This was originally published on Tumblr on November 8, 2024.

One of my greatest fears as a writer is being labeled melodramatic. I tend to write emotionally charged works, but the instant that it veers into melodrama, people shut off – or worse, find your heartfelt piece a hilarious comedy.

I want to avoid this, and I imagine you do too, especially if you also deal with heavy themes. Melodrama can feel insulting to survivors of whatever trauma you are dealing with, making it all the more essential that you keep your work realistic.

As always, this is just my opinion from what I’ve learned over 15+ years of writing – and excising melodrama from my work. (A lot of my earliest stories were indeed melodramatic. I have learned much since then.)

Take what resonates with you and leave the rest. With that caveat, let’s go.

What is melodrama in writing?

Literary Terms describes melodrama like this:

In literature and theater, a melodrama is a work with exaggerated, sensational events and characters. It is highly emotional, focusing on exciting but over-the-top situations that are designed to encourage emotional responses in the audience. Strong characterization is not a feature of melodrama; rather, characters are assigned stereotypical or simple roles, often in “good versus evil” situations. The genre gave life to the widely used term melodramatic, used to describe something overly dramatic or emotional. For example, if your friend was crying hysterically about breaking her new sunglasses, you’d probably tell her she was “being melodramatic.”

Melodrama is about the situations and how people react to them.

Not only is everything way too intense, with no downtime, but every character always reacts to every single thing as if it’s the worst thing to ever happen in their entire life, despite the fact that we saw their fiancee get blown up in the last chapter.

In essence, you are taping down the Dopamine Button on your reader’s brains, forcing them to react over and over again with the highest possible emotional resonance. But, as anyone who has been in a stressful situation can tell you, the reader will inevitably get burned out from all this intensity and stop caring.

Symptoms of melodrama

Mythcreants has an excellent writeup that gives more examples; it also explains a bit about how to avoid melodrama, but I’m going to go into more concrete examples than they do.

Every single page has a major plot twist or action sequence.

You’d think that you never want to be there a dull moment in your writing, but that’s actually not true. Your readers need a bit of time to breathe in between twists. If the character’s partner got blown up and then they immediately had to run from the law, it’s too much. Give everyone a break.

The reader is told how to feel.

We are expected to think everything is terrible because you tell us everything is terrible. Characters always react in the most intense ways possible, usually in excruciating detail.

There is little to the characters beyond their responses to everything.

Characters in melodramas do not have agency; they are reacting to the plot rather than forming it. Things happen to them, and they respond, but they don’t do much else.

Some characters are extremely emotional and others are totally emotionless. You’ll have a wailing banshee (usually a woman) who panics constantly, and a stern stoic badass (usually a man) who doesn’t respond to anything ever.

People form attachments to one another way too quickly.

It’s really not normal to fall in love at first sight, no matter what anyone tries to tell you. Yet in a melodrama, people become devoted soulmates the instant they meet and throw away everything to be with this person who they barely know. This is a major problem in romances.

Everyone has the worst backstory ever.

It’s okay to have characters with sad backstories; I think most of us do this to our characters. The key is the density of their terrible backstories. Not everyone can have the worst life either, nor can they all collect every trauma like Pokemon.

The plot is powered by Murphy’s Law.

Anything that could possibly go wrong does, usually in the most impropable ways. Tiberius Wolferson is just about to cut the correct wire on the bomb, but then suddenly a poisonous snake wriggles over the wires and bites him, and he clips the wrong wire.

He survives the blast somehow, but now he’s paralyzed by snake poison and everyone that could save him is now dead, and he’s going to die an agonizing death surrounded by the aerosolized bodies of everyone he ever loved.

Simultaneously, there are ridiculous Deus Ex Machinas.

The beautiful heroine just happens to be on her way to Cancer Cure Technologies when her super-sensitive hearing catches the slight rumble of the explosion that happened in a bomb-proof safe ten stories down. She charms her way into the building and rescues Tiberius in the nick of time.

That’s annoying and unrealistic. Let Tiberius sort himself out, damn.

How to avoid melodrama

Alright, so let’s figure out how to avoid all this nonsense.

Assume readers are intelligent

I say this all the time, and it is true for melodrama too. Writers may write in a dramatic fashion because they believe their readers are too stupid to recognize subtler emotions, so they have to make it as glaringly obvious as possible that a character is angry, scared, etc.

When I write, I assume that readers are going to pick up on the subtler emotions, so I don’t need to spell it out in capital letters every time. If I’m not sure whether I’m doing it right, I’ll add a second emphasis in the same ‘key.’

Become mindful

Notice how people deal with stressful situations. Most adults don’t have crying jags or screaming fits on the regular unless we’re so emotionally dysregulated that we’re incapable of self-soothing. We learned, over decades of practice, how to rein it in.

Of course, sometimes adults do freak out like that, but it’s rare, and they are the kind of people we avoid – or laugh at.

If you’re writing adult characters, then you need them to act like adults: not children throwing themselves on the floor and having tantrums all the time. Otherwise, you are crossing into melodramatic territory, and everyone will wonder how these people got to the age of majority while acting like that.

Pick a few traumas and stick with them

In my series, Uileac and Cerie Korviridi saw their parents murdered in front of them. They were then taken in by two different organizations: Uileac to the War Academy, where he trains as a warrior, and Cerie to the High Poet Society where she learns poetry magic.

