There Is Only One Way to Make Someone Cry
I’ve made my wife cry twice in my life.
On December 28, 2004, Elysha and I ascended the stairs in Grand Central Station, her self-described favorite room in the world. When we reached the top of the staircase, I pulled her to a stop. A police officer appeared almost instantly and told us to keep moving. “You’re blocking the stairs,” she said.
I dropped to one knee.
“Oh,” the officer said. She smiled and stepped back.
I was holding a book that I had been reading on the train. Wanting to take Elysha’s hands in my own, I turned and handed the book to the police officer. “Hold this,” I whispered. The officer nodded and smiled.
I turned back to Elysha. Tears were already filling her eyes. “Elysha Green,” I said. “Will you marry me?”
Tears ran down her cheeks as I removed the jewelry box from my coat pocket and lifted the lid, presenting her with an engagement ring. She wept as I put it on her finger.
A second later, shouts erupted from the bottom of the stairs. About twenty-five of our friends, hiding in the holiday crowd, had witnessed the proposal firsthand. When they burst into cheers, they were immediately surrounded by National Guard soldiers. The country was on alert level extra-super-ultra-orange, and the soldiers were on high alert. One of my friends, a police officer, quickly defused the situation, and our principal and friend Plato, who would serve as the minister at our wedding two years later, charged up the stairs first, taking two and three steps at a time. He was pumping his fist in the air and cheering.
Elysha saw him first. Still weeping, she said, “Plato? What are you doing here?”
Soon we were surrounded by friends and family congratulating us. We all went to lunch and then walked to Rockefeller Center as snow began to fall so we could pose for photos underneath the Christmas tree.
For the record, Elysha never said yes to my proposal of marriage. She only cried. To this day, I’m still waiting for an answer.
The second time I made Elysha cry was about two years later. I was sitting at my desk, correcting papers alongside a student-teacher when my phone rang. I rarely receive calls during the school day, but since my students were in art class, I picked up the phone to see who was calling. A California number.
“That’s weird,” I said to my student-teacher. “Who lives in California?”
I answered the call. It was my literary agent, calling to tell me that Doubleday had made an offer on my first novel, Something Missing. I didn’t even know that she had sent the book to publishers.
It was an offer for more money than I had ever seen in my life. More money than I could ever have imagined for a story that I had made up in my head. She explained the specifics of a deal. Negotiations were still ongoing. She wanted to retain international rights. But the basics of the deal were in place. The book was sold. I listened in disbelief. When I finally hung up the phone, I was shaking.
“What?” my student-teacher asked.
“I can’t tell you,” I told her. “Elysha has to be first.”
I ran to Elysha’s classroom, only one door down from my own, but the room was empty. Her students were in music class. She was somewhere in the building. So began my frantic search through the school for my wife.
As I ran past the office, Plato saw me. “What’s wrong?” he asked, looking worried.
“Can’t say,” I said. “Elysha first.”
I ran into Cindy and Justine, two women who had served as bridesmaids in our wedding the previous year. “What’s your deal?” Cindy asked as I charged past them.
“Not now,” I said.
I checked the lunchroom. The copy room. The music room. I finally found Elysha in a hallway behind the auditorium. “What’s up, honey?” she asked.
“Stop,” I said. I took her by the shoulders. “Just listen.” I told her the news. I had spoken about two sentences when she collapsed to the floor in tears. The money wasn’t going to make us rich by any stretch of the imagination, but it was enough to clear our wedding debts and enable us to put a down payment on a home. She cried and cried and cried.
Word quickly spread throughout the school that I had broken up with Elysha in the back hall of the school. After setting the record straight, we celebrated.
That’s it. I’ve made her cry a total of two times in our almost fifteen years together. This is not to say that she hasn’t cried at other times over the course of our relationship. She cried throughout most of our wedding ceremony. She wept at the birth of both of our children. She cried upon the death of each of our two cats, Jack and Owen. She often gets teary-eyed while watching movies and television. Commercials can make her cry. José Saramago’s novel Blindness made her weep almost constantly.
But when it comes to me, I’ve only made her cry twice. Why? And more importantly, how?
The answer is simple: surprise.
