Death and dying bring out complex emotions. How many times have I sat and cried at the death of a character or the grief of another one? Writing allows us to tell stories and feel emotions but what does it take to write these difficult situations? I am thrilled to have Victoria Price with me today on Creator’s Roulette and she is diving deep into writing realistic death scenes in fiction.
Victoria lives in leafy Surrey, in the South East of England. She loves fairy tales, myths and legends, and grew up creating stories both in words and pictures. When she’s not writing you’ll find her exploring with her husband and their two dogs, searching for beautiful hidden places and secret picnic spots.
Let’s learn from her!
On Death and Dying in Fiction
– Victoria Price
It’s quite common in fantasy to have a death scene, or multiple deaths. But often the characters seem to be “over it” all too quickly, or the death is never mentioned again. I appreciate it’s the author’s decision to keep the plot moving forward – but I’ve always found myself searching for a more real representation of grief and loss, not a story that skims over the hard parts.
I write young adult fantasy, but I also write about death and dying. What happens when we die? Where do we go? These are questions I’ve found myself asking many times, and writing has helped to process those thoughts and feelings over the years.
When I’m writing a death scene or writing about death and dying, I draw on my own experiences. I’ve read a lot of grief books and I’m part of grief communities where people share their stories, like the grief community on Instagram which is particularly active and supportive.
Modern Loss by Rebecca Soffer and Gabrielle Birkner is a book I’d recommend to anyone thinking of writing a death scene. It’s not a book for writers, it’s a book for grievers, but each story is about a different loss, a different experience, and they’re all true. Every single one of them happened and you can feel the emotion pouring through the page.
Of course there’s always a bit of time spent researching the precise ways in which people die. What happens to the body? How quickly can you die from blood loss? I think these are questions many writers will have in their Google search history. I have a family member who was a nurse for many years so it’s always helpful to check things over with them, too. But the more time I spend researching something, the better I know my chances are of making it feel real/believable.
Writing a death scene, for me, isn’t the hard part – it’s making sure the characters respond accurately to it. In reality, when someone close to us dies, it’s all consuming. We don’t wake up the next day and carry on as normal, our normal has been shattered. That’s what I’ve tried to demonstrate in my young adult fantasy series.
A death scene becomes bigger than just the scene itself. It’s the moment, the hours and the days that follow it. How it impacts the individual characters, how it impacts the way the characters interact. A character’s response to a death can be more gut-wrenching on page than the death scene itself because it’s more relatable. In a fantasy world a character might be killed by a spell or by a creature, something we know isn’t real. But the character’s responses to that death – those can be very real.
Emotional connection with the reader becomes even more important – if the reader has never experienced a death before, as a writer you have to make them feel those emotions. Physical reactions, what a character notices in their body, those can help to create that emotional connection with the reader as well showing what emotions they’re experiencing.
When I think about the stories that have meant the most to me, it’s been the ones with characters and events I can relate to. So much of what happens in Harry Potter seems impossible, but at it’s heart, it’s a story about friendship, family and love. I want to create characters that people can relate to – and for me, part of that was not skimming over grief.
Crescent City by Sarah J Maas is a great example of a book that doesn’t skim over it. The main character loses her friends right at the start (no spoilers, it’s in the blurb!) and her grief and the way she deals with her life without her friends in it plays a huge part in the story. There are a number of moments when others suggest she’s been grieving for too long, or characters that tell her she shouldn’t be feeling a certain way anymore, and it’s refreshing to see an author tackle that in a fantasy book.
Grief is complex – and yes, it’s different for everyone. But it’s not something that’s widely discussed, and sometimes reading words on a page that match your feelings can be like finding a light in the dark. Grief can make you behave in all kinds of ways – good and bad. It can cause anxiety and make you want to shut yourself away from the world. When I have a character death in mind, it’s all of those things that I like to flesh out first, usually before I even know precisely how the character will die.
For me, a death in a story should mean something. I won’t kill off a character unless it’s absolutely necessary, and I won’t do it unless it holds some meaning. If the other characters don’t care when someone dies, why would the reader? If it doesn’t make a difference in the story, the reader isn’t likely to care, or even remember it happened at all. That’s not to say that that good stories don’t exist with multiple deaths or meaningless deaths – those just aren’t the stories that have stayed with me. I think there’s a balance to be struck with writing death scenes – too much and the whole story could grind to a standstill, but skim over it and you risk losing that connection between reader and characters.
The books that have stayed with me the longest are the ones that have resonated with a precise feeling or thought. There’s so much more to death and dying than a character being wiped out – what happens once they’re dead? Do they go somewhere? Or do they simply disappear? I write about angels and how they help the dying, where we go once we die. I think that’s a thought anyone who has lost a loved one has had. We want to know they’re close by, watching over us somehow, but we also want to know if they’re in some magical, happier place. Or maybe both – and so often stories don’t address that.
Writing this series has helped me a great deal – from the time I’ve spent searching books and blogs that told me I wasn’t alone in my thoughts, to the amazing friends I’ve made who have also lost a loved one. Hopefully someone will pick up my books and feel that way, too.
What death scene from a book or movie had the biggest impact on you and why?
I hope you enjoyed this guest post by Victoria! Find her on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter and her website.
Banner image from Unsplash.
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