Character and emotion: death and tears.
Do you remember the stories that made you cry? The faithful dog died. The hero sacrificed himself to save everyone. The star-crossed lovers died rather than live without each other. The cancer is a slow painful descent. The crash ends that young life all too soon.
Now you’re a writer. You want your readers to cry. You know what to do. The ultimate tearjerker in three concise parts. Page one: our sweet young protagonists’ receives word her beloved grandfather has died. She, herself, is dying of cancer, and you hint that her vitals have been dropping. As she cries over her dear grandpappy, she asks the boyfriend to walk the dog, but he gets loose, and the dog bolts into traffic. The boyfriend tries to save him from the oncoming truck, but they are both flattened by the semi. It takes the family a while to notice he never returned, but by the fifth page, they see cars rubbernecking outside. They tell their poor cancer-ridden daughter, and she overdoses on her medication. The parents are tragically killed when driving to her funeral.
Good elements, all. You obviously know your conventions. Unfortunately, amalgamation is not the answer. If you try to cram in too much into too few pages, your great American Tragedy will somehow become a farce. You can’t come across as a checklist of crying points. The death of the faithful dog is a tragedy that must be visited upon that young, lonely country-kid who has got no one and nothin else in the world. This poor suburbanite, will barely notice amid the rapid human deaths. The starcrossed lovers only work, themselves, if they are each others’ whole world. Mix styles with caution. The reader may suspend disbelief and emotionally invest into one tragedy, but they don’t stack well.
Note also, that the order is all wrong. If you begin by explaining the girl’s incurable disease, the reader will not get attached to the character. Her death becomes an expected plot point—if you reveal the illness later, however, you had better have used foreshadowing.
As for the grandfather’s death on page one, it comes across as an obituary. Token regret, no real emotion, with the possible exception of the reader being reminded of their own grandfather. The other characters can be as sad as you make them, but the reader never had the chance to know grandpappy, so any sadness surrounding his death would be sympathy for the other character’s emotional suffering. Remember that beginning with a death will set a low bar for the emotional tenor of the piece. It’s dangerous, and you must remember to follow it up with uplifting moods and events for the living characters, or else their upcoming tragedies will not be as far a fall.
You, as a writer, may develop feelings for your characters and keep alive those you like, killing those who are less appealing, less developed. That is a mistake. If you didn’t care about the character you killed, why would the reader? The death of a cardboard cutout becomes plot, not character.
In our excellent example story, the vital role of grief is left out. In a functional story, the girl should have time for the event to sink in before she expires. The boyfriend should have been around to cry over the tragedy of the plucky young girl’s losing battle against the wasting disease. If they both lay dead, you can’t see the human impact. If no one is left alive to be sad (which is typically the most relatable to your reader, since few of them have previously experienced death), why should the reader waste her time? Even Hamlet left a witness, to soldier on with the burden of suffering.
Death made vivid in art can be a powerful device. It is a preemptive universal experience, and reminds the reader of her own mortality, and all past associations with the event. It’s uncomfortable. Don’t make a mockery of the event with flat characters and melodrama. I promise they will roll their eyes at you.