What makes you cry, sob, blubber or bawl?
Everyone has different triggers and some might make sense while others may make you raise a brow but I don’t think anyone can argue with the fact that shedding a few tears now and then can be good for you. It means something has affected you strongly enough to trigger the emotions many try so hard to hide…sensitivity, compassion, kindness, concern.
Television and movies are more likely to bring a tear to your eye because so many of us are visual but have you ever read a book that made you cry?
I don’t know that my books will ever make anyone cry but I hope they hit a nerve every now and then so that you think you might shed just a tear. Hitting any emotion, whether it’s sadness, humor, anger or concern for a character is a great achievement every writer would hope to accomplish. It means the reader is connecting with the story and the characters. It means the reader cares.
While I won’t go around killing off my characters to draw any tears (well, maybe), there are other difficulties many deal with in life that can be brought into a book to draw readers in. In No Mother of Mine there was the question about whether a mother could harm her own children, the question about Jorja’s parentage, the question about why Kat’s mother abandoned her as a child and the question about how an upstanding citizen could hide their true nature. Whether a reader has ever experienced these types of situations or not, most readers have at least asked the question, “why?” Why would a mother hurt her child? Why would a parent lie? Why would a mother abandon a child? And, why do people kill?
In real life, we don’t always get the answers but in books (most of the time, anyway) we do. And if the author is able to pull you into the story and into the lives of the characters so that you really want to know the answers, the book will also pull strong emotions from you as you turn each page to get those answers.
As the creator of characters in my world, my answer would be ‘no.’
