In a discussion on the private forum of my online writers group Codex, a thread grew that discussed all the things a writer should not do in his fiction. The thread was fed mainly by editors venting their frustrations about all the ways in which hopeful would-be writers contaminate the slush pile with bad writing. One of the ‘pet peeves’ mentioned was excessive crying, especially before the reader has had a chance to grow empathy with the tear-shedding character.

Having just finished reading ‘The Fionavar Tapestry’ trilogy by Guy Gavriel Kay, I wanted to applaud and cheer this particular pet peeve. There are strong arguments why ‘Fionavar’ should have gotten stuck in the slush pile, the strongest of which was the constant crying, or rather, in Kay’s words, weeping.

Kay stuffed the trilogy so full of drama queens that every time a character started to cry I wanted to stamp my feet and toss whatever volume I was reading out the window. I think it was about twice on every page on average. It got so bad I found myself rooting for the only character in the entire book who didn’t continually have his eyes flooding with tears at no provocation. Of course, that character was Ragoth Maugrim, the Lord of All Evil (Kay’s version of Sauron).

I wept when he was defeated*.

* Should I have put a spoiler alert at the top of this entry? Nah… I’m only giving away that the Lord of All Evil is defeated in the end, and that’s like letting slip that Bruce Willis kills the bad guy at the end of Die Hard X: it does betray the ending, but who expected anything else? As a matter of fact, I would love to read the first 2,000 page fantasy saga in which the Lord of All Evil comes out on top…