With my marriage proposal and the publication of my first novel, I surprised Elysha with unexpected information. Joyous information, but completely unanticipated.
When it comes to storytelling, I believe that surprise is the only way to elicit an emotional reaction from your audience. Whether it’s laughter, tears, anger, sadness, outrage, or any other emotional response, the key is surprise.
This is unlike real life, where many things can give rise to an emotional reaction, and surprise is not always required.
Like Elysha, I cried at the birth of each of our children, not because of surprise (though we waited to be surprised about the sex of each child) but because I was overwhelmed by the instantaneous love I felt for these two new human beings.
Like Elysha, I cried at the death of our cats. I was overcome with grief and sadness for these two beautiful boys who gave us so much love and affection for so many years.
I frequently leap into the arms of total strangers in Gillette Stadium when the Patriots win a close game or score an especially awe-inspiring touchdown. This is almost always the result of a prolonged period of hope, anticipation, nervousness, and excitement.
I wept throughout much of my mother’s funeral. I was overcome by the personal loss as well as by the knowledge that she would never read one of my books or meet any of my children.
Elysha doesn’t know this, but I recently wept in pain over a wisdom tooth that had cracked wide open. The nerve was exposed, but because of bad timing, I had to wait five days for surgery. In the middle of the night, the pain became so unbearable (even with the Vicodin) that I crept downstairs to cry. I didn’t want to worry her.
In real life, there are many reasons to experience an emotional response. But in storytelling, we don’t have the ability to overwhelm an audience with grief. We can’t create prolonged periods of nervousness or excitement. We can’t cause physical pain. We can’t recreate these depths of experience. All we have is words. We must use our words strategically to create and enhance surprise for our audience.
Think about the moments of emotional response in “This Is Going to Suck.” All of them are generated through surprise.
Audiences react with shock and sympathy when my car collides head-on with the Mercedes, mostly because, as terrible as they suspect a head-on collision can be, they don’t expect to discover that my entire bottom row of teeth would be knocked to the back of my mouth or that my head would crash through the windshield. They don’t think my legs would be as ravaged as they are. It’s a surprise. As bad as they may have predicted the accident to be, it’s rare for someone to expect this level of violence and gore.
I enhance this surprise through contrast. I paint a very different picture of the world right before the collision. I talk about my hopes for a perfect Christmas. I describe the picture postcard–like appearance of the homes that I pass. I turn the snow, which will prove to be the cause of my downfall, into something beautiful, blanketing the lawns in white. All of this is done specifically to enhance the surprise of the collision. I’m creating contrast between the moment just before the collision and the moment immediately after. I’m establishing expectations so I can quickly upend them.
Audiences become emotional and often cry upon learning that my friends have filled the waiting room outside the emergency room, because this is also a surprise. They never see it coming. Part of the reason is that I hide important information in the story (more on this in a moment), but it’s also because I accentuate the surprise by stressing the idea that I am alone. I paint the picture of a boy who is badly hurt and completely alone in a place where no one even knows his name. I’ve primed the audience for an emotional response by playing upon their sympathy, empathy, and outrage.
My parents decide to check on the car before checking on me.
The nurses don’t know my name.
It’s two days before Christmas.
I feel utterly alone.
When I say the words, “But I’m not alone, because . . .” audience members will sometimes start crying even before they hear the reason. I’ve primed the pump for surprise.
Audiences also laugh several times during “This Is Going to Suck,” even though it’s not a funny story at all, and in each of these cases, the laughter is an emotional response resulting from a surprise. I’ll explain each of these moments in the next chapter on humor.
How to Ruin Surprise
For you as a storyteller, this means that you need to build surprise into your stories. There must be moments of unexpectedness so that your audience can experience an emotional response to your story.
You may argue that I was able to surprise my audience in “This Is Going to Suck” because my story had surprises already built in. Head-on collision. Death. Friends suddenly appearing in the waiting room.
But this is not true. I will grant that the story contains moments of potential surprise, but almost every story ever told has this kind of potential. It’s up to the storyteller to ensure that these moments are as surprising as possible.
Storytellers often mitigate or even ruin surprise by making some simple mistakes or failing to accentuate or enhance the potential surprise of the moment.
