Or how to make your readers cry floods of tears.
Yeah, as if I know that. Well, I can give you a lot of tips and hints, but in the end I find that though readers do cry at some of my scenes, they also cry at scenes that I never intended as crying points. However, I’ll try to give you a few tips I’ve hard-earned along the way.
1 – Don’t be afraid to tug on the heart strings. Believe it or not, readers are not in general reading your shining prose for sparkling language, historical information or a fiendish puzzle. Oh, some of them might be, but think on it. The books you remember are not the ones that taught you something or where you learned a new word. At least not the FICTION books that you remember. For that you read non-fiction or, for the puzzle, play games.
As someone noted in my comments, a novel is an emotional experience. (A short story too.) It’s the closest you can come to experiencing someone else’s life. (Yes, more than movies. There you just SEE someone else’s life.) I suspect as the stigma and brownie points of being seen with a book fade away, you’re going to see more novels succeed that go, unabashedly, for the highs and lows of emotion.
So, don’t be afraid of those. Set out deliberately to create the situations that will test man’s souls (or women’s. Or small fuzzy animals. Or dinos.) I recommend you study deeply upon Shakespeare, who never forgot to take the viewer’s heart and TWIST. When does Romeo kill Juliet’s cousin? Why, while she’s waiting to consummate their marriage, of course. And does she find out about it before Romeo comes in? Oh, yeah, of course. For that matter when is Romeo forced into a duel with her cousin? Why, as he comes from church, from marrying her. Study Shakespeare, he never let the trying things undone.
2 – Don’t cringe at corny. This one is hard for me, because I come from a stiff-upper-lip tradition. We’re very good at reading emotion in a lifted eyebrow, an upturned lip, or even a silence. But remember the objects in the mirror effect of writing on the page. It’s amped down a bit. You won’t feel it as strongly as if you saw it in real life.
My husband recently was reading a story where the culmination of it was that the man this woman had finally fallen in love with was the same one who’d sent her comforting postcards when she was a litle orphan with no one to love her. AND after that lip-trembling revelation, the author piled on with something like “So, you see, you’ve always been mine to look after.” My husband’s reaction was “I could see her tugging at my heart strings, but it still worked.”
Shakespeare is also a good guide here. Does Lear just carry his dead daughter or whatever? No, he laments and his lament is heart rendering. Corny it up.
3 – Pile it on. With a shovel. Your character just lost his entire family and remains unbroken? Have his faithful dog crawl out of the wreckage of his house (brief moment of joy) only to expire at his feet. Go on. I DARE you.
4 – Never let a death go to waste. No matter how minor a character you’re killing, make them important/valuable or hapless before you kill them. Make their death unexpected, unfair, just plain cruel. Clifford Simak made me cry floods of tears over the death of a stray dog, simply by having him cross the street, wagging his tail, happy-doggy to go lie in a patch of sunlight, before a ray tears him apart. It made me cry because the dog had been all happy, hadn’t been expecting death and it was UNFAIR. I.e. the death had nothing to do with him, but was an alien invasion. He couldn’t have avoided it, and he’d been so HAPPY.
5 – Have your character’s noblest act be misunderstood and punished. The instinct of fairness is very deep in humans. A situation like that WILL make us cry.
6 – Sock them with a happy ending when they least expect it. The hero that crawls out of the blazing inferno is such a cliche because it works. But you don’t need that, or even a coming back from the dead. Just anything unexpected and suddenly good, after relentless struggle, will break your reader’s defenses and the floods are likely to come.
And that is the sum of what I know. Sometimes it doesn’t work. And sometimes what you don’t expect does work.
Go forth and make them wring their hankies.
According To Hoyt 
It’s not a book, but the corniest/hookiest movie I saw was ET but I left glad I saw it even when I saw the plot holes. I doubt that I’d see it again but I’m not ashamed that I saw it.
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Someone (maybe Ray Bradbury?) told me “If you don’t cry while you’re writing it, why would your reader cry when he reads it?”
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At least for me, some of the moments when readers tear up are just nostalgic moments, e.g. a character looks back at an incident and sees how certain things have remained and others have changed entirely. I don’t cry when I write those . . . although I do tear up, sometimes, on a re-read. So YMMV.
Character deaths, however? I definitely agree with you.
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Heinlein is one of the only writers who ever made me mourn a fictional character. I won’t spoil it for those who haven’t read it yet, but it was the end of “The Moon is a Harsh Mistress”. Another was Daniel Keyes in “Flowers for Algernon” (the short story — I felt the novel was kinda bloated). I vaguely remember a third in some recent book; but since the character and title didn’t stick with me, it clearly wasn’t as effective.
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Me too. Only I BET not the same character…
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Hmmm… How to speculate without spoilers…
I’m guessing based on some of your socio-political commentary (with which I generally agree) that you mourned for the character who wasn’t later rescued in “The Cat Who Walks Through Walls”. The rational anarchist.
Whereas for me, it was the one who was rescued in the later book (which somehow ruined both books for me).
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uh. Wow. No, it was that too. That last “someday I’ll call” was the SADDEST thing I ever heard. Most people mourned the other one.
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Such excellent advice. What a wonderful post.
I have a scene in my novel in which I cried while writing, cried again while rewriting, and have cried each and every time I’ve read it since then. To me, that is some of my best work.
IIRC when we observe someone else’s emotions experience, our little brains fire the same parts as if we were experiencing the emotions ourselves. We got to know what it is like to fight a battle, lose a spouse, watch a dog die, all without actually having to do those things. Call it learning, call it entertainment, cal it whatever you like. It works.
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I was absolutely devastated when Sammy died this summer. Sammy was my Beagle pup, and my first four non-fiction books were dedicated to him (and they were written with him curled up against me).
His death totally messed up my writing. I didn’t write a word for two months after he died. Emotional tags in a story are the most powerful things that you can use.
Wayne
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Certainly, in first draft, don’t be afraid to over-write, to go cornball, to “[tear] out [their] heart and stomp that sucker flat”. It is easier by far to dial it back in the revision process than it is to pump it up.
OTOH, please try to make sure the deaths are appropriate and purposeful, NOT disruptive of the story-telling.
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RES
Considering how hard it is for me to kill he so and sos, don’t be afraid of that.
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The highest compliment I have received as a writer was when a friend wrote to me, yelled at me, and begged me to rewrite a story so a major character would live. She already had decided what his fate should be (and the fate of his romantic interest, the protagonist); and when he died, she really felt the protagonist’s loss.
When I read that email, it felt like… victory!
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I love reading these list of yours and checking them off with respect to my novel. Makes me feel like I’m doing something right.
Oh, there is one I think you missed. Sudden or double reversals. Snatching something away from a reader or suddenly restoring it really pulls on the heartstrings too. Interrupted kisses, jump scares out of nowhere, everyone’s happy and then something AWFUL happens, last words unspoken between lovers before they are torn apart, rugs yanked out from under characters and readers alike. Never fails.
My whole novel revolves around a dead mother’s note to her surviving daughter that she manages to send back to her from the underworld, and when it arrives, it doesn’t say anything that anyone is expecting.
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“My husband recently was reading a story where the culmination of it was that the man this woman had finally fallen in love with was the same one who’d sent her comforting postcards when she was a litle orphan with no one to love her. AND after that lip-trembling revelation, the author piled on with something like “So, you see, you’ve always been mine to look after.” My husband’s reaction was “I could see her tugging at my heart strings, but it still worked.”
Hey, I read that book (if it is ‘Daddy Longlegs’) first time I have ever heard someone else mention it!
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Weirdly, no. It was a regency romance. :/
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