Tips and tricks for tearjerking scenes?

Hm, this is a toughie. One thing that I would point out is that everything leading up to that tragic moment is just as important as the tragic moment. If you show throughout the novel HOW INCREDIBLY MUCH this mother loves her child - she sacrifices for him, does whatever she can to help him - then your readers will feel that separation at the end. You won't even have to say much, as the narrator.

Warning: Star Wars example. Think how you would feel if you ONLY saw the scene where Luke learns Vader is his father. You'd laugh (I did) at this dorky dude with buck teeth yelling "NooooooOOOOooOOOOOoooo!" and clutching his fake-cutoff hand. But if you watch the first and second movies first, you see how much Luke has invested in his fantasies about going off and fighting the empire and becoming a hero, JUST LIKE HIS FATHER. He's just like any poor kid who loses a parent early on and then makes up elaborate daydreams about how wonderful the parent was. And then when you see Luke confronted with the reality that all of his dreams are founded on a lie... well, you can't help but feel for him. Right?

One of my favorite points about this was from Orson Scott Card (I think from Characters and Viewpoint) (paraphrase): If the character cries, the reader doesn't have to cry. Sometimes subtle reactions are more powerful than overt.

Go with natural. If the emotions are there, your readers will feel it. If your characters are real, your readers will feel it. Don't try too hard or your readers will think you're manipulating their emotions.

Similar to what has been said, I think the "trick" is to have done your work with the characters before you get to the sad scene. If you've developed the characters to the point that the reader feels something for them, once that tragic event comes, it will have a greater impact. I also think that some of the most touching scenes are the simplest, avoid melodrama or cliché lines.

Think about something in your own life that made you feel the way the characters feel. What about that time made you feel that way? How did you react? How did the people around you?

Translate those actions and emotions to your scene.


ETA: Why, in terms of the story, is the scene supposed to be sad or poignant? What makes it sad or poignant for the characters?

I don't want to write the story for you, but I think you could be okay with introducing this character in the last scene. Don't give up on your book just yet! If the son comes into the story bit of like a saviour, like so long as he is there the MC is going to be fine, and your audience is all, "Yay! Finally something good!" And then the mother is all, "Well shall I make your favourite for dinner tonight?"
"Actually, mom, I have to go."
"Go where?"
"To the airport. I . . . my flight leaves in an hour."
"You're leaving?"
"I'm sorry . . . "

etc etc.

See? That's really pretty sad!

Keep it simple. Keep it subtle. It's about building up expectations and then dashing them. But you don't need to say something like: She felt all her dreams lying shattered at her feet. Uncontrolable tears started streaming down her face. They all deserted her, why why?!!!

If you have been consistent in you novel, demonstrated how everyone deserts this woman. If you then give her hope with her son and then dash it. That is tragic. This is going to be a real case of show don't tell.

Also ask yourself why you are telling jokes. It could be possible you are not used to dealing with your emotions so outwardly and so have little empathy for your characters. Or it could be that what you are writing is a tiny bit over the top. Either way, you really need to get inside your characters, especially the one the reader is supposed to feel for, understand how this is no laughing matter. The second you do that, the jokes will stop. I promise.

Good luck!

I can't tell you about technical tricks, really, except for the method acting part of writing your characters. When I'm writing, I'm trying to tap into the part of me most like the character in question - and I'm trying to really feel the emotions the character feels. After that, it's just a matter of putting the words on the page as honestly as you can.

There's a death in my novel that takes me particularly hard. It does not shame me to admit I wept big fat tears while I wrote it. But you know? I think it's one of the strongest, most effective scenes in the whole book.

donut said:

So does anyone have any technical tricks for writing really sad scenes? Just from my own experience, I gather that repetition helps, or dragging things out. For example, instead of having a character die quick and clean from a bullet to the head, let him slowly bleed to death while all his friends gather around to say goodbye.

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Actually, a quick, clean death can be a lot worse because they didn't get to say goodbye. It's the absolute shock of a person being alive one second and gone the next. No tearful goodbyes, no last chance to say "I love you" - it can be a lot more painful than a slow, bleeding inevitability.

The only thing that is going to make the reader sad is what you made the reader feel up to that point.

Repetition and dragging out cause boredom. Hammer words, gushy purple emotion pushers, cause nausea. Only caring about a character can cause sadness. Hook the commonality of human existence, make it real, make it hurt. If you can't see to type for the tears, you did it.

I'm not sure that something can't be sad and funny at the same time, particularly if that's been the tone of the novel all along. At the moment, the only tear jerker ending that's popping into my head is Terms of Endearment, but wasn't Jack Nicholson making jokes at the end. And even if the kid only shows up in the last chapter, was the mother thinking about him all along?

