Writing about Death

In the months since my personal bereavement, I've had a problem with my writing. It's not been a fatal problem, but it's been a problem nonetheless. I couldn't write about death.

Now there are plenty of authors who've had runaway successes with novels that don't so much as include a bruise or a small cut. I've written them, and plan to write them, myself. But I do feel the need to use death where possible. Like in a murder mystery scenario, for example. I tried writing something like that a while back, a highly fantastical scenario based on Golden Age detective fiction. I was doing well. But when I returned to it in the weeks and months after my bereavement, I couldn't move it forward beyond the fifth chapter.

I just couldn't' reconcile myself to writing about death in such a way. It wasn't as if the death was bloody. That actually made it worse. I find writing about bloodless death more difficult anyway, but since my own loss was bloodless, there was an unpleasant association combined with the story I was writing and the themes I was using for the central narrative. And when I began editing another work I'd completed before the event, I found the deaths there disturbing. And they did have blood. It was as if some deep switch had been flicked. Its message clear; avoid death.

But a few days ago, something happened. I was writing the opening scenario for the next chapter of my current story -- a Shinto-inspired story inspired by series like CSI:NY and the Japanese genre of "Kori no tatakai" -- and in that opening segment two people died. They died in a relatively violent way. I wrote about it, and it wasn't until I was talking to my mother about it that it hit me. I'd written about death, and I'd even written this death-infused premise some days before, and I hadn't felt squeamish.

I've since gone back and read it, and continued writing this particular part of the story. And I haven't actually run up against anything more than my usual problems of creating a compelling narrative within a 8-10,000 word limit. It feels strangely liberating. I've scaled that mountain, conquered at least some of that little thing holding me back. I feel like I can begin again. I can't go back to the way things were. Who can? But I can at least rebuild something, learn from my experience, and no longer be afraid.