NOTE: The following is a revised version of an article originally published on Medium, where I’ve published a number of writing advice pieces.

Warning: Contains spoilers for Legends of the Fall, The Godfather Part II, Oedipus Rex, The Remains of the Day, The Illusionist, The Empire Strikes Back, and Blackadder Goes Forth.

Several years ago, I went to see Legends of the Fall. The film featured fine direction from Edward Zwick, an A-list cast that included Anthony Hopkins, Brad Pitt, Julia Ormond, and Henry Thomas, and gorgeous, Oscar-winning cinematography courtesy of John Toll. I hoped for a sweeping, epic tear-jerker, but it turned out to be one of the most unsuccessful attempts at tragedy I have ever seen on film. The screenplay features poorly motivated, unconvincing characters, who then have tragedy upon tragedy piled upon them. The ludicrous escalation of misfortune becomes numbing, and eventually even funny.

Throughout the film, I was acutely aware of the audience’s emotional response. The first great tragedy occurs with the death of Henry Thomas’s character in World War I. Audience reaction: Sombre silence, but no-one was particularly upset, as we didn’t have a handle on who he was enough to miss him.

This was merely the first act. Another tragedy occurred shortly afterward. Then another, and another, until I heard disgruntled snorts from fellow patrons. Towards the end, when the character played by Anthony Hopkins has a debilitating stroke, the audience finally erupted with derisive laughter. Why? Because we’d been bludgeoned over the head with an unrelenting stream of big tragic events, to the point where it was absurd to expect us to be upset any longer.

Legends of the Fall contained none of the counterpoint vital to generating a satisfying tragic tale, comedic or otherwise. Before explaining how and why such counterpoint works, I am going to explore two different tragedies, and why counterpoint is essential to the success of all tragic writing. This applies whether they are based on irony, fatal character flaws, circumstantial disaster, or other traditional English literature definitions.

The Tragedy Spectrum

“I used to be partial to tragedy in my youth, until experience taught me life was tragic enough without my having to write about it.” — Amon, Clash of the Titans.

I cite the above quotation not because I agree with it (although I share the sentiment to a degree), but because it hints at the two kinds of tragedy, we invariably encounter in stories. If it is your ambition to write impactful, meaningful, convincing tragic drama, whether for stage, television, film or in prose, you must first decide what kind of tragedy you wish to write. I have devised what I term the Tragedy Spectrum.

Melodramatic Tragedy

At one end of the spectrum, we have what I loosely term “melodramatic tragedy”. This deals with the accidentally killing-one’s-father, marrying-one’s-mother, and gouging-one’s-eyes-out kind of tragedy. It is big, melodramatic, and often overheated. Not that it can’t be interesting, convincing, and moving. Sometimes a blunt instrument is the most effective tool, but it has to be well deployed. With Legends of the Fall, it was not.

However, with Sophocles’s Oedipus Rex (flippantly alluded to above), it works. It also works in everything from Shakespeare’s Hamlet and Romeo and Juliet, to great novels including Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights, Thomas Hardy’s Far from the Madding Crowd, and Thomas Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur. Many films also feature successful uses of melodramatic tragedy, including Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather Part II and Baz Luhrmann’s Moulin Rouge.

These narratives feature large-scale tragedies that wear their hearts on their sleeves, attempting to make the biggest potential impact on the audience. Whether Hamlet’s bloody vengeance, resulting in the deaths of most of the key characters, or King Arthur’s tragic fall at the hands of his bastard son Mordred, or Michael Corleone deciding to murder his own brother, these stories exist squarely at the melodramatic end of the scale.

This kind of tragedy we are mercifully unlikely to experience. Most of us aren’t destined to unknowingly murder our fathers, sleep with our mothers, and gouge our eyes out. Nor are we likely to discover our uncle has murdered our father, undertaking procrastinating vengeance that winds up with the deaths of our entire family, whilst others around us go insane and commit suicide for good measure. Nor are we likely to become the head of a mafia organisation and commit fratricide to consolidate our power. These kinds of tragedies, when well-written, make for a gripping, dramatic story we can enjoy from a safe distance, knowing it is exceptionally unlikely we will one day find ourselves in the protagonist’s shoes.

Private Tragedy

At the other end of the spectrum, we have what I call “private tragedy”. This deals with more intimate, everyday, small-scale heartbreak and loss. As Henry David Thoreau famously put it: “Most men lead lives of quiet desperation”. These tragedies rarely involve lurid sexual sins, gruesome revenge, and Grand Guignol body counts. But they are quietly devastating to those concerned. This kind of tragedy we are likelier to or inevitably will experience; the tragedy of small, mundane, seemingly insignificant events that only spell despair for the person or people directly involved.

Quiet desperation narratives include Susan Hill’s sublime collection of short stories A Bit of Singing and Dancing. Or novels such as Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day, David Nicholl’s One Day, and films including Sylvain Chomet’s The Illusionist, Yojiro Takita’s Departures, Luca Guadagnino’s Call Me By Your Name, and Marc Foster’s Finding Neverland.

