Overly Sentimental & Melodramatic

On Sentiment and Sentimentality

By being both surprising and convincing, and by choosing to render
things that resist easy summary, we may, if we're lucky, avoid those
twin hobgoblins of creative writers: sentimentality and melodrama.
Now, these words are bandied about frequently in writing classes and
workshops, so let's first define our terms precisely so we know what
we are talking about when we use them.

MELODRAMATIC: When a work is characterized by extravagant
theatricality, and by the predominance of plot and physical action
over characterization. In other words, the reader's emotions are
evoked through the sensational nature of events and/or actions making
up the plot rather than through more subtle elements, such as
characterization. The word "melodrama" comes from early dramatic
pantomimes, when action was staged to music, usually without any
dialogue at all; naturally, in such cases, subtlety of character was
often lost in favor of dramatic physicality.

SENTIMENTAL: Falsely emotional in a maudlin way. Extravagant or
affected feeling or emotion. When a work exhibits an excess of emotion
that doesn't feel "earned" by the piece. When a piece is imbued with
sentiment (feeling) independent of a meaningful context.

That is, the writer is depending on a reader's stock emotional
response derived from general cultural or human experience, rather
than creating an exact and believable context for that response within
the world of the story.

We tend to associate the word "sentimental" with things that are
precious, mawkish: squishy, "soft" subjects such as babies and kittens
and whatnot. But that's only a small part of what can be sentimental.
Something is sentimental if it attempts to induce an emotional
response in a reader that exceeds what the situation warrants. And
this can happen with so-called "hard" subjects like war or death as
much as with ruminations on love and ducklings and flowers.

The best way to describe "sentimental" is by use of example, and the
best examples come from advertisements—certainly print, but especially
television. These advertisements are trying, deliberately, to push our
buttons, to provoke an emotional response with a thirty- or sixty-
second video clip. Advertisements for camera equipment fall into this
category, for example, by tapping into our fear that life is passing
us by and that we need to capture precious moments on film (or,
increasingly, in electronic form) in order to remember them. Telephone
companies mine our fears similarly with ads of grown children calling
their aged mothers or "reaching out and touching someone." What these
advertisements don't want is complexity: they don't want us to think
that many moments of family life can be painful or tedious or
frustrating; they don't want us to think that we can have conflicting
feelings about calling our mothers—that they can impose guilt on us,
that we can sense their loneliness which brings out our own fears of
mortality, etc. These advertisements are after the knee-jerk responses
that are already fully prepared in our minds.

NOTE: Sentiment is not bad. Sentiment is variously defined as "refined
feeling"; "delicate sensing of emotion"; "an idea colored by emotion."
If we don't strive for true sentiment, we will never achieve truly
moving work. But if a piece is sentimental, this basic "good" thing
has been overextended or misapplied.

As I. M. Richards says in Practical Criticism:

A response is sentimental when, either through the over-persistence of
tendencies or through the interaction of sentiments, it is
inappropriate to the situation that calls it forth [emphasis mine].
What is bad in these sentimental responses is their confinement to one
stereotyped, unrepresentative aspect of the prompting situation ...

In other words, marriages and births are always happy, funerals are
sad, old people are lonely and waiting at home for phone calls. These
are stereotyped and unrepresentative depictions in that they do not
represent the range of emotion and feeling and complexity that such
situations frequently, if not always, evoke. We all know of births and
deaths that conjure up more ambiguous emotions for people: people
reluctant, in their hearts, to become parents, people who are in
certain ways relieved that someone has finally died.

Sentimental writing tends to trigger what Richards calls "stock
responses" in the reader. As he goes on to say:

[Stock responses] have their opportunity whenever a poem invokes views
and emotions already fully prepared in the reader's mind, so that what
happens is more of the reader's doing than the poet's [emphasis mine].
The button is pressed, and then the author's work is done, for
immediately the record starts playing in quasi- (or total)
independence of the poem which is supposed to be its origin or
instrument.

....And sentimentality can infest the opposite end of the spectrum from
treacly sweetness. Rather than trying to make everything too "nice,"
it can...

The Making of a Story: A Norton Guide to
Writing Fiction and Nonfiction
by Alice LaPlante
http://www.amazon.com/Making-Story-W.../dp/0393061647