from a character who wouldn’t normally be doing so and for a justifiable reason. I figure if the event is sad enough for a character to cry, the reader should be doing the same.
I think I’ve had…one crying scene between my various books. Considering that it happened when a mind controlled character almost killed their love interest, I think it’s acceptable.
- Wings
“I, for one, find it a lot more meaningful if the crying is coming from a character who wouldn’t normally be doing so.” You know what they say about Chuck Norris’ tears.
I’d like to see a crying badass character who manages to be badass through his tears. That would be simultaneously heartwarming and crazy awesome.
- Wings
I was thinking about doing a cover for a later SN issue focused on a headshot of Agent Orange crying. In the reflection on his glasses, I’d show something like the ruins of a city. I don’t think it would be thematically on-cue, though. The cover would be far too dark for this series and, in any case, I don’t think that I have it in me to write a city getting annihilated or put something on the cover that doesn’t actually happen. One old trope of covers was that the cover would feature some outlandish event on the cover and then reveal in-story that it was a simulation on a computer screen or a dream or a hallucination.
Maybe Agent Orange softly crying with a reflection of Agent Black or Agent Black’s tombstone or Agent Black’s wounded body or a flag-draped coffin or something like that. Obviously that would have to be later in the series, at some point when AO isn’t fervently hoping for AB’s departure.
Speaking of devastation and unlikely crying, I had a friend at Notre Dame that was in a military/DOD high school overseas. On September 11, the school cut access to the internet and TV and the only thing his class knew was a third-hand rumor that “New York got hit.” A lot of people were crying because they assumed it was nuclear.