The Remains of the Day is about the tragedy of wasted lives. Butler Stevens misses his opportunity for happiness with housekeeper Miss Kenton, out of misguided loyalty to an equally misguided Nazi appeasing master. The gradual realisation of the appalling personal cost to himself unfolds throughout the narrative, which is told in flashback.

The Illusionist is interesting because it taps into tragedy all inevitably experience: Wistful nostalgia at the passing of an era. The music hall magician in that film finds himself increasingly upstaged by the rise of rock bands in the late 1950s. Along with other music hall acts, he gradually becomes obsolete. An achingly sad tale.

Counterpoint and Humour

One of the most important narrative techniques when writing any fiction is to use counterpoint. The best writing emphasises conflict, contrast, differing views, and opposing ideas. To write tragedy convincingly, there must be something tugging against it. Some optimism. A note of hope. Regardless of how relentless and miserable real life may be, it often contains moments of absurd humour. To deny humour a place in a tragedy is to deny reality, which is why a story like Legends of the Fall rings hollow.

The Illusionist works because the magician is accompanied by a naïve assistant girl who believes his magic is real. Her innocent beliefs are destined to be shattered, but her own coming-of-age, culminating in her attracting the attention of a young man, shows a happy future. This subplot provides an undercurrent of optimism amid the melancholia of the main plot.

The devastating heartbreak at the core of The Remains of the Day would be too much to bear if it weren’t for the gentle humour in the story, regarding Stevens’s hilarious fastidious, uptight character. One moment where he is instructed to convey the facts of life to his master’s godson is hilarious. Yet throughout the narrative, audience response to the absurd repression of Stevens’s character gradually moves from laughter to tears.

Hamlet has several amusing and witty subplots; for instance, the bumbling pompousness of Polonius, who seems unable to take his own advice (“Give every man thine ear, but few thy voice”). Wuthering Heights gains much tragic power because it is told through the eyes of the unreliable narrator Mr. Lockwood, whose slightly comical emotional timidity stands in stark contrast to the raging passions of the main protagonists. F Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby pulls off a similar trick.

Baz Luhrmann drenches Moulin Rouge in surreal, outrageous humour, making the final tragic loss even more potent. The Godfather Part II is a sombre, brooding film, but it finds time for upbeat and comedic moments, particularly in the flashback sections to the young Vito Corleone in early 20th Century New York (the carpet theft, for instance).

The Empire Strikes Back is generally regarded as the finest Star Wars film, yet it is also one of the darkest and most downbeat. Luke Skywalker struggles not just against external evil, but the evil in himself, as revealed in the terrible secret of the Skywalker family line. Han Solo ends up frozen in carbonite, with possibilities of unfreezing parole looking increasingly unlikely as he’s spirited off to Jabba the Hutt. Our heroes don’t win. They merely survive, by the skin of their teeth, to fight another day. All of which is leavened by the hilarious, screwball comedy of the Han/Leia romance (“Would it help if I got out and pushed?”).

Even something as serious as Schindler’s List has funny moments peppered amid the horrific events. Scenes such as Schindler’s secretary montage, to his darkly comic asides with Nazi bureaucrats (“I think I can guarantee you’ll both be in Southern Russia before the end of the week”), makes the appalling tragedy even more believable and powerful. No one would be foolish enough to describe Schindler’s List as funny, but these tiny moments provide important glimmers of humanity amid one of the darkest chapters in humanity’s history.

A superb example of comedy as a counterpoint to tragedy occurs in the TV series Blackadder Goes Forth. After six hilarious episodes satirising the absurdity of the trenches of World War I, the principal characters meet their deaths in a hail of machine-gun bullets after they are ordered to advance. Their slow-motion, doomed attempt to cross no-man’s-land dissolves into a quiet field of poppies; one of the most shattering television finales I have ever seen. As a testament to the horrifying tragedy of the First World War, it leaves Legends of the Fall in the dust.

Conclusion

I expect some of you are thinking tragedy in life isn’t funny. I don’t wish to argue with anyone’s personal experience, but rendering tragedy in a satisfying narrative is a different matter. Besides, my experience is that even the most tragic real-life situations can contain moments of dark comedy. For example, at my father’s funeral, I experienced a farcical “shoe malfunction” that would have had my father in stitches. Such real-life experiences have only underlined my belief in the storytelling counterpoint principle.

Deliberately omitting humour from tragedy makes for a one-note tale that is depressing for all the wrong reasons, especially if said tale comprises little more than the repetition of endless tragedy. Such stories actually end up becoming unintentionally comic because they are so absurd, as the audience reaction I witnessed to Legends of the Fall shows. A tragic story that uses counterpoint judiciously and wisely, especially comedic counterpoint, will win over even the most tragedy-averse viewer or reader. My point boils down to this simple takeaway: If you make an audience laugh at your character, they will like them. Therefore, they will feel for them when you place them in tragic situations.