I Want to Make You Cry

Many years ago, when I lived in Connecticut, I attended a weekly poetry group. Every Wednesday night there was an open mic, mostly at a defunct train station. The group of poets there were wonderful and supportive and bonded in kindred spirit and friendly competition. Everyone came there to be blown away by great poetry, but I think we all also wanted to be that poet that had blown everyone away.

One night, I was waiting to read a really difficult poem about my father’s funeral. My father and I had a quite complicated and dysfunctional relationship and there was so much emotion caught up in the lines of the poem that I was certain I wouldn’t be able to get through it without breaking down. As I waited for my turn, I listened to the other poets work through their poems, some of them getting stuck on the more personal lines. The crowd, as always, coaxed them through the hard parts, and applauded their efforts.  Then the poet just before my spot came on. She was one of my favorite poets, meticulous in her rhythms and word choice and I always enjoyed her readings. This time she outdid herself, though. I wish I still had the book of poetry that particular poem was in so I could quote her directly, but I think you will understand if I tell you the premise.

The narrator of the poem (and, we all knew, the poet herself) had a mother who was fighting cancer.  The name of the poem was “More Than One,” and it used those three repeated words to drive the narrative. I am paraphrasing, but it started out something like,

“More than one tumor,

 on more than one organ.

More than one doctor

giving more than one opinion,”

etc., etc., and those three words became a sort of mantra as she recounted the rituals of care, and chemo and pain and grieving while her family fought this battle.  The poem ended with the lines,

“Give us more than one day more.

Please. More than one day more.”

There are tears in my eyes writing that now, ten years later. Imagine the state I was in walking up to the mic to read my own cathartic poem.  It wasn’t a pretty sight.

When we write, we want to evoke some emotion in the reader. I want to make you laugh, or make you excited, or make you feel angry or powerful or elated. Mostly, though, I want to make you cry.

How do we as writers achieve these kinds of cathartic moments in our writing? After all, it isn’t like chemistry where you just combine ingredients and you get a certain result.  When you cut an onion, the onion’s defense mechanisms release certain chemicals in the air that stimulate your tear glands. The chemicals react with the amino acids in your tear to make sulfenic acid. The acid causes your eyes to burn and tear. 

We cannot just combine a mother dying of cancer and a crying daughter to achieve that effect. Sure, readers may feel badly for them, and will always wish them well, but unless they are in a particularly vulnerable state of mind, it is going to take more than that for them to shed a tear. We, as readers must emotionally invest in the characters. We must care about them as people before we care what happens to them.

For example, there is a famous scene in the movie, Steel Magnolias. It is just after Sally Fields’ daughter’s funeral, and she gives a monologue that if your eyes are still dry at the end, I question the existence of your soul.  However, if I were to just paste a YouTube video of that particular scene, and you have never seen the movie, it might just seem a bit sad, or like a crazy lady ranting, and you certainly wouldn’t get the joke at the end with Olympia Dukakis and Shirley Maclaine, which is hysterical and cuts the tension beautifully. It is truly a perfectly written scene, but it relies on just about everything in the film that has come before it.

Sally field is an overprotective mother, and Julia Roberts, her daughter, is diabetic and fragile, but she refuses to let the disease rule her. There is a famous line where Roberts says she would rather “have 30 minutes of wonderful than a lifetime of nothing special.” In that light, against the advice of doctors, and to the horror of her mother, Roberts gets pregnant and has a baby. This takes a toll on her and eventually kills her. Now, if you watch that scene, it will affect you a little more because I have given you the backstory to understand it.

My writing partner, when we were discussing the subject of emotional investment, asked me what I thought was the secret to making readers care.  First, there are no secrets. You need to write to learn to write. However, what I will say about emotional investment is what I will say about everything involved in writing. If you aren’t emotionally invested in your writing, no one else is going to be. This goes back to a recurring theme in these blogs, which is writing the truth, and writing the hard things.  If it bothers you or if it makes you laugh when you think about it, then chances are it will resonate with the reader if you are honest and write it the way you remember it.  The ‘secret’ if it exists is to not be lazy and not to be timid.  Fighting the lazy is fairly easy. Don’t go for the easy line. Don’t cut corners. For example, if you need to tell the reader that the main character has shoulder-length dreads, don’t put her in front of a mirror admiring herself. It is the equivalent of a bad magician having the rabbit pop its head out of the hat before its time.

Fighting the timid isn’t as easy. I think that a lot of writers, after setting up their readers for a knockout, pull their punches. This hesitation can come from not wanting to go into the dark places of your mind. If what your character is feeling is “I looked at my daughter, and I realized in that moment, I truly despised her,” then that is what you should write.  Yes, there are people who will wonder how anyone could feel that way about their child, or, if it is fiction, how any writer could even think of someone feeling that way. That is not your problem. I am a writer of horror. I was married to someone who couldn’t understand how I could write about monsters killing babies, or dogs or whatever, as if the very thought made me a baby- or puppy-killer.  Stephen King famously said that if he couldn’t be a writer, he might have been a serial killer.

I will leave you with an anecdote that my writing partner recently told me. He, as we all do as writers, sometimes struggles with the validity of his ideas and whether they are good, or cliché or worth pursuing.  Over the course of a conversation, he mentioned his nieces. He is single and his nieces are his world.  He related this time when his niece was younger, and she and him were watching a kid’s program while she was drinking a bottle. There was a moment when he realized that the bottle she was drinking was her last because her parents were graduating her to sippy cups. He knew as well that she would soon be growing out of the program they were watching. That particular time of day, when she would have her bottle and they would watch the kiddie show together was a treasured time. At that moment, he was struck with this unbelievable melancholy. This phase of life that he had enjoyed so much would soon be gone The emotions he felt seemed irrational because his niece was still there, and the new stage in her life that was beginning was surely going to be just as wonderful, with just as many joyful memories.  That didn’t help the sadness, though. 

He was surprised when I told him if he never wrote anything else, he needed to write that story. That is such a pure moment of humanness. I believe all writing is communicating our common human experience, however irrational, and emotional and illogical, because it is in living those moments where we feel the most alone, and when we read about other people experiencing those moments, it is where we feel the most understood.

Keep writing.