Half In Love With Death

Darkling I listen; and, for many a time
I have been half in love with easeful Death,
Call'd him soft names in many a mused rhyme,
To take into the air my quiet breath;
Now more than ever seems it rich to die,
To cease upon the midnight with no pain,
While thou art pouring forth thy soul abroad
In such an ecstasy!
Still wouldst thou sing, and I have ears in vain--
To thy high requiem become a sod.

-- John Keats

Life provides fodder for fiction. If you are sitting in Starbucks having coffee with three friends and there is a writer sitting behind you, you may find yourself--and your friends--in a novel someday. Authors observe life to turn it into fiction. Mystery writers, however, don't just write about life; they write about death. Death is, quite literally, only the beginning. The victim dies and the rest of the book--including any subsequent deaths--are the result of characters' reactions to that death. For our books to be interesting, our characters have to react in ways that are at least believable if not entirely realistic.

The question of realism is a difficult one. How realistic do our readers want us to be? I write traditional mysteries, not thrillers, which means I don't have to do much in the way of describing in (very) gory detail the specifics of a murder. But I do have to relate, with less gore but more detail, how people respond to that murder.

And that's complicated. Because most of us don't have models for such situations. Thank goodness, not too many of us have been touched by violent death, not too many of us have looked at the faces of our friends and relatives in the aftermath of such a tragedy.

This has been on my mind of late because I read a couple of mysteries recently wherein I found the reactions of the victims' friends outside the bounds of belief. They were too casual. People are not casual about death. In fact, if someone appears unaffected, my first instinct is to suspect them of something. So I immediately went back to look at my manuscript to be sure I had not made such a mistake myself.

And what did I find? While my errors were not as gross as those in the books that had driven me to re-examine my own work, I had not been sensitive enough to the emotions of my characters. Too enthralled by the puzzle, I hadn't considered how devastating the death--let alone the murder--of even an enemy can be. Foolishly, I had imagined that the death of someone I disliked would not affect me and therefore I didn't spend time worrying about how it would affect my characters.

So now I have to re-write some scenes, to re-think the development of the mystery. I don't want to write a sob story, but I need to examine more closely the multitude of ways in which my characters might be influenced by a death in their midst.

As anyone who reads my personal blog knows, I saw a man die last week. It was not a violent death, and he was a complete stranger, but even so it made me think about emotions. Not the obvious ones of the people left behind, but those of the bystanders like myself and of the policeman who had to take the man's wife to the hospital. How must he have felt, knowing he was driving a woman to hear the worst news she could imagine? How did the employees who had been working at the Staples where the man died get through the rest of the day? There was a teenager there. Was it her first experience with death?

Obviously a writer cannot go off on too many tangents, describing the emotions of every person touched by an event. Readers would lose interest. But what I've learned is that I need to think a little less linearly--there's more to murder than death. Or more to death than murder.