Common mistakes that storytellers make that ruin surprise include:
Presenting a thesis statement prior to the surprise.
This often takes the form of an opening sentence that gives away all that is surprising about the story.
“This is a story about a time in my life when my friends became my family.”
“This is a story about a car accident so serious that it took my life, if only for a moment.”
“This is the story of a waiting room full of surprise guests.”
It sounds ridiculous, I know, but this is done all the time, both onstage and in less formal situations. People feel the need to open their stories with thesis statements, either in an effort to grab the audience’s attention with a loaded statement or (more likely) because this is how they were taught to write in school: thesis statement, followed by supporting evidence and details.
But storytelling is the reverse of the five-paragraph essay. Instead of opening with a thesis statement and then supporting it with evidence, storytellers provide the evidence first and then sometimes offer the thesis statement later only when necessary. This is how we allow for surprise.
The same holds true for smaller moments of surprise within stories. For example, in describing the way my grandmother pulled my teeth, I have two choices:
My grandmother tied a length of string around my loose tooth. She leaned in close so our two faces were just inches apart. She told me to look her straight in the eyes. “Don’t blink,” she warned. Then she wrapped the other end of the string around her fist, raised it between our noses, smiled, and pulled down. Hard.
My grandmother was a sadist.
Option #2
My grandmother was a sadist.
She tied a length of string around my loose tooth. She leaned in close so our two faces were just inches apart. She told me to look her straight in the eyes. “Don’t blink,” she warned. Then she wrapped the other end of the string around her fist, raised it between our noses, smiled, and pulled down. Hard.
See the difference? In option #1, the thesis statement comes at the end of the paragraph, allowing for my grandmother’s method of pulling my teeth to be as surprising as possible. That thesis statement “My grandmother was a sadist” also probably adds a laugh at the end to punctuate the moment.
Referring to any grandmother as a sadist is surprising. These two words are rarely pushed together, and therefore the statement, if delivered well, is probably funny.
Option #2 strips the moment of its potential surprise. It alerts the audience to the horror that is coming. “My grandmother was a sadist.” The audience knows that whatever follows will not be pretty. The actual method of tooth removal may still be surprising, but not nearly as much as in option #1.
Thesis statements ruin the surprise every time. In storytelling, our job is to describe action, dialogue, and thought. It is never our job to summarize these things.
Failing to take advantage of the power of stakes to enhance and accentuate surprise.
Remember in “Charity Thief” when I put a Backpack on my audience before I enter that gas station? I describe my plan for begging for gas in great detail. It sounds like a plausible idea. Probable, even. My audience is rooting for me. They expect me to get the gas I need. I know this because when I tell this story in workshops, I see the same reaction every time I say, “But the kid won’t give me the gas.”
Shoulders slump. Faces contort in anger. People groan. They shake their heads in disgust. They experience an emotional reaction very similar to the one I experienced that day.
Why? They are surprised. They wanted my plan to work. They expected it to work. It sounds like something that should have worked.
If I don’t explain my plan before I enter the gas station, no one is surprised if the kid says no. He should say no. Who gives away free gas? It’s only when I load up my audience with a complete description of my plan, as well as all my hopes and dreams, that they experience the surprise of the refusal.
The same thing happens later in that story, when I say, “Hi, I’m Matt, and I’m collecting money for Ronald McDonald Children’s Charities.” It’s the most surprising moment of the story. People either gasp or laugh when they hear me say those words. If you’ll remember, I accentuate this surprise with a Breadcrumb and an Hourglass. I give a hint about what is to come (a crumpled McDonald’s uniform), and I make the audience wait forever to hear it by slowing my speech and adding enormous amounts of unnecessary description and repetition.
Can you imagine how less surprising the moment would be if I had climbed into my car, spotted the crumpled McDonald’s uniform, and said, “I know. I’m going to go door-to-door pretending to be a charity worker.” Still surprising, perhaps, but not nearly so.
Yet this is what many storytellers do. Rather than seeking ways to make the surprise even more surprising, they kill the surprise through a failure to accentuate it. They fail to take advantage of the power of stakes to make something that is potentially surprising truly surprising.
