Tragic Circumstances 101 · 7:57pm Jun 3rd, 2014
Taking a break from my usual "Writing from an Actor's Perspective" series this week to showcase a story doing a commonly mishandled concept right.
Having a character with tragic circumstances is probably one of the first things fanfiction authors discover that sounds cool on paper but inevitably leads to flames. In theory, if a character is going through sufficiently tragic times, then the reader will sympathize with them. In practice, we've seen the same situation over and over: orphaned, isolated, abused, alone, significant others dead, and so on, so readers roll their eyes and grumble snide remarks to the effect of "Oooh, I'll be this author thinks they're so edgy." Downvotes ensue.
However, outside of fanfiction these are still serious topics, especially because they actually do happen, and when they do, you can bet that several peoples' lives have been irreversibly messed up. So let's say we actually want these elements in our story. How do we actually handle them correctly? Cue Rescued by a Rainbow, by Cirrus Tail. As a warning to more sensitive readers: it does deal with an abusive father and can get a bit intense. No gore, however, apart from the mention of blood and cuts and a set of cracked ribs. There will be spoilers below, so do give it a read now. It's well worth your time, especially if you like some dark feels.
Back? Good. (Also note the fancy page break thingy which I just discovered. No more flooded userpage for me! 
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The first thing to notice is how the story chooses its subject matter. A newbie author tends to think more tragedy = more sympathy. This leads to characters who have had their parents die, leading them to live with abusive foster parents before said surrogates are brutally killed in front of them by the mafia who then sell our protagonist into slavery at a foreign freak show exc exc.
Each of these things could have happened before to someone, and any of these on their own would be a very serious matter. However, that is exactly the problem. Humans have a limited amount of focus to go around. If your parents died, you'd grieve with your whole attention. If your parents died AND your foster parents abused you, then you have to decide how much attention to devote to each. Thus, the more tragedies you come up with, the less concern we devote to each one and the weaker they are as a whole.
Rescued by a Rainbow does have multiple tragedies, but it gets around the issue by choosing one overall focus: the abusive father. This character oozes an aura of malice whenever he's involved that implicitly draws the audience's attention to rest on the overall tragedy: this freak isn't in jail yet, and he's going to continue hurting people until he is. The tragedies of Ditzy loosing her mom and being abused are thus unified in one issue for the reader to devote their entire attention towards. Everything comes off stronger as a result.
Another issue that comes up with the normal parade of tragedies is that they rarely are connected to each other. On the surface, losing your parents could be said to lead directly to you being put in an abusive foster home, but there are nice foster parents too (why even choose to shelter a kid if you hate children?). Thus, it looks more like a disconnected string of bad luck and circumstances. If then the mafia kicked in the door, well, we'll just say things have gotten far too silly.
Stories are driven by connection. Sometimes a random event can spice things up, but the concept of a plot exists for a reason: to tie things together in the reader's mind so we can get invested and follow along. If life's just giving you bad luck, there's really not much your character can do besides whine, and the mounting improbability of that much bad luck happening to one person will have your readers grumbling about the author throwing in tragedy for its own sake.
Again, Ditzy's father serves to tie everything together. Ensuring the tragedy has a physical cause gives a convenient focus for the reader's ire. You can't get mad at life: once you've screamed at the heavens in the pouring rain, you're left with the reality that there's no one you can bring to justice. All you can do is cry more, which is duuuuuulllllllllllllllllll. If we can interact with the source of our troubles, then our character can move beyond sitting and angsting to actually kick down doors and get things done. The latter is always more satisfying than the former.
A unifying cause also serves to heighten the believability of the underlying events. As mentioned before, as the number of independent tragedies increases, the probability of actually having them all happen to you drops until it becomes more probable that the author is just stacking them up to squeeze some cheap feels out of a reader. Having one unified cause, however, means we only have to accept two things: the existence of whatever the cause is, and its desire/ability to cause the misery.
Rescued by a Rainbow does an excellent job establishing both of these things. We find out early on that the father wanted a colt but got a filly. Irrational, possibly, but certainly something we're familiar with. We then see him choose to react destructively towards his wife and foal: first he snaps and cuts her with a knife, which leads to her becoming sterile. From there it's not hard to piece together that he's not getting what he wants from her, so you can see his sick mind connecting the dots to take out his anger by killing her in front of her foal. Everything can be traced to the father's twisted drive towards his goals, which turns a series of improbable circumstances into an all too believable character-willed hell.