Despite the dubious morality of child soldiers, Uileac is treated well at the War Academy in 9 Years Yearning. The teachers there are strict, but they’re not beating the shit out of their charges, nor is Uileac getting incessantly bullied by everyone. In fact, we see that he’s pretty well-liked by his peers, and he looks back at that time with fondness.

It would have been melodramatic to have this poor little waif thrown into the War Academy and then forced to lick toilets or whatever. By avoiding more trauma, we get to see him as a person.

Focus on internal reactions

One of the problems of melodrama is that we see a lot of external reactions but not a lot of internal ones. Characters are emoting at full blast, but we don’t understand what they are thinking and feeling. As such, the characterization is weak and everyone feels like Barbie dolls smashed into one another.

For example, here’s a short passage from my second book, Pride Before a Fall, where Orrinir is in a terrible mood:

Maybe he shouldn’t have come. Facing anyone he recognized right now seemed excruciating, more like picking at his callouses until he stripped half the flesh.

But then again, ripping someone to shreds for daring to look at him wrong also sounded appetizing. His veins were crackling with nervous energy, and he felt dusted with sweat despite the foggy breeze.

Orrinir doesn’t have much outward-facing emotion in this scene: all he’s doing is walking to the pub and dreading the thought of talking to his friends. But we can see that he has a rich internal world, and so we don’t need him to do anything dramatic.

Many of us have had that feeling of being filled with anxious energy, where the very thought of socializing with someone makes us want to rip our faces off. He’s relatable right now, and that makes him likable.

Another reason to focus on internal reactions is that the character can tell us information about a situation through their thought processes. What characters think about, and the way they think it, can tell us a lot about how they perceive the world while also providing readers with important details.

Pair subtler actions together

If a character is blinking hard, grinding their teeth, and breathing through their nose, we can guess that they’re having a strong emotion. The context will tell us whether they want to punch someone or burst into tears.

If you tell us an adult character’s voice cracks, that’s enough. We don’t need them crying or slamming their first down or whatever. The typical adult doesn’t have their voice crack constantly.

Don’t have extreme reactions during a crisis

People who have been in crisis situations can tell you that most of the time, you don’t have the bandwidth to emote. You’re too focused on dealing with whatever’s happening.

As another example from Pride Before a Fall, Orrinir is terrified that his husband is about to cough himself to death, so he doesn’t have time to melt down.

“Love you. Don’t let me die.” The cavalryman’s voice was watered down to near incomprehensibility, but his husband knew him so well.

Never a good sign when Uileac grew needy.

“I won’t. Just rest against me.” Orrinir dared to rub his lover’s back; Uileac relaxed further, so at least one thing was acceptable.

“Hurts. Love you.”

“I know.” Lifting Uileac’s heavy head, he pressed their lips together, unsurprised when his husband barely registered the touch. “That fucking horse.”

Notice also that their dialogue is very short and choppy. Both of them are incredibly stressed and only have the mental energy for the simplest, most obvious statements. They’re not going on massive monologues.

Use extreme emotions as a treat

Do you always have to avoid sobbing, screaming, throwing things? No. But it should be rare. Someone needs to be pushed to that point over chapters and chapters rather than having that reaction first.

Give readers breathing room between each twist and turn

The problem with melodrama is everything happens so fast that the reader gets whiplash. Two stories can have almost the exact same plot, but one may be melodramatic because it has absolutely no filler in between different scenes, and the other one isn’t because there’s time to catch your breath.

Add decompression stops throughout your story. This is where you can build character development, discuss the world around your characters, and add nuance so you don’t have the boring “good versus evil” trope.

You may believe that these parts are boring and irrelevant, but they aren’t. In fact, having a bit of downtime creates more emotional resonance because we get to see the character closer to their baseline, so their extremes feel intense. We know they aren’t like that all the time, making us react more strongly when they do jump off the deep end.

Think about the aftermath

Anyone who has been in a serious situation before can tell you that you feel like shit for days or even weeks afterward, depending on the severity. Show us this! Let us see your characters rolling around in a total daze, absolutely wrecked!

This is not only more realistic, but it allows for deeper characterization and offers readers some decompression time.

Not everything should get an intense response

This is especially true if you have a character in a DV situation. Having grown up in a violent household, I can tell you that sometimes I just kind of checked out and did not care. I was not screaming and crying every time something bad happened.

No one can live on pure adrenaline 24/7 or we will straight up die. Sometimes your characters will not have the emotional capacity to react strongly to something. By having them not respond in the way that would be considered normal, you demonstrate that they have become immune to the abuse. It’s almost sadder, honestly.

It’s not the mountains that wear you down; it’s the grain of sand in your shoe.

I absolutely love this old proverb, and I live by it in my writing.

It’s common for the smaller frustrations to illicit a bigger reaction in a stressful situation; in fact, this actually demonstrates how serious the issue is. Something that would otherwise be a small annoyance is the limit of our patience because we’re pushed to the edge, and we focus all our attention on it because it’s more manageable.

There’s a lot more than goes into avoiding melodrama, but this is a good starting point. If you’re worried that your writing is coming across as a little unrealistic, you can specifically ask beta readers to address this after you’re done.

Over time, you’ll develop your narrative voice and recognize that you don’t need everything dialed to 10293123 at every second of a story – thus doing more with less.