Too depressing?

There is nothing per se "too depressing" for YA. And I don't know anyone working in the field who would say any topics are off limits becuase they are depressing.

BUT, I have seen many a manuscript become a melodramatic or muddled slogfest because the author didn't make strategic decisions about which plot elements best worked and threw them all in.

Write what you are passionate about. But in the revision stage, ask yourself what purpose each event serves in moving the story forward.

~suki

Check the stuff floating around 80% of the manga shelves anywhere. Cute little girls stab themselves to death with a clueless smile on their baby faces. Kids these days like it dark.

I sometimes worry my writing is too depressing. But I've still been able to connect with publishers. I agree with Sage, as long as there's some hope at the end, write what you want. I've also seen publishers like Chiteen prefer a not-so happy ending. So it depends on the publisher too.

All I could think about was Evanescence--her first album Fallen was dreadfully depressing and in some paradoxical way I love it. (Don't like much of her other work though) Tourniquet is about suicide; My Immortal the death of a loved one. I mean her songs aren't even hopeful or at least very rarely end on a semi-hopeful note.

Some people are drawn to tragic stories, perhaps because they fine solace in a character who is experiencing what they have experienced. The avid readers I know want to make "friends" with the characters; have someone they can relate to. So a depressing story might reach out to them. Misery loves company, I suppose. I think it's better to end stories on a positive note. Giving a glimmer of hope somewhere at the end so that readers don't take the story as "we're all doomed".

I have a character who self-harmed, attempted suicide, is depressed, OCD, bipolar--but I've made him change, a lot from what he used to be. And the growing aspect is what I find hopeful about him.

No, not everyone is going to love your story. I can tell you right now my sister won't. She's 24 and watches My Little Pony! She prefers happy things; she can't handle depressing stories and most of the time neither can I. In my own writing I try to balance the emotional turmoil of one character with the happy-go-lucky comedic character so that I don't lay the troubles on so thick for my readers. (That can be difficult though, knowing when to lighten the mood and when not to)

You can write a super depressing story, but if you right it well, even the people who dislike such stories will be drawn in and enjoy the novel. If you're worried that it'll be such a turn-off for a particular audience you have two choices: don't care and continue writing or try to balance out the drama with a little comedic relief. If my sister and I were in a novel, she'd be the comedic relief and I'd be the serious character trying to solve all the obstacles.

No such thing as too depressing subject matter, but make sure it's not melodramatic. I've got three or four of the Big Issues (depression, anorexia, etc.) but that doesn't mean my life's a never ending stream of pain and tears. EDIT: which is not to say that I'm a usual case, but it's thanks to issue books that my friends look at me weird when they learn about it.

If the book starts depressing, stays depressing during the entire middle, and ends depressing, that's not so much a flaw of the subject as a flaw of the story.

I don't know.

Here's something I just now made up which is bullcrap but fun-sounding.

Sometimes in meditation exercises, they tell you to relax by first contracting each muscle and then letting go.

So. Contract.

Melodramatic:

My boyfriend dumped me today.

Life has become a dark swirl in the eye of Satan. An albatross carcass floating on a sea too salty for any living thing to survive. A black rose humped to wilting by blood-blorting zombies. A shriveled foreskin cut off the phallus of Mephistopheles and left to roast in the panini press of hell. A clockwork monkey whose cymbals have been stolen and who can only bang his hands together until they are bloody and broken.

There is nothing but darkness. There is no one but Pain. There is nowhere but the wasteland.

Click to expand...

...okay...now release...

Sage said:

I have heard that the ending should have an element of hope, even if it's otherwise tragic, but I know of no rules about being depressing for the rest of the book. Outside of the normal rules for all books and their need for peaks and valleys.

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I don't think I'd have thought of this this way, but, er, this.

I still remember some horrid YA thing I read as a kid because the ending was so bad.

It was (I don't remember the title, it was a while ago, and I think I'd picked up the book at a used bookstore to begin with, so god knows) about a kid with Lupus, who got ill, got treatment, was sort of better and dealing with her friends and she had missed stuff and whatever you'd assume - then she got sick again, was hospitalized, ran a very high fever and in a febrile delirium, believed herself to be aflame and leapt out the window and died. The end. I still remember how mad I was at that book, and where I chucked it. It was just baffling - why make someone care about the character only to do that, with no rhyme, reason or resolution?

Which brings me back to Sage's point - I've read other YA things where the protag killed his or herself, or died of something but there was some point. There was some resolution or learning or hope for another character or for the protag or something.

Same as there's no character too evil, if you can communicate the humanity or universality of the character to the reader.

All my YA is issue related. All my YA is depressing in places. Most of my reviews mention that the reader cried. But most also mention that they laughed. You must have balance. Also, my reviews mention that my books deal with tough issues but that they didn't feel they were being spoken down to or beaten over the head with the issue or a lesson. You need to be subtle.

Cheryl is awesome... We share experiences in that we were both physically and sexually abused in childhood. We both write on these issues. I've read all her work and reviewed them ahead of publication. I consider her a friend. If you notice, with her work, story takes the wheel... Not the issues. That's your main goal right there. I love that I always make my readers cry. I do deal with depressing stuff... Abuse, bullying, suicide, accidental teenage death. I take the reader to the cliff. I leave them with hope.

Yes. It can be too dark and too depressing.

Just ask my beta readers and my agent.

