Some Thoughts on Angst
Random author advice:
Be mindful of the amount of angst you put in your story! This goes double when it comes to authors who have past experience in fanfiction. There are things that people love in fanfiction that they will hate in a canonical story. You have a lot more leeway to put characters through hell when it comes to fanfiction, because at the end of the day, it’s hypothetical. Your readers are here because they know exactly what you’re going to give them, and they want to see characters they already know and love react to situations that aren’t going to happen in the canon. They have the emotional security to watch characters go through hell, because at the end of the day, they know they can return to canon and the characters will be totally fine.
When you’re writing an original piece, you don’t have that cushion–you ARE the canon. This gives you incredible power, but great power comes with great responsibility. It’s your job to manage the emotional flow of a story. Constant canonical suffering gets exhausting for readers. If you kill a character every page, people won’t be as willing to get attached to any new characters you create. Why care if all of these people are just cannon fodder? I’ve quit a few series’s that I liked initially, because I lost my attachments to the characters and got numb to everything that was supposed to make me feel.
Some angst is good, but working with angst takes nuance. First of all, you need to establish early on that your book is not completely safe for its characters, so readers won’t be completely blindsided when things go wrong. Secondly, you need to space out angst with lightheartedness! Give your characters (and your readers) a chance to recover and regroup. The characters need to have a reason to keep fighting, and if life is pure despair, you risk everyone losing a sense of what matters. Thirdly, you need to make sure you are using a balanced hand when you distribute violence and tragedy. Don’t dump all the pain on one character, and leave some characters less affected–they need to be able to support each other. Finally, be careful about who you decide to kill, when you do kill characters! Killing a fan favorite for shock value is going to give you angry readers who are not as attached to your story. Kill characters who might be important to the protagonist, so the angst has depth, but who are a bit more distant from your reader.
This has been my thoughts on angst! I would love to hear your thoughts!
P.S. Some of this is second-draft stuff, so don’t worry if your book is a little heavy on the angst side right now! You can add in scenes of healing, decide to send a character to jail instead of death in order to remove them from the action for now, and play with character dynamics and developments in round two. Get it on the page and then work with the nuances!
