"It is true, that you have quite some mastery over the natural world. They do as you command without a single hesitation. It ended my mother. I must assume, it has now also robbed me of another sister."Pride, Prejudice, and Witches!
"No, no." Lady Catherine de Bourgh said sympathetically, "Robbery implies that I have taken these from you. Yet, in just a moment hence, you will be joining them."
"If that is so, then why have I not yet joined them?"
One of the tools that author's reach for, so very frequently, is something to make their reader cry.
There's no actual cruelty in this. Feeling things, is part of reading. You want to feel a range of emotion, so that you connect and invest into what you're reading.
Unfortunately, reaching for tears all the time, stops the tears. The reader becomes more distant from the work. It is harder to invest, when everything that you experience is pain.
The author has to strike a balance.
For myself, this is a particularly hard balance to strike, because I don't appreciate plot armour. I have used the deus ex machina, once, but that doesn't mean I will reach for it ever again.
If it makes the most sense, that the character should die... Then they probably will.
That is not to say that this happens without limitation. If you strike out more than one character, or you strike out a main character without already having another, then the book probably needs rewriting. All you'll do is push away your reader, rather than twist their gut.
Sometimes that is fine - the end of one tale, in a series. That gut punch of the main dying is the perfect place to end the middle of a trilogy, or the book right before the pacing changes, and so on. It can have a place and time to do it.
But halfway through a standalone? Time to rethink it.
Near the beginning of a first book? Nope. That probably hasn't got the investment of emotion that you need, yet.
Whilst it may seem entirely obvious, I so often see authors forgetting the point of all of this: To create the expected psychic damage in your audience, walk slowly, walk carefully, and walk it back if it's too much. Invest in the emotion, not the damage.
© Copyright 2024, James Milne