5 Thoughts on How Crying Shapes a Story—and Characters

Why do characters cry? At face value, it’s an easy question: They cry because people cry. Authors want their creations to feel life-like, so just as characters share our laughter and struggle, our hopes and wild dreaming, they must share our weeping, too.

(Benjamin Perry: On Dismantling the Shame Around Crying)

But tears, like any action, can feel authentic or forced. When crying is handled poorly it can feel incidental at best and, at worst, a disingenuous attempt to make the reader feel something that the writer has not earned. However, when tears are artfully woven into the narrative, they can provide unparalleled emotional complexity and catharsis for the reader.

In the two years I spent writing Cry, Baby: Why Our Tears Matter—a nonfiction book about the science and social ethics of crying—I was particularly attuned to how authors portrayed weeping in the fictional books I read. The book devotes an entire chapter to the way tears function in novels, myths, and sacred texts, but here I’ll condense a few of the bigger lessons I learned about how to effectively portray sobbing in a story.

A common pitfall I see is writers only linking tears to sorrow. Obviously, sadness is a significant reason why people cry, but—even when it’s a principal cause—real emotions are usually more layered and multivalent. Often, it’s not just the sadness that makes our eyes well up, it’s frustration with our situation, anger at unjust circumstances, our longing for something different.

There’s a scene in Torrey Peters’ wonderful novel Detransition, Baby where one of the main characters sits weeping on the floor of her ex-partner’s closet. Certainly, loss from the breakup is part of why she’s crying. But what truly gives the scene its power is how that loss mingles with her fragile hope about the possibility of becoming a mother—and the anger she feels about receiving what she longs for from someone she feels betrayed her. If crying is used as lazy shorthand for “sad,” we lose that emotional richness.

Crying is startlingly effective as an action to bring a character into a new place—either physically or in their heart. One of the most famous examples of this are the tears that Alice weeps when entering wonderland. Growing giant, she weeps a sea into which she later becomes literally awash. She must travel through that soggy morass to enter the door to a different world, a striking metaphor for the character’s emotional journey.

In a less literal depiction, Octavia Butler’s protagonist in Parable of the Talents cries profusely when she decides to turn away from the lure of security and safety to accept her calling as a prophet. Whether your character is embarking on a literal voyage or an emotional one, tears can help embody the conflict of that choice.

While tears are often connected to a particular emotion (anger, pride, joy, etc.), they’re also extremely effective to show how a character is changing or has changed. The archetypal example of this, for me, is Ebenezer Scrooge. Throughout A Christmas Carol, Charles Dickens punctuates Scrooge’s ghostly visions with frequent tears, to show how the experience is changing him. This all culminates on Christmas morning when Scrooge leaps from his bed, “laughing and crying in the same breath,” upon learning that there is still time for him to choose a different future.

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Because of social forces that shape who is more comfortable crying openly, there are many cultural misconceptions about crying. Men, for example, are far less frequently depicted crying in our stories. (And the absence of those portrayals is likely part of why so many men only feel comfortable crying in private.) There is so much power in subverting these expectations!

It’s not a book, but one of my favorite recent depictions of masculinity is the titular character in Ted Lasso. The show follows an ebullient soccer coach who motivates his characters through praise and kindness. Part of what makes the character so vibrant, however, is the way he’s shown weeping in private moments—often literally in the dark. It’s the tension between the public joy and quiet sorrow that gives Ted so much pathos.

We cry for so many reasons: Awe at the majesty of a forest; pride at accomplishing something long-awaited; confusion when something happens that we don’t expect; even cunning tears wielded to deceive. Part of the beauty and mystery of tears comes from the way that they refract the fullness of our humanity. So, embrace that complexity!

The more you’re able to use tears in multifaceted ways, the nearer they will strike reality—and the more your reader will resonate with what’s on the page. Similarly, there are lots of ways we cry: a single glimmering tear, a silent stream, or the howling sorrow of full, body wracking sobs. Matching physical embodiment to the narrative event will cultivate realism, helping your characters come alive.

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