Spoiler for The Picture of Dorian Gray??? (But Is it really a spoiler though if it came out in 1890????)
Spoiler for season six of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, season three of Glee. Trigger warning: mention of suicide, homophobia, gun violence At the age of 24, I don’t even come close to being able to literally identify with the people who’ve pioneered the LGBTQ+ rights movement. But this summer, as I was working as a nonfiction counsellor at TYWI’s summer camp, I could not stop thinking about how fast LGBTQ+ rights have changed in the last decade.
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Death: Not Always a Tragedy8/15/2021 A Review of When Breath Becomes Air by Paul Kalanithi.
Minor spoilers for When Breath Becomes Air by Paul Kalanithi. One day Paul Kalanithi was a doctor, treating dying patients, and the next he was a patient struggling to live. Although the tragedy in When Breath Becomes Air presents itself from the very first page, the entire book, although infused with death, was not tragic. Why must I suffer? Why is human life so filled with unfairness and misery? Does the cause of suffering lie within us or outside of ourselves, in the hands of Gods, or is the world simply filled with terrible people who continue to inflict suffering onto one another? If such questions pop into your head in the middle of the night filling you with existential dread, then congratulations, you are not alone!
The Greeks have long been struggling with such questions which they expressed through their captivating stories that often involved lots of murders, dramatic choruses, and very complicated family relations. “A tragedy is the imitation of an action that is serious and also, as having magnitude, complete in itself; in appropriate and pleasurable language; in a dramatic rather than narrative form; with incidents arousing pity and fear, wherewith to accomplish a catharsis of these emotions.” — Aristotle
Tragedy has existed for as long as humans have known suffering. It’s a genre surpassing cultures, regions, and languages, but with more or less the same foundation. Further along the timeline, (est. 830 B.C.E) a man known as Aristotle wrote the earliest surviving work of literary theory, Poetics. In this, he examines “the poetic art,” and more specifically Tragedy in poetry. It was from this that 6 main elements of tragedy were discovered: plot, character, diction, thought, spectacle (setting), and song. These foundations, and more set by philosophers and critics of the times, is the beginning of modern tragedy and drama. You might laugh, cringe, and roll your eyes when you see it, but what is melodrama, and what causes it? Melodrama is when drama goes too far into theatrics. When you read it, you might be pulled out of the story because a character’s actions don’t fit the moment. It breaks the suspension of disbelief. Usually, melodrama is caused by extreme physical reactions and extreme metaphor. Think Vampire Diaries, Grey’s Anatomy, or literally any soap opera.
Personal taste will determine what you think is over-the-top, and what is considered melodramatic sways between genres. For example, sweeping proclamations of love are common in a romance, but not in a thriller. Many reactions and emotional displays can be melodramatic, but for this article we’re focusing on grief. Crying, sobbing, wheezing, and wailing. The Big Sad. Here are three tips to write grief without being melodramatic. Surviving Tragedy in King of Scars8/12/2021 Major Spoilers for all of the Grishaverse, including, Crooked Kingdom, King of Scars, and Rule of Wolves. Seriously, if you haven’t read the books, read this article at your own risk, or unless you love spoilers.
I was pretty late to the party as far as the Grishaverse is concerned. I started reading at the end of April and have just recently finished Rule Of Wolves, Leigh Bardugo’s seventh installment in the Grishaverse as a whole, and the second book in the King of Scars duology. I was kind of worried going into this series, as some of my friends who’d read it before me reported massive amounts of emotional damage, but I couldn’t put it off any longer, and I really just wanted to know what happened. The Tragic Villain Trope8/11/2021 One of the popular writing tips I’ve stumbled across in the past year is giving your villains clear motivations. I was instructed to think carefully of their backgrounds, personalities and upbringing so that a reader would be able to identify exactly why they turned out the way they did. It was emphasized that readers should be able to empathize and understand the villain's behavior, which is something I hadn’t been working on. Most of my characters were simply villainous. They were monsters, or mad men who did bad things because they could, not because they had a reason to. All these tip posts made me conflicted about my characters. I started to think if each of my villains really needed a clear motivation, and if that would change my original vision for them. You see, it’s easy to end up writing a morally grey character or anti-hero when writing motivations for villains, not to mention that providing a reason for (and in some cases justifying) your villain’s villany could easily go very wrong. After all, can you really be against a character who you relate to?
So you start another book and find yourself getting attached to a side character. The more you read about them, the more you like them. But a few chapters — or books — after you realize just how much you look forward to their interactions, they...die. And so you might cry or rant about it with someone. You might think you’re over it, but then you listen to that one sad song and remember them and feel sorrowful all over again. Tragic, isn’t it?
Tragedy has power. In any genre, it succeeds in stirring up powerful emotions: pain, anger, despair, fear. If you know how to write them, they can impact your readers in a way nothing else can. Therefore, here is a list of dos and don’ts that will hopefully help you out the next time you’re drafting a tragic scene. Note: this article is meant for fiction writers, but poetry authors might find it useful as well! Spoiler warning: death of some of literature’s most beloved characters. Little Women, Anne of Green Gables, The Boy in the Striped Pajamas, and Harry Potter.
Death is a tool, as versatile as the ink used to write. For as long literature has existed, deaths have too, seeping into the paper like ink. Literature touches our emotions and tickles our hearts, turning us into saps for our paper-lovers. For some authors — (Martin, Roth, I’m looking at you), death is a tool to serve and advance the plot, sometimes unnecessarily. For other authors, it’s used for symbolism and to bring growth in the character. Literary deaths, similar to ones in real life, are abstract. Let’s have a look at the many forms of fictional deaths, and how they served their stories. Before we start, please be warned: everyone dies. Books, movies, and even video games often find their ends made of tragedies — and all the more loved for it. Lit fic classics — from Shakespeare to Sylvia Plath to the works of Edgar Allan Poe thrive off murders and things going downhill.
So let’s talk — why have these tragedies (many carrying slightly outdated themes) stood the test of time while still continuing to hit readers just as hard? Categories
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