Make Your Characters Cry

I just finished reading an incredible article by Kevin Simler, that asks the fascinating question: why do we cry?

It’s a question I had never really considered before… Why does water come out of our eyes when we’re sad?

Or frustrated? Or angry? Or when we hear beautiful music? When we attend either a funeral or a wedding? When we lose at a sporting event, but also when we win?

When you stop to think about it, crying is very weird.

The most pernicious myth about crying is that we use it to “process our emotions,” specifically the emotion of sadness — in other words, that crying is a response to grief. This idea is so wrong, in so many ways, that it needs a thorough exorcism before we can proceed.

The entire article is so good and so insightful, it deserves to be read by anyone with an interest in human emotion and behavior. And if you’re a novelist, or screenwriter, or some other kind of storyteller, it’s pure gold.

It’s a long article — more than 5,000 words — so it took me about 25 minutes to read the whole thing. But I’m so glad I did.

Tears: by Kevin Simler

Okay, now that you’ve read the whole article, let’s think carefully about its conclusions and think about how we can apply those lessons to our own writing projects.

According to the author, we cry for two related purposes:

the original function of weeping was to serve as both a submission signal and a distress signal at the same time, but addressed to two different receivers

First of all, as humans we cry when we’ve exhausted our emotional reserves, in the face of an overwhelming situation. Essentially, we’re collapsing in submission, sending a message to our tormentors that says “Please, make it stop. I can’t take this anymore.”

But at the same time, we’re sending a signal to our friends or to any potentially-sympathetic onlookers, who might see our tears as an authentic distress signal and come to our rescue. We’re saying to them “Please help me. I’m vulnerable, and I handle this on my own.”

If you look at this analysis from a literary perspective, each tearful moment becomes the story of three characters — the protagonist, the antagonist, and the helper — and the dynamics of the scene can potentially involve six different forces, interacting all at once:

1. The antagonism of the antagonist, against the protagonist.

2. The resistance of the protagonist, against the antagonist.

3. The plea-for-help from the protagonist to the helper.

4. The response of the helper to the protagonist, either accepting or rejecting the plea-for-help.

5. The reaction of the helper to the aggressions of the antagonist.

6. The counter-reaction of the antagonist toward the helper.

The first two of these forces are the most obvious elements of any conflict, but I think the rest of the forces get progressively more and more interesting as you move down the list, and you can craft these forces in a variety of interesting ways to engineer compelling and unexpected stories.

For example, imagine a character in distress collapsing into a pile of messy tears and crying out for help to a dear friend. But the dear friend discovers a betrayal in this situation, rejects the appeal for sympathy, and forms an alliance with the antagonist! This reversal plays on our intrinsic understanding of the dynamics of crying, and overturns our expectations of the conflict and its relationships.

You won’t use these kinds of story engineering tactics on every page, of course. Making your characters cry is exhausting, both for the characters themselves, and for the readers experiencing their torment by proxy. So you might only employ these techniques once or twice in a full-length novel. But understanding the mechanics of a tearful breakdown can help you write better stories, full of pathos and authenticity.

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