(Why Do You Write About Death?)

We know that we will all die at some point, but it is a universal truth that many avoid talking about or writing about death. As writers, we know how to go into dark places. We also know that processing grief involves facing our own mortality and the mortality of those we love. Pull out the Moleskine in your pocket or bag or your computer and explore your own feelings about death as it relates to your stories or poems.

Literature has long helped readers understand human desires and frailties. Two elderly people holding hands over their wheelchairs in the hallway of the convalescent home have a story. One of them will die first. Perhaps they are both widowed and recently met after losing their longtime partners. A teen driver running a light at a busy intersection and just missing a head-on collision has a story. Maybe she will become a better driver because that incident will be a moment where she literally faced her own mortality. There are illnesses and accidents, the tenderness and tedium of caretaking. These are stories that often don’t get told. 

Lighten up, I can hear people saying. Is it the role of writing to talk around the inevitability of death? How else can writers guide readers who have experienced loss? There is something healing about reading a story where characters once again see vivid reds and greens emerge in spring after too many seasons of drab or muted colors. After loss, the world can seem diminished. Stories can recount the long trek back, aided by friends, family members, or therapists.

Every culture, every person, every time period has stories about loss. Stories help us grapple with our own mortality and the mortality of those we love. Some stories make us indignant, angry, or hopeful. Reading stories or poems with a theme of loss or grief helps to mitigate the pain because we do not feel as alone.

Let your characters express themselves in a realistic and compelling way. Do not shy away from death. Stories can surprise us, horrify us, or lead us to contemplate. When you are immersed in the author’s fictional world, the emotional connection is real even though the story is fiction. Bits of real life turn up regularly in poetry and prose—a parking ticket, an overheard conversation, a dead pet. Once I saw a dress discarded on the path while walking behind my house. What kind of story might that be?

Some writers use the material of their lives to heal and move on after trauma. Tim O’Brien wrote about the Vietnam War in his 1990 book, The Things They Carried, a collection of linked stories, and Kristin Hannah wrote a fictionalized account about the forgotten nurses of Vietnam in her recent novel, The Women. Joan Didion wrote about the magnitude of loss she felt after her husband’s sudden death in her book, The Year of Magical Thinking. Language can represent trauma and transform it into art. I think of the gorgeous and spare writing of Claire Keegan in Small Things Like These, a story about moral conundrums and rising to be our best self when a character is witness to unexpected horror.

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In 2018 I shared a house in Ireland with various writers and artists. One was a young dancer. She related a story about washing her mother’s blouse when she knew her mother was dying. She wept on the floor by the washing machine when it became clear that her mother would never again wear this blouse—and then she made art of the loss by creating a dance that incorporated the washing of the blouse and the grief it represented. All of us can use life experiences to make something beautiful. 

Suffering and joy are distinctly human experiences and writing is another way of processing incalculable loss. It need not be your story. Ideas come from everywhere. A sad-eyed server at a fictional restaurant may have a secret that you write about in a way that evokes emotion. Get in the habit of paying attention. Be unafraid to use your own emotional experiences in your writing. Emotional truth is not the same as literal truth. In fiction, you can change names, demographics, and even circumstances but the feelings are universal.

During the pandemic, many of us became more aware of our mortality as life as we knew it ground to a halt. Uncertainty and fear became regular visitors. Some of us used this to make art and some of us were directly impacted when we lost loved ones. The scenes from the pandemic included nursing home visits through a window, Facetime or Zoom goodbyes to dying family members, paranoia about groceries, shared air, and all modes of public transportation. Most of us felt as if death was closer than ever, even if we were young. Schoolchildren and parents had to learn or work remotely. What lessons did we learn during that time and how can we use that urgency in our writing?

Stories or poems about mortality are also stories and poems about living fully. They remind us that we are fragile and our presence on this planet is temporary. While that may seem depressing, it also enables to live and write with a sense of how vital and important every moment can be in this complicated world. Look at the shadows the sun makes on asphalt or a cloud formations before a storm. Awareness of the finite time you have here on makes your writing life vital. Do not squander it.

Check out Lisa C. Taylor’s The Shape of What Remains here:

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(The Art of Writing Deceptive and Unreliable Narrators in Thrillers.)

Plot must happen for stories to entertain, but plot is simply a test of identity. No matter how exciting the plot point, readers need a human element—a character’s response—to care. A tree falling in a forest certainly makes a sound, but it needs a character to turn that sound into story. A plot falling onto a page needs a character with identity issues, a character who ideally faces those issues and changes. Because of this, I believe every story at its heart is an identity story.

Identity is often a signaling term in fiction, referring to the realm of other. As an Indo-Caribbean immigrant woman in America, I will always be “othered,” which forces me to micro-analyze myself within our societal framework and keeps me attuned to overt markers of identity, such as race and ethnicity. My debut novel, A Girl Within a Girl Within a Girl, deals with identity on this explicit level as my main character inhabits multiple selves to survive her difficult childhood. But I believe everyone everywhere grapples with the question, “Who am I, really?” And by extension, every writer grapples with the question, “Who is this character, really?”

