creative writing - Any techniques to make the reader feel sad and very sorrowful?

Are there any techniques which writers can use to really touch the character, and make them feel really emotional because of your writing?

I'm trying to improve a dystopian piece of writing.

I stood there, in front of it. I could feel my emotions toppling outside of my mind as I began unleashing my hatred upon the ones that did this. I could not hold back my sorrow, and I shed a tear. The creature stretched its great neck forward and my tear fell onto its long cheek. It ran down the beast's face and dropped onto the floor.

During this paragraph I focused on a tear, is this a good idea?

Answer

In order to find ways to invoke sadness in others, it's best to try to understand what makes you sad.

Everyone has been sad at some point in their lives, so it's easy to know what sadness looks like and feels like. However a lot of people don't really think about why those things make them sad. This can be said about a lot of emotions, but sadness is one in particular that people don't care to dwell on (for obvious reasons).

This is why it is probably it is one of the most difficult things to portray in pieces of writing. A lot of the times people attempting to create sadness create sad people to try to get others to be sad through empathy. But unless you already massively empathize with the character, it is difficult to pull off.

It is similar in your excerpt. From that short bit of writing I understand that the creature is sad, but that doesn't make me sad. When I then read some of the comments you had written about the backstory of the character and reread the question, it affected me more, as it was now in more of a context. I understood the creature better and could empathize a little with where its heartache stemmed from.

My suggestion is to watch/ read/ experience things that make you sad, and try to think about and analyze why they make you sad. You need to dig deeper and find out the emotions and reasons for how this sadness has developed.

Many things can evoke sadness: fear, loss, longing, pain (physical or emotional), regret, anger, disappointment, frustration. Even some positive emotions can incite sadness in the correct context. Off the top of my head I can think of 4 things that never fail to set me off into floods of tears, and they couldn't be any more different from each other.

It is all about making the reader become invested in something first, and then changing the thing in which they have become invested in a way that can cause sadness. Ultimately, sadness is the destination, the journey to get there will be accessing other emotions within the reader.