{"id":8281,"date":"2011-08-30T14:21:23","date_gmt":"2011-08-30T18:21:23","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/?p=8281"},"modified":"2011-08-30T14:21:23","modified_gmt":"2011-08-30T18:21:23","slug":"death-scenes","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/2011\/08\/death-scenes\/","title":{"rendered":"Death Scenes"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

[Image: <\/em>Death in the Sickroom, by Edvard Munch]<\/em><\/p>\n

Well, now. Could that title be any starker? Maybe it should be all caps?<\/p>\n

(Aside to Jules, if you’re reading this: I actually put that header in a marquee tag for a moment. It was just too, too weird.)<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

Some of the most interesting online\u00a0content for writers, I believe, can be found at the blog of YA author Livia Blackburne. I don’t think I’ve ever left a comment there (he said, his toe\u00a0digging at the ground in shame), but from the first visit I was hooked. I’d probably keep returning, if for no reason other than to savor the site’s slogan:<\/p>\n

A Brain Scientist’s Take on Writing<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

How can I resist that? From her “About” page:<\/p>\n

By day I’m a neuroscience graduate student at MIT, conducting research on the neural correlates of reading. On evenings and weekends, I write fantasy stories for young adults… I like to take the analytical approach I use for my experiments and apply it towards the process of writing and publishing. This is what I will attempt in this blog: study pieces of writing, break it down into component pieces, and try to see what makes it work.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

A recent post offered some interesting peeks into the mind of a reader (Blackburne herself) coming upon a death scene in a novel — and then re-reading it, even though it tore her up on the first pass and continued to do so on the second. I’d love to have that sort of detachment. But if Blackburne is there to provide it, maybe I can just trail along in her wake. Sample advice:<\/p>\n

\n
    \n
  1. Emphasize the good qualities of the dying character…<\/li>\n
  2. Draw a connection to a previous tragedy…<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<\/blockquote>\n

    More here<\/a> (caveat: includes spoilers about the book she was reading!).<\/p>\n

    <\/p>\n

    Tearing up while reading differs from tearing up while watching a movie. There’s no actor onscreen to play with the viewer’s emotional response with facial and gestural signals; no bystanders to cue us —\u00a0Time to cry now!<\/em>\u00a0— with their own tears.<\/p>\n

    Do you tear up at death scenes in books? Beyond the nine suggestions Livia Blackburne offers, have you found that anything is more likely to trigger that emotion than anything else? Setting? Weather? (Note: your own hormonal fluctuations might have had something to do with it, but RAMH<\/em>\u00a0doesn’t ask that sort of question.)<\/p>\n

    And if you’re a writer, have you had good or bad luck in writing a death scene? If the former: what do you think you did right? If the latter: any idea what went wrong?<\/p>\n

    Maybe more to the point: how important is it, do you think, to trigger tears when someone in your story dies? What’s the line (fine or otherwise) between wringing honest emotion from a reader and milking it?<\/p>\n

    I’ve killed a few\u00a0characters. Most of these deaths have been, well, serviceable: in a murder mystery, obviously, you’re going to have one or more fatalities — often (usually?) characters whom the reader doesn’t know very well. I might have pushed for tears even there, but the emotional release of the tears would obstruct the emotional release of suspense<\/em>.<\/p>\n

    Of the remainder, one — really a death by implication, off-stage — concluded the story of an unrepentantly evil character. I don’t think that counts.<\/p>\n

    And one scene involved the deaths of not one but two characters. One of these characters, again: not very sympathetic. The other: well, it upset me<\/em>. I don’t know if that’s a good gauge, though. (Is it?) And I’m not sure what I did particularly right<\/em>\u00a0anyhow. I think he was a likable character, and he’d been with me through the whole book. That he’d die should not shock a reader, given what came before. And yet it wasn’t (as they say) writ large upon the wall, either.<\/p>\n

    Anyone else?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    [Image: Death in the Sickroom, by Edvard Munch] Well, now. Could that title be any starker? Maybe it should be all caps? (Aside to Jules, if you’re reading this: I actually put that header in a marquee tag for a moment. It was just too, too weird.) Some of the most interesting online\u00a0content for writers, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","h5ap_radio_sources":[],"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"activitypub_content_warning":"","activitypub_content_visibility":"","activitypub_max_image_attachments":3,"activitypub_interaction_policy_quote":"anyone","activitypub_status":"","footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[247,5,372],"tags":[1726,2550],"class_list":{"0":"post-8281","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-ruminations","7":"category-06_writing","8":"category-style-and-craft","9":"tag-brain-science","10":"tag-death-scenes","11":"entry"},"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6kZSG-29z","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8281","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8281"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8281\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8282,"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8281\/revisions\/8282"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8281"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8281"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8281"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}