Piling Ossa upon Ponyville · 5:06pm Apr 20th, 2014
I've been reading some fics with "Sad" tags lately and oh boy, you'd think Ponyville was located on the banks of the Spoon River. Near Tilbury Town. In Shropshire.
Woes and ills never come singly but crowding round some hapless character. One is not only a cripple but also an impoverished orphan with an alcoholic father (okay maybe not both at the same time). Another loses her mother in childbirth with her much-anticipated new baby brother, after which her father becomes an alcoholic, who ships her off to summer camp where she's quite literally tortured, comes back home to find her friends have forgotten her, gets completely misunderstood, and then the story gets really depressing.
I'd like to say this is unrealistic but it isn't. Some people suffer multiple calamities in quick succession, sometimes because these calamities are connected (like earthquakes and tsunamis) but often not. And it isn't just poor people this happens to--case in point: the Kennedy family. "They're just snakebit" the folk saying goes, which like most folk sayings offers no insight and makes no real sense but sums up the problem simply by having been used to sum it up since time out of mind. Which implies that the problem's existed since time out of mind.
But when encountered in fiction it's hard for me not to feel like it's a cheat. I mean, you had me at the first calamity. I've already paid attention to the narrative and bought in to the characters--why keep upselling? It's like NPR, they won't leave you alone: but for an extra donation you can join our GOLD CIRCLE SUPPORTERS club and look down on all the Silver and Bronze Circle supporters...
As well, too much misfortune can become comedy. Wyle E. Coyote simply breaking a leg would elicit sympathy. Wyle E. Coyote being blown sky-high then falling into a canyon only to get run over by a train, elicits laughter as is intended.
Yes I know there are some great works that do this: Hamlet and King Lear both come to mind, though in those cases the tragedies really seem more intended to move the story along than to be considered for their own sake. But Hamlet has inspired countless parodies and even Lear is problematic in places (seriously: a blind guy thinks he's jumping to his death when really he's only flopping down on the ground--how do you keep the audience from laughing, short of leveled guns?). So yes, Shakespeare could do that sort of thing but a) even he had trouble with it and b) how many of us are Shakespeare?*
So what's my point? That lots of catastrophes in quick succession tend to advance the plot at the expense of mood. If your desired theme is tragic then I think tragedies are best appreciated in single state.
(Alright, I'm King of Critic's Mountain--who wants to knock me off?)
* Let's not always see the same hands, Ms MacLaine
Who?
To truly twist the knife in a sadfic, you need to separate the tragedies with just enough time for the character to believe things are getting better, or at least will get no worse.
I don't consider myself to really have the stomach to do it properly. I suppose that's a sort of failing in an author.
I don't like to calamity[1] my characters. I don't do [sad] much, but when I do, I prefer to find misery amidst generally happy circumstances. That, to me, is much more affecting—a calamity can be blamed on someone[2], but gentle, yet pervading misery that arises from the characters being who they are, now, that's different.
[1] I can verb whatever I like.
[2] In real life, not so much. But in fiction, the buck stops with the author.
2028302
If previous experience is any judge, Scootaloo.
2028302
That would be Diamond Tiara in The Old Curiosity Sh-- I mean, Why am I Crying?
It's not entirely unreadable, if you like Dickens.
I've always felt:
That big calamities are like big coincidences--as an author, you're allowed one per story. Unless, like you say, you're Dickens...
Mike
(Disclaimer: I'm stupidly tired right now, so I'm just kind of hoping this makes sense and isn't rambling or redundant.)
There are some emotions that, as a writer, I tend to view as "cheap." They're useful, sure, but they're also easy to pull from people-- arousal, disgust, "happiness," and pity are among the ones that come to mind first.
Interestingly, I've found at all of these have some audience that loves reading a story just for these reasons. So much so that they all have stories written that obviously serve no other purpose than to elicit this emotion.
Arousal has, of course, pornography. Both the short, "one-handed reads" as they used to call the one published in each issue of Bitch magazine, and longer novels that obviously only serve as a loose plot to string together this sort of scene (I've never read them, but Laurel K Hamilton's later novels often get accused of this.)
Disgust has the gorier aspects of horror-- the stories like Cupcakes that exist only to show off how outrageous the blood and torture can be, and slasher or torture-porn movies and books that exist only to string these together is increasingly bloodier and more disturbing ways.
Happiness (and here I mean the simplest version of the emotion-- things like actual joy, and triumph, can be much trickier) often takes the form of slice of life fiction where there's little to no conflict; in romance fanfiction we call this "fluff" and there are certainly people who can string this out to novel length, and fans who love it.
And pity... well you found some of those yourself. But shorter versions that prove the "cheapness" of the emotion are things like My Little Dashie, or "crying on graves" fics (where one of the mane six has outlived her friends). There are real novels that do this too, Nicholas Sparks' novels being an example that comes to mind, along with the YA author Lurlene McDaniel.
Anyway, my point is that those are all actually the same thing: an easy way to make people feel a strong emotion. And all of those have an audience of people who just want to feel that emotion over and over again. They have a very hard time being enjoyable stories for people outside of their intended audience, because those people would rather feel different emotions over the course of the story, but there's a reason why people keep writing them. There's an audience out there who want more to read.
2030176
The phrase "schadenporn" has a nice ring to it...
Or if the reader is so invested in the characters that they can't see the humor in all the misfortune, the story can become so unpleasant that they simply stop reading - and if you're writing the story with the hope that other people will read it, that's probably even worse. (Although on the other hand as Bookplayer said some people can never have enough pain in the stories they read, so even the most misfortune-filled story could still have a few readers...)