Finding a Grieving Character's Voice: Tips Writers

If I am guilty of anything when I write, it's an unbridled fascination with the characters I discover in my story. While I love each of them to pieces, some are always more brazen than others. The brazen ones are almost always trying to protect the characters I'm having a harder time connecting with, and they are unbelievably good at it. They guard the vulnerable ones with humor, stealing a scene just to keep the story moving so I'll forget that the real reason we're all on our way to a funeral that unusually sunny morning is because someone has died.

But the time always comes when I have to take a stand as the author, ignore the sideshow and try to get back to the pain we were all in an hour or a day or sometimes even a month ago when we all got in this limo in the first place. I'll get up and take my psychic place next to the one who is suffering the most and try to out-comfort any of the other forces around him, staying silent the entire time, praying that I can feel the origin of this anguish. If I stay put long enough, I'll be privy to something.

It might be a younger version of the man who's suffering now; I might go where's he's going in his mind, to the place where the wound began. I might see why it's so deep. Or I might be distracted by someone else in that very same vision, the parent who saw it happen or caused it to happen or didn't care that it happen. I'll look back over my shoulder and see a boy already punishing himself because he's not yet a man. Or I might see way into the future and see a child trying as hard to understand the man I'm sitting next to as I am right now. Perhaps there are pictures strewn all over the floor, old bent photographs, and in one of them that the child has yet to realize flew under the bed, I see the reason for all of this.

If I concentrate on that photograph, if I get inside it, if I can convince this broken character I've created that I'm in there with him, that the Polaroid isn't permanent, he might break down and talk to me. I usually apologize first; genuinely sorry that it took me so long.