But the story doesn't dwell on the hellishness. It is explored at the rate the characters would naturally explore it and no further. The father isn't beating Ditzy around the clock. In fact, he doesn't interact with her much at all because (personal theory) he probably just wants to forget she exists. He's only actually violent when he gets mad and wants to take his anger out or he doesn't feel in control. Ditzy doesn't spend all her time moping, either. She doesn't have much to tell her what she's missing, and she'd rather focus on happy things like the birds chirping outside the one window that's not boarded up.
Though you might have a lot of terrible things happen, a well-developed sad story will recognize that even though all these things are sad, you can interpret them in many ways. Habituation is a natural human defense mechanism in which we take stressful things and gradually adjust to see them as normal. When you get tragedy after tragedy taken in the spirit "sad things keep happening and it's so sad," then you cry all the tears you've got and get burned out. There needs to be something besides bad times to cleanse the palette. This doesn't have to be sad-happy-sad-happy, although playing opposites off each other does help bring out both of them.
The best example of this in Rescued by a Rainbow is when Ditzy's mom is murdered. While the story does dwell on the horrific kill, it doesn't go out of the way to jerk tears. In fact, the tone of the scene is one of triumph: the mother's last words are effectively: "HA! Now you'll never get what you want! And praise Celestia for that, because a pig like you don't deserve no colt! Two birds for you! Suck them!" Then fall awesome one-scene character 
Less is more where tragedy is concerned. The normal parade of tragedies can leave a reader unfocused, overwhelmed, and incredulous. You can write better tragic circumstances by bringing one overarching tragedy to the forefront, taking the time to give it in-world context/plausibility, and remembering to allow your characters to focus on things besides the tragedies your story is showcasing.
This makes so much sense. I wonder about your thoughts when a tragedy involves inner conflict, and a refusal to accept a simple, if painful truth. I'd rather not say more, but if you need more to offer your thoughts, I would be happy to do so.
Thank you for this one. I'm stepping outside my bounds lately with a few stories, and it's good to see this kind of advice blog when I'm just about to start getting into the not sad part of the tragic circumstances.
Thank you, SirTruffles.
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). If you're guarding story ideas, feel free to PM.
If you were thinking about writing something, specific advice is always more helpful than general (generally speaking
Otherwise, general advice shotgun awwwaaaaay:
What challenges are you facing/want to avoid with your internal conflict? As far as I can see, the above rules of thumb are the place to start. From a reader's perspective, the big challenge is holding interest in the internal tragedy because readers don't have a stomach for much angst. Every time our character vents, we had better be learning something new, or we'll have seen everything already and skim it.
If your issue is portrayal, actor's instinct says a big issue you may face is likely to be "playing the ending" or acting as though the character always knows the truth, but chooses to act some other way that causes problems. You'll have the obvious solution out there with the character saying 'no' every time. If the solution is obvious and the only reasonable alternative then the readers are going to be frustrated: they already know an ending that's easy to reach if your character smartens up, so the story is just holding their attention hostage until it gets on with itself.
To avoid this, you must allow your character to fight for their worldview. Here's the deal: life doesn't have to work the way you don't want it to if you can find an alternative way of looking at things that doesn't cause problems. The story is then about the in-denial character's mental gymnastics to concoct/justify a worldview without the uncomfortable truth, their inevitable failure, and the mounting problems caused by their denial. This frees your authory mind to experiment without respect to the thing your character doesn't want to acknowledge. You then just need to make sure that whatever the shenanigans are costing the cast matters to the reader and you should be set.
But like I said: general advice is general. Specific advice is probably more helpful
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I'll PM, even though I'm not exactly guarding the idea. It's kind of a long one. Long winded. That's me. Except for now, apparently. Give me a few minutes to make sure the transition from Evernote to PM survives.
Edit: Actually... I don't have a coherent enough outline at the moment. It's kind of a jumble of thoughts in a sort of outline-ish thingamabobber.
The differences between interesting and uninteresting Tragic Circumstances are twofold:
(1) How do the Tragic Circumstances tie to the larger story -- if the larger story is about a war devastating the land, for instance, it's not only plausible but almost necessary for some sympathetic character to have lost loved ones or livelihoods to the war, in order to make the devastation feel reader to the reader. If it's about aristocratic tea parties than having characters focus on unrelated personal tragedies may simply be Narmtastic.
(2) What does the character who has suffered the Tragic Circumstances do in consequence of his suffering? Does he seek vengeance against the foes who devastated his village and killed his family? Does he seek power so that he won't die as well? Does he seek to heal the rift between the combatants so that others won't have to suffer as he did? Each of these choices reveals things about his character.
If he simply breaks down and cries about it constantly, then he probably won't work as a hero. Though he might be someone whom the actual heroes save and put in the care of someone who can heal him.