Crying While Reading

I took part in several conversations yesterday about crying while reading. Do you do it?

I do. I cry every single time I read Persuasion. I weep buckets reading epic fantasy (anything from C.L. Wilson to the Chronicles of Narnia — and I actually won’t read The Last Battle anymore because I have such a visceral reaction to my memory of sobbing all the way through that horrible travesty tragedy). I cry whenever they kill animals in fiction (do not get me started on George Orwell, the bastard, or John Steinbeck, may he rot). My high school English teacher probably remembers to this day the girl who came into her classroom during lunch period, and cried on her shoulder over A Separate Peace. I love a good cathartic cry over a piece of fiction.

Now, for the second part of the question, for you writers out there: do you cry over anything you’ve written?

I haven’t done so until recently, and, prior to Secret Society Girl, I wrote some dark books. I admit I felt a bit sniffly a few times near the end of Rites of Spring (Break), but, much like Amy, I bucked up and soldiered on. But there is one part of Rampant that I have never, in the more than a year since I’ve written it, been able to read without turning on the waterworks, and there’s a scene in Tap & Gown that made me cry as well. (It’s not one you’d think, though).

The crying has continued apace, especially with my current manuscript, though given the protagonist’s state of mind (daaaaaaaarrrrrrrrkkkkkk) it should probably be expected. She’s in a bad, bad place, and it seems I have at last figured out how to torture my characters. Um, yippee?

Seriously, protagonist. It’s spring. There are tulips coming up in my yard. My dog is adorable. I did not sign up to be Method!

I read something once that said that, as a writer, if you expect your reader to chuckle, you should be in hysterics, and if you expect them to shed a tear, you should weep buckets. I suppose this is a way of saying you have to feel things strongly if you expect the reader to feel anything at all. Because some folks just aren’t the crying type.

Though two readers (and there haven’t been that many readers yet) have already told me that Tap & Gown made them cry. Um, yay? And here I thought I was writing a comedy!