Failing to hide critical information in a story.
As storytellers, we must hide pertinent information from our audiences to allow the surprise to pay off later. I often refer to this as planting a bomb in a story that will explode when the time is right.
In “This Is Going to Suck,” the bomb that I plant is the moment that I ask the nurse to call McDonald’s to tell my manager that I can’t make it to work. This is important. It’s critical to the story. It’s the reason why my friends know about the accident and make their way to the emergency room. But I don’t want my audience to foresee these events, so I hide this important moment in two ways:
Hiding the Bomb in the Clutter
We hide these important moments by making them seem unimportant. We do this by hiding critical information among other details. We make the important information seem no more important than the rest of the information by pushing it all together.
In the case of “This Is Going to Suck,” I turn my all-important request for the nurse to call McDonald’s into just another detail by placing it amid a series of doctors’ and nurses’ interactions with me. Rather than highlighting the encounter, I add it to a long list:
Nurses picking glass from my forehead
Dental surgeons wiring teeth
Doctors prepping my knees for surgery
A nurse asking for contact information
See what I did? It’s a critical moment in the story, essential to all that is to come, but I portray the nurse as just another medical professional doing another job. Oftentimes I will load a portion of a story with superfluous information simply to hide the one important bit of information that I need the audience to know but not yet recognize as important. I clutter the landscape so that the audience can’t tell what is important and what is not.
Camouflage
I also camouflage the bomb within a laugh. Laughter is the best camouflage, because it is also an emotional response, and audience members assume that the laugh is the result of the storyteller’s wanting to be funny.
This is never the case. Comedians want to be funny. Great storytellers want to be remembered. For this reason, they deploy laughter strategically. I’ll talk more about this in the next chapter, but when it comes to preserving surprise, laughter is an excellent way to hide something important that needs to surprise the audience later on.
In “This Is Going to Suck,” I ask the nurse to call McDonald’s (a fact I want to hide), so then I say, “[The nurse] looks at me as if I’m crazy, which I kind of am. I was dead twenty minutes ago and now I’m worried about work, but that drive-through does not run well without me, and they’re going to have to get someone in.”
That laugh line draws attention away from the importance and relevance of this moment. It makes the moment feel like a storyteller’s attempt at a joke instead of the conveying of a critical bit of information.
This is an exceptionally important concept in storytelling. If you can’t hide critical details and preserve the surprise, the audience sees it coming a mile away. In that case, you may as well not even tell your story.
I tell a story about the time my girlfriend’s father surprised me by serving me my pet rabbit on Thanksgiving.
When I’m twenty years old, Bengi and I decide to buy a pair of rabbits and keep them in the house as pets in hopes that girls would think this sweet and like us more.
It kind of works. Girls come over to see the rabbits and hang out for the rest of the day. I don’t know if they like me more, but they hang around our apartment longer and more often, which is great for me. My primary means of attracting girls has always been proximity. I stand as close to a girl as possible as long as possible, hoping to wear her down. I crack jokes and tell stories, and eventually the girl might turn my way.
Sounds silly, I know, but remember this: Elysha fell in love with me while our classrooms were separated by about twenty-five feet of hallway. Proximity. It’s genius.
Bengi and I train the rabbits to use a litter box, feed them rabbit food in cereal bowls, and basically give them the run of the house.
A few months later, the rabbits begin chewing incessantly through the electrical cords on the TV and lamps, so we decide it’s time for them to move on. My girlfriend’s father keeps rabbits in a large hutch behind his house, so when he hears about my problem, he offers to take them off our hands. I’m thrilled.
Then he feeds the rabbit to me at Thanksgiving dinner. I didn’t know it at the time, but my girlfriend’s father is Portuguese, and the Portuguese eat rabbit the same way I eat chicken. Nor did I realize that my girlfriend’s father raised rabbits to sell to local restaurants. To him, a rabbit is nothing more than a food source.
Still, he knew the rabbit was my pet. He understood the difference. He thought he was being funny. It was a terrible thing to do.
The trick of the story is to not allow the audience to foresee me eating my rabbit until the moment I take my first bite of the stew. I need it to be a surprise. It’s not easy.