I agree with Stormhawk................I would have some character show up and be told.......so and so is dead..........he/she died 30 mins ago........then your character can look around and feel helpless about having missed the final few minutes etc etc.....

TheIT said:

One of my favorite points about this was from Orson Scott Card (I think from Characters and Viewpoint) (paraphrase): If the character cries, the reader doesn't have to cry. Sometimes subtle reactions are more powerful than overt.

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Characters and Viewpoint is a GREAT book, and I was just about to suggest this. It's so, so true.

I have a death scene in my second novel that had all my betas in tears. A lot of this came from how much I'd developed the characters and their relationship beforehand. The reader doesn't need to be told or shown how heartbroken my MC is, they KNOW it. I told the scene from the POV of a second character who had less emotional investment in the scene, which violates a lot of advice given on choosing POV characters, but totally worked in this case. From that more 'distant' POV, I simply showed the MC's reaction with very little narrative beyond description. Very simple and straightforward way of presenting it, no flowery descriptions of feelings or agonized thoughts. My MC's only true love is dead. There is nothing left to say.

The death in my book is extremely sudden and completely unexpected. No-one even sees the character killed, they just find the body. There is some very subtle foreshadowing, but it's a shock to the readers and the characters. No goodbyes, and a completely senseless death.

I'm all for dramatic narrative and describing feelings most of the time, but this was one scene so dramatic in and of itself that if I'd done much narrative it would've actually reduced the impact.

I told the scene from the POV of a second character who had less emotional investment in the scene, which violates a lot of advice given on choosing POV characters, but totally worked in this case. From that more 'distant' POV, I simply showed the MC's reaction with very little narrative beyond description. Very simple and straightforward way of presenting it, no flowery descriptions of feelings or agonized thoughts.

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I did the same thing with the most gut-wrenching scene in my book. It would have been too much, maybe even maudlin, if it was told from the POV of the character it was happening to. But it worked from the POV of her husband, witnessing her stoicism and feeling helpless and terrified, doing what little he could to help her.

Devil Ledbetter said:

I did the same thing with the most gut-wrenching scene in my book. It would have been too much, maybe even maudlin, if it was told from the POV of the character it was happening to. But it worked from the POV of her husband, witnessing her stoicism and feeling helpless and terrified, doing what little he could to help her.

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I think this is why my POV characters (and I, with very few exceptions, have only one per book) tend to me secondary characters. I like having that perspective. If I wrote it from the POV of the character wondering if he was saint, or the boy descending into eating disorder hell, I don't think I could have written the connections as well. I think they would have been too melodramatic.

Make it sudden, either for the characters or the reader.
When I think about it, it's this sort of pinch you give the reader....and then they start to weep.
I think something that makes me cry, and I've cried twice with books (Harry Potter and His Dark Materials) was that I put myself in the characters situations.
I don't know if this is something that the authors worked on, in their subtle ways, in their sentences, but if I felt connected with the character, I would get watery eyes.

Get the reader to think "I know how that feels."
Try going for stuff that is common among most people around the world, before you strike them....and then, since they identify so much with the character, the readers suffer with him or her when it strikes.

That's my take on it, it doesn't mean it's the most accurate one.

Without going into the who or where or why, I suggest going with your senses -- smell, taste, sight and sound. How does the POV character feel without telling us? Heartbeat? Heat? Shaking? What does the POV character see?

I wrote a heart-wrenching scene of the death of a child after a long battle with cancer. The POV character watched the mother go through a gamut of emotions. He didn't know what she was feeling, but got a sense of it through her actions. Her hands, her trembling lips, the words she said. I hope this helps:

She was still. Restaurant patrons babbled around her; waiters zigzagged around the tables, pigeons cooed and swirled just beyond the wrought iron fence. Traffic hummed. The breeze hissed through the infant shoots of leaves on spindly branches. Horns were tapped, bicycle bells jingled, but she was still.

He slowed. His eyes fixed on her face as he approached the table. He could see that her eyes were bright, her lips swollen from the pressure of her teeth, biting down hard to prevent breaking down in public. He wanted to draw her into his arms, but he slid into his seat instead. He nodded at Paolo who was ready with his usual drink, and returned his gaze to her face.

It took a few moments for her to look directly into his eyes, and the message that he saw was clear. He reached across the table and grasped her hand, not speaking.

The waiter returned for their food order, but after watching them for a few seconds, he walked away and returned with two more drinks. He silently set the glasses on the table and left.

