Recently, one of the writers in my orbit complained of "dry eyes," and announced a contest where people would submit short stories and whoever made her cry the most would win.
This writer carries drama behind her like a cape that flares as she walks. It trails after her, and heedlessly, she keeps walking with the wind in her hair. So when she announced this contest, I got out my popcorn to watch the inevitable weirdness and fallout. (It delivered.) But I got to thinking about how the premise of this contest might be inherently flawed.
We all have different thresholds to what makes us cry. I cry just thinking about the movie "Arrival," but I rarely cry at books. (The big exception is "The Paper Menagerie.") And not everyone cries when they're sad. I mostly get quiet and need a nap after I read a very sad book.
You cannot control someone's reactions. As someone who plans out whole, difficult conversations and then gets disastrously off track when they say something I didn't plan for, I can tell you with certainty that people's reactions are in no way guaranteed. I suppose it could be different when you're writing for an audience of one, and you have an idea how they react to stimuli, so you can trigger those reactions. I know what's going to scare my kid, and I know what's going to make my cat snuggly. But not everyone reacts the same way, so if you're writing for a broader audience, it's unreasonable to write one thing that's going to cause all your readers to cry.
Instead, something I think is doable is to trigger an emotion. It sounds strange, because in real life, I can't control the way someone else feels the same way that I can't control someone's reactions. But I think in fiction, a particular emotion is a larger target to hit. Wanting your reader to feel sad/angry/uplifted/frustrated is an attainable goal. Not every single person will feel that way, but you can set a tone with story beats and language and how you layer a story to make it come to an emotional head. I can check with my beta readers, "How do you feel about this? How did you feel when you read that?" and if I'm not hitting it right, I can adjust by changing or removing the parts that made them feel differently. If they're not sad about a character's death, because they're still upset about something he did back at the beginning of the book, then that part in the beginning of the book needs to change, or there needs to be more of an adjustment throughout the rest of the book, building up to the character's death. If I was asking, "Did you cry here?" when they say no, that's a much steeper mountain to climb, and a peak that in the end may be unattainable.
So I'm side-eyeing the goal of this contest a bit. There was some discourse on writer twitter a while back about how fiction writers emotionally manipulate their readers. Someone claimed this was bad, and others claimed that that claim was ridiculous. I think that it's fine to try to inspire emotions in a reader. It's good even. And at the same time there are cheap punches an author can throw that do feel like manipulation. And some of my hesitancy surrounding this contest has to do with how asking for this seems to be encouraging some level of manipulation. Dragging up emotions in your readers is one thing, aiming for a specific reaction does feel manipulative, and it feels like a breeding ground for those cheap shots.
But I think another aspect that gives me pause is the individual nature of this contest. If I wrote something for it, I would be writing a story just for this writer to enjoy (and by enjoy, I mean cry over). It would be my tearful, urgent gift to her. There are people I would do this for, and I hope that she is that person for everyone who enters, or that the people who enter are thinking about this completely differently than I am. But as it is, asking me to write a story for her, is a bit too personal and too big of an ask on my time and resources.
(No matter what I think of it, it did deliver on the drama. And, in the end, that's really all I ask.)