I maintain the surprise in the story by hiding the rabbit in a laundry list of things I do to try to impress my girlfriend’s father, who is manlier than I will ever be. Bonding over his adoption of my rabbit is just one of many ways that I try to earn this man’s respect and admiration and perhaps become the kind of man I’ve always wanted to be.
I hide the rabbit in the clutter of the story. I make my rabbit just one of the details (and an amusing one, using laughter as camouflage) instead of the most important element of the story, which it truly is. So when my girlfriend’s father asks, “What do you think about the stew?” the audience still doesn’t know that I’m eating my rabbit, because it doesn’t feel like a story about a rabbit.
“It’s good,” I say. “I like it.”
My girlfriend’s father smiles and says, “You should like it because . . .” That is the moment when the audience realizes that I am eating my rabbit, just one second before I realized it back in 1991. When I told the story for the first time, the audience gasped in horror. One of them shouted, “No! No!”
By hiding the rabbit in the story, and by making it no less obvious than any other detail, I was able to maintain the surprise and give my audience the emotional reaction that the story demanded.
In another animal-related story, a couple whose wedding I DJed decided to name their dog after me because I was “the most fun person they had ever met.”
I’m not kidding. It was one of the best days of my life.
By the way, keep in mind that my DJ partner’s name is Bengi. The couple could have named their dog after the guy who is named after a dog, but instead they named their dog after me. I am an objectively fun person.
At the end of the story, Matty the dog unbelievably moves into the apartment below mine. Matty the man ends up living above Matty the dog. What are the odds?
I want my audience to be as surprised as I am when I discover this. Therefore, like the rabbit, the story can’t be about Matty the dog, and it’s not. It’s really a story about my pending divorce from my first wife and my belief that my life is probably over.
When, at the end of the story, Matty the dog arrives at the apartment below mine, his leash isn’t being held by the bride’s husband. The groom is nowhere to be found. Instead she is standing beside the best man from the wedding.
Yes. She left her husband for the best man, and she took the dog with her.
It’s a story about realizing that perhaps I didn’t have it so bad after all. Somewhere in the world, there is a man who has lost his wife, his best friend, and his dog. Despite my pending divorce, I still had my best friend, Bengi, and I still had my dog, and maybe, just maybe, I still had a future.
But the story doesn’t work without surprise. When the dog appears (along with the bride and best man), you need to be surprised that it’s Matty the dog. You need to be surprised that it’s the bride. You need to be surprised that it’s the best man. You can’t see any of this coming.
So, as with the rabbits, I hide the dog early in the story as an example of why I am an objectively fun person even though my ex-wife is complaining that I am boring. “How can I be boring when a couple named their dog after me because I am the most fun person they know?”
Just like that, the dog becomes a detail rather than a major plot point. I tuck the dog in between other details about the problems in our marriage, to obscure it even further.
I also place the dog early in the story, as far away from the payoff as possible, and I use that line “The couple could have named the dog after the guy who is named after a dog, but instead they named the dog after me” to punctuate the moment with a laugh, further obscuring the importance that the dog will play later.
Just a funny detail. Not the most important detail in the whole damn story.
When I tell the story, the audience realizes that it’s Matty the dog at the last possible second, only after I’ve identified the woman who is moving into the apartment as the bride. The dog appears, and the audience smiles, realizing what’s happening. Matty the dog is moving in below Matty the man. This moment usually gets a laugh.
But the surprises aren’t over yet, though the audience thinks so. It’s not until I fail to see the groom but rather spot the best man that the audience puts two and two together and the laughter quickly transitions into audible groans. Emotional response achieved by preserving the surprise in the story and maximizing it to its greatest effect.
To review, the strategies for preserving and enhancing surprise in a story:
1. Avoid thesis statements in storytelling.
2. Heighten the contrast between the surprise and the moment just before the surprise.
3. Use stakes to increase surprise.
4. Avoid giving away the surprise in your story by hiding important information that will pay off later (planting bombs). This is done by:
• Obscuring them in a list of other details or examples.
• Placing them as far away from the surprise as possible.
• When possible, building a laugh around them to further camouflage their importance.