By Nicholas Leigh, exclusively for Frost Magazine
Death happens many times a day – loss is as common as taking a train. But when it is you who loses someone you love, it becomes a moment of rare devastation.
To write about loss and the grief that comes with it is, then, to write about the utterly constant and the crushing rarity at the same time. It falls to the writer to reflect the existence of these contradictory feelings within a single moment – in other words, to reflect real life. The pleasure and comfort of reading comes, as wise folk have said in the past, from a complete stranger saying to you, I have been through what you are going through now – and I understand how you feel. A writer telling a story about loss and its grief takes on the mantle not just of storyteller but also counsellor, and perhaps even healer.
To honour this considerable responsibility, the issues that any writer intent on creating a good piece of work – how to form living, breathing characters, bring to life the world they live in and tell their story in an exciting, gripping manner – remain. Added on top is the question of how you respect the loss your reader has experienced, and recognise their grief, without undermining the story, or making it unreadable to others who just want to immerse themselves in a good, if emotional tale. To achieve this, it may help to consider yourself an archaeologist.
Loss – and in particular grief – is a many-layered experience. You cannot help someone who is grieving by simply saying, let me help you. As another wise person once said, if you were capable of sharing my grief, I would gladly let you have it all. Instead, you have to start at ground level, and then dig down through each of the layers of that relationship, descending through your character’s experiences with the person they have lost, the happy times and the difficult periods, the reversals of expectation, the times when it was not they who let your lead down, but vice versa. All of these layers need to be explored, deciphered, decoded, and it is this exploration that could form much of your story.
You must keep on going until you reach what lies beneath it all: the love that causes this grief to be so painful. For at the heart of the matter is the heart itself. To write about loss is to write about love. The writer must ensure that the love story at the centre of a tale about grief is well-drawn, convincing – perhaps even a little complicated.
Stories remind us of the people in our lives, and how we feel about them. So when you cry from reading, you are often really crying for yourself, and for those closest to you. To give your story the heart it needs to have the power you desire, open up the best resource you have available: yourself and your experiences. Write as if you were talking about those closest to you, even if your story takes place in the Fourteenth Century, or on a planet light years away. The simple humanity that comes from talking about simple human experiences will emerge and could provide readers you will never get to meet with a helping hand in dealing with their own grief just when they needed it the most.
Nicholas Leigh is a British author whose intelligent and individualistic novels are based on relationships and human interactions. His books include Blood Harmonies, The Condition, The Confession of Dieter Berenson, and his latest novella, Two Women. All are available now through Liborwich Publishing on Amazon UK
