Angst with out being angsty

You're typing cat. Are you currently falling asleep over your keyboard?

LOL I sensed a bit of dys there and just translated. You're going to need some understanding beta readers bye and bye.

My main character has given me some hard times. He is not only an angsty teenager, he goes all depressed and starts planning suicide for a while, so I am still probing around in a couple of chapters to see if his mizry is getting too much attention.

Ah. Dys. That makes sense. I type like that when I'm falling asleep over my keyboard -- just ask the author's I edit. One of them is running around here some place.

Zara Ravenwood said:

Anyone else having trouble making a MC and their situation miserable with out making them whiny? I thought about making her stoic- but stoicism is kinda hard to portray when it's from the MC POV. After all *she* knows what she feeling.

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Stoicism, to me, is about how the character expresses (or more accurately doesn't express) their emotions. A character can be wretchedly miserable, but if they hide it and keep up a cheerful front, they're still stoic.

That said, a character who spends too much time dwelling on their inner torment in their narration and internal monologue is a turn-off. One technique I've been playing with is to externalise the character's unhappiness, expressing it through external sources of conflict. For example:

X asks Y how she feels.

Whiny Y goes into great detail about how terribly awful her life is, the extent of her soul-rending torment, how her mother never loved her as a child etc etc.

Stoic Y thinks or feels the above, but says "Fine".

Externalising Y says: "I'm pissed off about Z, so I'm taking action!". Or: "I blame you for my problems!". Or something that creates external conflict. (Dialogue between X and Y about how awful Y's life is and how much X pities her isn't conflict.)

I find this encourages me to get the narrator's mind off their enormous emotional trauma and back onto actively creating conflict.