# Dramatic vs. Melodramatic



## Kyle R (Oct 4, 2014)

*Dramatic*
exciting or impressive
greatly affecting people's emotions






*Melodramatic*
exaggerated, sensationalized, or overemotional

​How can we distinguish the _dramatic_ from the _melodramatic_ in our fiction? :encouragement:


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## T.S.Bowman (Oct 5, 2014)

If I can't keep a straight face while writing it, chances are it's the latter.


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## InstituteMan (Oct 5, 2014)

I know that the only time melodrama works is when it's intentional. Intentional melodrama can be campy fun, but accidental melodrama is usually unreadable. Which just gets back to Kyle's original question, which I take as figuring out how to avoid the unintentionally melodramatic. I don't have a good answer to that other than diligence in writing.


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## J Anfinson (Oct 5, 2014)

Dramatic is natural. It reads just like the characters are real and not creations. Melodramatic, to me, is cheesy and over-the-top.



> Oh, I feel such shame! Go now, dear Martha, run away and be with the one your heart surely desires! For I cannot hold you back as I have...



Give me a break, right?


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## Nickleby (Oct 5, 2014)

What J said. Drama happens when characters are angry and have every right to be angry. Melodrama happens when characters say angry things, so angry that there can be no angrier things that have been expressed in the whole experience of all humankind!!!! and yet they're not that angry. Nobody can be that angry. It's hyperbole. It's forcing emotion down the reader's throat. It's lazy writing because the writer is substituting manufactured emotion for real emotion. You might even argue that it's a form of telling not showing--with the overheated rhetoric, the writer is telling, no SCREAMING AT!1!, the reader how these people feel instead of showing it.


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## TKent (Oct 5, 2014)

I am better at detecting it when I am reading it than when I'm writing it. When I go for twenty-something angst, it often comes out as melodrama. My challenge is to strip the melodrama but leave the angst.


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## Gamer_2k4 (Oct 6, 2014)

If it reads like you're watching a silent movie, it's probably melodramatic.


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## Morkonan (Oct 6, 2014)

Kyle R said:


> ...How can we distinguish the dramatic from the melodramatic in our fiction? :encouragement:



When there's drama, but no logical or reasonable reason for it. Or, when "drama" has been inserted and elevated to legendary status before the Reader, themselves, would care enough or know enough about the threat of loss or the "risk" to actually feel "drama."

Read Madam Bovary. Understand her character, then you'll know what perspective to avoid when trying to build "drama."  By the way, "melodrama" is one of the qualities of her character. It's a wonderful story, but Madam Bovary has to be one of the most shallow characters in Western literature. Still, she's written with such amazing style that we can't help but to be riveted to the page, even with all her senseless acts.


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## Bishop (Oct 6, 2014)

We can't!!! We're all gonna die! Aaaaaieieeeeeeeee!!!!

Honestly, with my own, I look at just how much dialogue there is about a particularly dramatic moment. If they're talking too much, odds are... But as said before, you usually can tell if you're being a little too campy with the writing.

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Morkonan said:


> Read Madam Bovary.



No. I did that once, and you'll never make me do it again! You won't take me alive, Mr. Bond!


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## dale (Oct 6, 2014)

well, i live in the most melodramatic country on earth. people here have nervous breakdowns when their cell phone dies.
 so forgive me if something i write contains a bit of the ol' melodrama.


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## Deleted member 56686 (Oct 6, 2014)

dale said:


> well, i live in the most melodramatic country on earth. people here have nervous breakdowns when their cell phone dies.
> so forgive me if something i write contains a bit of the ol' melodrama.



Man that's nothing. You want to see melodrama? Let them call for an inch of snow in Baltimore :nightmare:


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## No Cat No Cradle (Oct 8, 2014)

To me, drama is a lot more about the natural actions and how they create conflict where melodrama seems to more be implemented for the case of perception, like in War and Peace there is a lot of what is going on that feels like clean cut drama but then when you watch the people react, it is a lot of misty eyes and talk of 'civil responsibility' and torment and so on, the 'over-the-top' stuff but not entirely out of place.

There was this essay I once read describing Film-noir as the Male melodrama which makes sense since the plot usually revolves around trouble with Crime, women and money which in the 1930s-1960s were mainly problems men took onto themselves to worry about and would in-turn felt were all turning on them; ideas creating such classics as Double Indemnity, Casablanca, North by Northwest, Sunset Blvd., Citizen Kane, etc. I would even go as far as saying that Lawrence of Arabia was a Film Noir but that is a discussion for another time.

I don't find melodrama bad, but it needs to be understood and not acknowledged as the issue, more like the motivation to a character.


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## JamesR (Oct 12, 2014)

Dramatic is real; melodramatic is forced dramatic. Think of the former as natural and the latter as artificial. 99% of the time you can distinguish it simply by reading it out loud and asking yourself whether or not it sounds natural or forced.

I would also point out though that melodrama isn't necessarily bad; it's just misused most of the time. Melodrama only works when it's intentional. I personally think it goes well with satires, campy novels (which usually garner a cult following), and sometimes horror. I think though that its best place is in Epics like Beowulf for example, in which the style by nature is supposed to be melodramatic and somewhat over-the-top.


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## tabasco5 (Oct 12, 2014)

Use them when you need to.


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## Pidgeon84 (Oct 13, 2014)

I think melodrama can work in the context of a character, just be careful not to make it a narrative thing.


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## Sam (Oct 13, 2014)

If things become maudlin and characters start hugging/sharing their feelings, that s*** gets nuked.


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## bazz cargo (Oct 13, 2014)

I love melodrama. At least one character in every story I write is so over the top it adds the dark humour that underpins every day life.


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## Jeko (Oct 13, 2014)

Like a lot of things, I think the best judge of this is the writer's ear and perception of style. A scene might read melodramatic on its own, for example, but be actually dramatic once you've been following the characters for long enough.


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