Hey guys, this is a chapter dedicated to the genre of angst. I have the honor of being a judge for The World of Literature 2016 Fan Fiction Awards for the category of Angst. There are a total of 46 nominations that I get to read for and rate. It’s a bit exciting. Anyway, I was supposed to start reading last month or at the start of summer, but I haven’t started quite yet because I was in summer school. Before I start reading and develop a bias, I decided to do a chapter about angst.

So what is angst? It’s basically a feeling of deep anxiety, dread, or worry. Like you know tomorrow someone will bully you and you simply have to wait for it come. It literature, it is more closely related to sad things or drama. You’ve probably heard the term “teenage angst” at some point about a teenager overreacting to something only a teenager would care about.

“The whole world is out to get me! Nobody cares about my problems!” Talk about teenage angst.

Angst is actually one of my favorite “genres” to read. I enjoy a good book or fic that can take a dark turn and make me feel something for my character. Despite how I might sound, I am actually a quite an empathetic person. And that is what angst relies on, empathy.

You have to draw the reader in and make them emotionally care for the character. The character’s pain becomes the readers’ pain. Every struggle, every triumph, every failure. This is the key to writing any good story, but when dealing with emotional characterization and plot, empathy towards the character is essential. If the reader doesn’t care what happens to the character, they could lose a leg and it wouldn’t matter.

A character doesn’t necessarily have to be likable, the reader just needs to be able to feel empathy for them. They need to understand where the character is coming from and why they do and act the way they do. Why does our bullied OC let people bully her? Why does our rich bias feel so lonely? If the reader doesn’t understand the character, then all their emotional drama just seems like that. Drama. Superficial, irrelevant, annoying.

Then you have to gauge how a character would actually act. For instance, I am not the type of person who has “angst”. When bad happens to me I take it on the chin because there will always be another day. I’m a rather stoic person and things don’t really affect me personally. On the other hand, my sister is all kinds of emotional and she deals with angst on a daily basis. If she isn’t calling me for hours to talk about her problems she’s calling our mom. Daily. Guys, she’s nearly 30. On the other hand, I never call home unless it’s for something relevant. Like my tuition being late because I never called home about it needing to be paid. Oops. So it’d be really weird if I called home to talk to my mom about my bad days. That’s not me, I don’t live angst.

It’s the same way with characters in a story. There’s always going to be more emotional characters and more stoic characters. To break it down in the worst way possible, it’s like how men are expected to it up and not cry while women are seen as weak and fragile. Children cry more than adults. Teens suffer so much angst. Of course, angst has less to do with maturity and more to do with how much you can be assaulted by bad before you break.

Normal people are probably less angsty than one would believe. I think that most people in our society learn to hold in their less beautiful emotions and instead display a façade of happiness or good health. Unless you a rather attention seeking person, you don’t go airing your dirty laundry for the public to see. This is why so many people who are suffering never get help. They never ask for it and never let anyone know they are hurting.

So when does that angst finally show? Is it like a dam breaking and the floodgates of tears releasing. A string snapping and a smile dropping? A burst of sadness and depression? Those are all very abrupt and impactful, but I don’t think they’re as effective as a glass gradually filling with water until it overflows and can’t hold anymore. It’s not as effective as a life slowly losing its color until you can’t even remember what the world looked like outside of the dull grays. It’s not as effective as being beaten down and getting up, being beaten down and getting up, being beaten down and never standing again.

Yes, I think the best angst is a gradual buildup of agony that becomes so painful that even a blind man could see it and a deaf man could hear it. Angst isn’t just one moment of sadness. It’s the knowing that whatever you are facing now will continue tomorrow. That loneliness, that pain, that suffering. And when it ends, there are still some lingering remnants of those days. Still an effect on your mind and ability to live life.

This is why angst doesn’t have to be some over the top production of crying and shouting outbreaks. There doesn’t need to be some scene of thrashing and trashing. To me, the most impactful display of angst is when a character is being bombarded by the wind and still tries to stand strongly without bending to the wills of nature. That futile struggle to display “normalcy” or calm while enduring aching insanity. The simple crumbling of a sand castle when it can no longer hold.

Angst can have tears and anger, but there doesn’t have to be a big outburst to show deep emotion.

Lastly, angst can be happy. It should, in fact, have moments of calm and relief. Every person starts to get desensitized to the things happening to them or the characters they are reading about. You can only see the same thing happen so much before you say “do something about it.” It grows old. There has to be a moment when everyone can take a deep breath and smile. When all pain is forgotten and the only thing felt is warmth and hope. Then break that down again and get on with the angst.

When angst ends, I am torn. I like to see a character tortured and suffering, so bitter endings are great, but I also like to see happy endings too. It really depends on what the story is about and the intended effect it’s supposed to have. At the end of the story, was the suffering worth it? Did it do anything, did the character grow, did the story change? Was there a point to it? Or was it just pointless drama that made all us sadists squirm for a day?