There is a famous quote from Orson Scott Card’s Characters and Viewpoint: “…if your characters cry, your readers won’t have to; if your characters have good reason to cry and don’t, your readers will do that weeping.” If the character does not show an emotional reaction, the reader will fill in what’s missing and feel it for them. This simple maxim is easy to follow, but is he correct or does a character’s display of emotion elicit a sympathetic response in the reader? Maybe I’m just a sucker for tears, maybe I mist over myself, but I have never found characters’ weeping could defuse the emotion I felt. The key, though, is the “I felt” part. It’s what leads up to the weeping, setting up the emotional situation, that is critical.
“Recent psychological theories of crying emphasize the relationship of crying to the experience of perceived helplessness,” says Wikipedia under “Crying.” If true, then a reader cries out of sympathy for a character caught in a trying situation. Unless they ease the trial, the character’s tears don’t make the reader feel any less helpless. In fact, insofar as weeping shows a character’s helplessness, it should heighten a reader’s emotions.
So what creates an experience of helplessness in a reader? It is always the writer’s aim to generate an emotional connection between reader and character. We must write characters who are real. They must react to their dramatic circumstances in a way that real people would react. They must be weak enough that the reader fears they will break or fail. Crying can be a realistic part of that drama. It is the drama that creates the reader’s emotions, though, not the weeping itself.
If crying is the experience of perceived helplessness, consider whether a character’s tears lessen or heighten that helplessness. If the reader identifies with the character and feels a connection, then the character’s helplessness should evoke a sympathetic response. The character’s tears should increase the reader’s emotion.
To move the reader, the weeping, as all writing, cannot be trite. Hackneyed writing’s clumsiness distracts the reader and breaks the spell. Cliches, though, aren’t the only distraction. Writing can get in its own way. Haruki Murakami wrote in Norwegian Wood:
One big tear spilled from her eye, ran down her cheek and splattered onto a record jacket. Once that first tear broke free, the rest followed in an unbroken stream. Naoko bent forwards on all fours on the floor and, pressing her palms to the mat, began to cry with the force of a person vomiting. Never in my life had I seen anyone cry with such intensity.
This description of crying evokes a vivid picture in my mind. It is not at all trite or cliched. However, I’m not moved by it. I find myself impressed by the words themselves, not touched by Naoko’s sorrow. Perhaps this was Murakami’s aim, since all the characters in Norwegian Wood come across as detached.
One final note: don’t let your characters cry too much. My first novel, Under Shōko’s Bed, places emotionally broken characters into scenes charged with feeling. Tears are a natural result. But my editor told me I went there too often. So I worked through the novel with sticky notes and marked all the pages with weeping. My editor was right. So I changed the characters’ reactions. They break down to the point of tears now only when the emotion in the scene is especially intense. The tears serve as markers of helplessness, and they move me.
So I disagree with Orson Scott Card. My emotions back me up. So do my tears.