That being said, none of those comments came from issue books or even things that were "dark issues" or anything crazy plot-wise. It's all in how I handled it. I have a gift--not for melodrama, but for suffocating hopelessness I guess.

I loved books like "Lord of the Flies" and "Bless the Beasts and the Children". As I recall they both had tragic endings that left me feeling disturbed.

I noticed my YA Normalish showed up in two rankings the other day on Amazon: Suicide, and Depression. Yes, it deals with both subjects, but it's also really hopeful, I think, which is what readers responded to. And when I wrote it, I wanted to write something that would make the reader feel something. It's not overwhelming, though.

Life is a mixture of emotions--usually not all sad and depressing--which can be mixed in to break up the heaviness. And just because the subject is serious doesn't mean the book has to be bogged down in that emotion.

As the reader, I've got to have hope that the MC will prevail in some way, or else I'm going to be pretty unhappy in the end.

lemonhead said:

I have a gift--not for melodrama, but for suffocating hopelessness.

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Thanks much! I just found my epitaph!

I just thought of a book--not YA but read by many, many young adults--1984. The ending absolutely destroyed me. But it left its mark on me, and I thought about it for days afterwards. If it would have had the standard Hollywood happy ending, would it have had the impact on society that it's had?

I dunno if this is related to the discussion, if it's not, forgive me, but whenever we get into discussions about depressing books or angst, I think of the book http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Push_(novel) Yeah, sorry, someday I'll learn how to do links on this site.

But anyway, for those too lazy to click the link, Push is about a sixteen-year-old girl named Precious. At sixteen, she's obese, illiterate, and pregnant with her second child as a result of being raped by her father. In addition to all this, her mother beats her and hates her for "stealing" her man. Later on in the novel, Precious finds out that as a result of her father raping her, she's now HIV positive and given that Push is set in the eighties before all those drug cocktails were developed to keep the disease in check, that means despite all her efforts to make a better life for herself and her children, Precious's future is uncertain at best.

I admit the first time I read the book, I was kind of repulsed by it. It's a very graphic book and between this and all the stuff that happens to Precious, well I found myself thinking that all this abuse was a little over the top. After all, when giving your character a tragic backstory, it's seldom a good idea to give them every trauma under the sun; otherwise they cease to be a character and just come across as an object for the writer to heap abuse on.

But when the movie came out, on another message board we discussed it. Someone, I don't know who, but they worked in social services or DHS or something and they said something interesting that helped me look at the book in a new light. She/he said that they didn't consider the abuse to be too much because in their experience in dealing with abusive/toxic families, it's never just one thing that's wrong with the family. It's never a case of "Okay the father rapes his daughter, but the mother is kind and caring and not at all affected by a lifetime of abuse herself." Usually when something's wrong, the whole thing's wrong.

Again, still wouldn't put Push in my top ten books list. Heck, still not sure I want to read it again. But after hearing that comment, I could look at it in a new light. The author, Sapphire, crafts a unique and compelling voice for her character and Precious doesn't just sit and moan; when the opportunity comes along for her to improve her life, she takes it. Also the ending...where it's mostly up and the air and you don't know exactly how it's going to end...it kind of works.

Still probably won't read the sequel she wrote to the book. If I learned anything from The Giver quartet, it is that sometimes a story is best when the ending is still up in the air and can go either way depending on the reader's mood.

I don't think a young adult book can be too depressing. Sometimes there will be kids whose lives are just as depressing as the book and they will read it and feel like they are not alone in the world. They can relate and commiserate with the character. As a depressed high school kid I remember reading, "The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man In The Moon Marigolds" and "The Steppenwolf" and found them to be very depressing, but related to the characters in such a way that they probably saved my life, most likely because in both stories you experience a sense of hope in the end.

Kevin Brooks's The Bunker Diary is pretty depressing, and it won the Carnegie Medal.

But the answer to this is, tragic and/or dark material, if done properly, isn't depressing but cathartic. That one goes back to the ancient Greek dramatists.

If the material is made depressing for the sake of depressing people it would severely limit the number of people who enjoy and/or draw influence from it.

Personally, I've never been a fan of depressing stories, but I can recognise when it may be a legitimate choice. There are some dark things going on in the world, and it's not a bad thing to write about such subjects, and with some things it would be kind of insulting if the book weren't at least somewhat depressing. I wouldn't want to write something myself which didn't have some note of hope in it, but sometimes having a depressing ending can really drive the point home. I say I don't like depressing stories, but at the same time having something which is all bleak and sad all the way through, then suddenly having a happy ending can be a bit odd and unbelievable. Maybe a bittersweet ending is the best option here? The character's life can still be pretty bleak, but have at least one thing go right for them.

I do think that if a book is going to end on a depressing note, then that should be the natural conclusion; as I said, sometimes that's the point, that something is horrible. But sometimes you get books which actually aren't all that depressing in subject matter, and then just go into that mood in the last few chapters. That could probably be used to good effect, but usually when I see it I feel like the writer is just trying to be a bit edgy, rather than taking the story to its logical conclusion.

So yeah, I think depressing - even completely depressing - can be done right and well. I don't think I'll ever like that kind of story, but I can appreciate that. But it's something to be very careful with, and it wouldn't be good to come off like you're being depressing or the sake of it.

I think stories should have an uplifting element. It shouldn't be outright depressing.