Rebecca sipped her drink, her teeth rattling against the glass. She inhaled deeply. "It was two days ago. He was sleepy, so I let him sleep. I just thought I'd rest a little, so I lay down beside him. I thought I just closed my eyes for a minute, but I guess I fell asleep." Her voice raised an octave, thin and wobbly. "When I woke up, he was gone. I didn't even get to say goodbye."

1) Make the readers fall in love with your characters.
2) Do mean things to them. The characters, not the readers. Well, the readers too, I suppose.

All I can suggest is that you put yourself in that scene. I mean, really put yourself there. If you can't feel it - the sadness, the heartbreak and confusion - your readers won't either.

donut said:

My chapter involves a mother who, for her child's own good, makes the difficult decision to let him go live far away from her. That should be pretty sad, right? But it's not coming out that way, unfortunately. Any advice?

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For this particular scene--and any other--you yourself must feel the emotion, as deeply as possible.

But the first step to making a reader cry is creating a connection from the characters to the reader, and once again, as deep a connection as possible. If I don't feel the characters, well, too bad this naive little kid has terminal cancer...but it just doesn't affect me.

There are no scenes that are guaranteed to make me cry. A man dying suddenly from a shot to the head can be just as tragic as a man dying a protracted, torturous death. It is all in the execution.

Yes, I'm going to cite Virginia Woolf as evidence now. In part two of To the Lighthouse, time moves suddenly very quickly. In about twenty pages, she goes through about twenty years, grouped into short scenes of a few paragraphs or a few sentences. We learn, briefly, of the deaths of characters who were young just a few pages ago, and it's very emotional, although written like a sequence of obituaries. It's all in the execution.

Danger Jane said:

Yes, I'm going to cite Virginia Woolf as evidence now. In part two of To the Lighthouse, time moves suddenly very quickly. In about twenty pages, she goes through about twenty years, grouped into short scenes of a few paragraphs or a few sentences. We learn, briefly, of the deaths of characters who were young just a few pages ago, and it's very emotional, although written like a sequence of obituaries. It's all in the execution.

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And the homage, in the closing minutes of the series finale for Six Feet Under, is absolutely devestating...

Caring about the characters is probably the most important thing about getting people to cry. But there are some other techniques to enhance the feeling of sadness.

I read a book by a lawyer once, that said if you want the jury to cry, describe everything that happened with as much detail as possible but with little emotion. People will naturally feel greater sadness almost to make up for the victim seeming so detached. Its called the theory of understatement. The novel Hiroshima uses it to great effect.

Hope To The Horizon said:

I told the scene from the POV of a second character who had less emotional investment in the scene, which violates a lot of advice given on choosing POV characters, but totally worked in this case. From that more 'distant' POV, I simply showed the MC's reaction with very little narrative beyond description. Very simple and straightforward way of presenting it, no flowery descriptions of feelings or agonized thoughts. My MC's only true love is dead. There is nothing left to say.

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I guess you and I just love going against advice. I've always thought stories told from POV characters with more 'distance' have much greater impact than stories told by the main players.

The very first story that I wrote that I really considered "good" was the one where my narrator had little to no involvement in the plot. Incidentally, the story was about a musician who's only true love also dies at the end. My narrator didn't care about either of them, but he saw it happen, and he simply told it like it was. And it made the emotional delivery so much better than anything I'd written before.

It's not necessarily wrong for your characters to express their own emotion without subtlety, I think, as long as the narration is subtle. That's a strange statement, I'll admit. Showing the reader what happens is one thing. That's okay. Telling the reader how tragic it is will just ruin it. It's kind of something you have to be nonchalant about. Both good actors and bad actors can cry in a sad scene in a movie. But with a good actor, the crying will just be an extension of the sadness, a natural act, a part of what happens. With a bad actor, it'll be almost as if the actor is shouting at you "look! I'm crying! This is supposed to be sad!" You know what I mean? It's kind of like that. If your character is the kind to weep, by all means they can weep, but don't make a big deal about it. Just show us what happens, and the readers will fill in the gaps and their hearts will be broken, too.

I also definitely agree with Danger Jane that it's necessary to completely get inside your character's heads and feel what they're feeling. That's what I do. The difficult part is keeping up a filter between your feelings/thoughts as you imagine the scene and what you put down on paper. You need to be able to feel it, but you can't go off rambling in metaphors about the tragedy, i.e., the literary equivalent of "Oh! The humanity!" Toothpaste had a great example. You don't want to say "She felt her dreams lying shattered by her feet." You're trying too hard to manipulate your reader's emotions with something like that, when if you just show what happens--assuming they're invested in your characters by now--that'll often be enough. Maybe let it all flow at first, but then go through and delete those kinds of things that don't add anything.

Show what happens.
Don't tell the reader how tragic it is.
Feel what your characters feel.