One of grief’s strange gifts is courage.
After losing my father to cancer last year, I’ve done my share of writing with grief as my companion. I’ve noticed it’s dampened my fear of writing something “bad” and replaced it with a stronger desire to write something true.
Grief is bigger than fear, so it may be pushed against to overcome it. It’s like a fulcrum, where you can apply a crowbar to the fear and apply some force to lift it.
That being said, writers sometimes think they need grief—or another strong negative emotion—to write well. I’ve heard writers say, I’m afraid if I’m happy, I won’t be able to write. Or I need to have problems to write something interesting.
My response to this is that it’s not the pain or grief that makes writing good—it’s the dissolution of fear. It’s our willingness to look at life directly and announce whatever it is we see without editing. That kind of writing can come from any emotion—grief, joy, pain, boredom, ecstasy, wonder, love. The fact that we feel pain is more often the stronger tool speaks to how much power we give to it, and how deeply rooted we are in our fears.
In Sarah Gerard’s Binary Star, we meet a narrator who’s struggling with anorexia. She and her boyfriend, who’s addicted to alcohol, slush around in darkness for the entire book. There's very little story arc, and an even slimmer silver lining. Things don't even go from bad to worse; they just go from bad to still bad.
I bring it up because it goes against all the classic story structure advice, as well as our common impulse to wrap things up neatly, to draw a lesson, to make things okay — or even not okay, but just to induce some kind of meaningful change. Grief is such a powerful ally against artifices like this because grief won’t stand being made a framework. Grief is going to be whatever it is. Any attempt to make it palatable is going to ring false to your readers and haunt you.
In Pure Color, Sheila Heti becomes a leaf for the last third of her book as she grieves losing both a love interest and a parent. It’s an exhausting read, to be honest, but isn’t exhaustion, too, the experience of loss? It’s unforgiving and relentless.
Few artists have written about grief with as much depth as Nick Cave. After the death of his son Arthur in 2015, his music, interviews, and letters in The Red Hand Files became a kind of guide for those navigating loss. His words don’t try to solve grief or make it easier; instead, they honor its strangeness. He speaks to the way grief transforms the imagination, how it conjures presences that may or may not be real.
The last part of this quote is some quintessential writing advice, no matter your project or topic. I’ve bolded it.
I feel the presence of my son, all around, but he may not be there. I hear him talk to me, parent me, guide me, though he may not be there. He visits Susie in her sleep regularly, speaks to her, comforts her, but he may not be there. Dread grief trails bright phantoms in its wake. These spirits are ideas, essentially. They are our stunned imaginations reawakening after the calamity. Like ideas, these spirits speak of possibility. Follow your ideas, because on the other side of the idea is change and growth and redemption. Create your spirits. Call to them. Will them alive. Speak to them. It is their impossible and ghostly hands that draw us back to the world from which we were jettisoned; better now and unimaginably changed.
Writers have it hard. We are a group that has decided to look at life directly. Writers in grief, therefore, maybe have it hardest of all. Grief is a real presence for anyone who has lost someone they love. I don’t always want her there when she’s around. But she’s been a guide for creating my spirits, speaking to them, and coming back to the world changed. For that, at least, I thank her.