By Elaine L. Orr
Compelling stories lead readers to grieve. In the sixth Harry Potter book, Dumbledore fell from a parapet. Who would survive that? But it was a magical story. I held out hope. Then Harry entered the headmaster's office and there was Dumbledore, in a picture frame, just like all the other dead headmasters. I sobbed for a couple of seconds.
Frank McCourt's Angela's Ashes made me feel sad, but it infuriated my mother-in-law. She finished it because I recommended it, but she hated the deaths of Angela McCourt's young children, especially the twins. She told me never to recommend a book like that again!
But what about characters themselves? Catcher in the Rye initially seems to be a story of extreme detachment from life and an adolescent's sarcastic view of the world. It is that, but the basis for nearly all of Holden Caufield's feelings and actions stem from his brother Allie's death -- though Holden himself doesn't truly grasp this.
In the Potter series, Severus Snape carries one of the most extreme burdens of grief in modern fiction. It's only near the end of the series that his unrequited love for Harry's late mother is shown to be the tragedy of his life. As a reader thinks back through the series, it's clear that his near-hatred for Harry (the son of the man who won Lillie's love and a child who dares to have her green eyes) is rooted in grief.
How does a perhaps less deft author portray grief well? As any student would say, grief needs to be shown, not told. There are obvious indications: people sob at a funeral or throw themselves over a closed coffin.
But how can a character indicate his or her grief after people have gone back to their daily routines? Their grief may be so extreme that they don't, but it's the less obvious expressions of sorrow that build a real-life story. The woman who eats less and loses weight is almost a cliche. What about the one who signs up for every fitness class she can find so she's exhausted at night and able to sleep? The reader may spot the symptom before the character.
Grieving people can lose interest in activities that they always liked, become forgetful, stuff their faces as opposed to reduce their appetite, and go over spoken (or unspoken) conversations obsessively.
The symptom I'd like to write better is what I think of as the clarity of death. When a family member or colleague dies, suddenly we know what's important and what's not. We want all the unimportant stuff to just go away -- phone calls to return, houses to clean, or that committee report that is suddenly too stupid to write.
As you might infer, the clearest symptom of 'death clarity' is impatience. A character might be able to hide some feelings of annoyance, but the writer needs to figure out whether to display them in daily irritation or an explosion of temper. Or both.
Ruthanne Reid's article in The Write Practice Blog, "Show Don't Tell: How to Write the Five Stages of Grief" offers a comprehensive picture of subtle and very direct expressions of sorrow -- immediate and long-term.
As a mystery writer, I want the story to go forward and don't usually spend enough time on the sorrow of family and friends who've lost someone. It's a key component of making the reader care about the crime and the need to solve it. If it's not clear why someone should care about the victim's death, then all the reader has to do is flip to the end to see who done it.
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