In exploring identity in fiction, it’s important to understand how your character sees herself, what she hides, and how the world sees her. To start, map out your character’s visible, invisible, and buried defining traits. You could also do this exercise with yourself or famous fictional characters, as demonstrated below.

Visible Defining Traits: How the world sees the character or how your character presents.

Brainstorm words and phrases to reflect first glance and outward characterizations. How would the character answer small-talk questions such as: “What do you do?” and “Where are you from?” Does she code-switch at times, changing speech and behavior according to audience? Does she lie?

Examples:

• Maya, the main character in my novel: dental hygienist, wife and mother, of Indian descent, “Americanized,” has a deaf son, honest. These words represent how she is seen and how she wants to be seen. But she harbors a secret that contradicts this public front.
• Popular fictional characters: Harry Potter—visibly scarred, often bullied, orphan, unaware of abilities, vendetta against Voldemort. Katniss Everdeen—hunter, family caretaker, eschews feminine traits, sacrifices herself to save her sister. But these characters are more than they seem.

Invisible Defining Traits: How the character’s inner circle sees her.

Consider the character’s close friends and family—what do they know that not everyone knows? Start just below the layer of visible and delve deeper by considering events that shaped the character’s life. They’re usually true, but at this level, the character can still be lying.

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Examples:

• Maya: fluent in sign language; has tattoos that quote favorite books; former foster child; former alcoholic; former smoker; once stripped for money; avoids discussing the past.
• Harry and Katniss: Harry—suffers from self-doubt, was abused by his aunt and uncle, scar sometimes hurts. Katniss—resents her mother’s crippling grief, hates being used, is a rule breaker, would rather starve than beg.

Buried Defining Traits: Things only the character knows about herself that she might deny or even fail to recall.

Here, dig into the character’s “original damage,” those experiences that shaped them, creating their realm of secrets, fantasies, and regrets. Consider parenting, bullying, breakups, abuses and traumas, and past mistakes. What might be so shameful your character doesn’t tell anyone? Is anything buried so deep she can’t recall them, even as those events shape her behavior?

Examples:

• Maya: Was born Sunny; lived in Guyana; arrived to Miami without papers; was called Neena when she moved, then chose to be called Cindy; finally reinvented herself after an incident she has kept secret and tries to suppress.
• Harry and Katniss: Harry—visits Voldemort in nightmares and visions, feels a connection when he’s angered. Katniss—resists intimate relationships, afraid of courting love and having a family under the dystopian government.

The Interaction of Identity With Plot

When characters interact with plot, these visible, invisible, and hidden characteristics affect their behaviors. Harry Potter’s secret connection to Voldemort causes him to sic a snake onto his cousin, Dudley, and nearly kill his rival, Draco; he resists and fights these manifestations because he does not want to identify with Voldemort who exerts more power over him as the story progresses. In the Hunger Games, Katniss Everdeen must face her fear of intimacy when she is pitted against Peeta, who loves her; to win the games and stoke revolution, she confronts her identity as an unemotional stoic and opens herself to Peeta. In my novel, my character, Maya, must own up to her hidden past to save her marriage and reunite with her long-lost sister. These characters are forced to deal with their buried truths as the plot unfolds; in this way, plot can be seen as a vehicle for character change.

As you sketch a story’s plot, it’s important to understand that your characters’ layered identities will interact with it in interesting ways. This is what makes writing so much fun.

We writers are armed with endless possibilities because identity is complicated. To paraphrase George Saunders: readers are drawn to stories as a way to glimpse into the “black boxes” of each other’s minds. Being equipped with complicated “black boxes” of our own, writers hold enough raw material to craft a world of fascinating identities. 

Mining the truths, fictions, interpretations, and baggage we often cannot untangle within ourselves is a great starting point. Simply add a little imagination and test the created identity with a plot, and a messy and honest story will certainly emerge. With a little work, it can become one that connects to the messy, honest identities of readers everywhere.

Check out Nanda Reddy’s A Girl Within a Girl Within a Girl here:

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In the mid-80s, I was left in the care of my long-widowed grandmother every evening, freeing my parents to attend “Night University”—a chance to reclaim the education stolen from them during the decade-long Cultural Revolution. My father, a stubbornly avid reader even when books were supremely dangerous, chose Chinese Literature as his major. Post-graduation, he dedicated years to crafting stories worthy of publication. He’d take long walks and compose tales in his head. He’d return to his writing desk hollow-eyed and in a trance, pouring the brewing sentences out onto the page. He tried submitting his stories too, but quickly learned that whatever pieces he thought worthy could never pass the censors. By the time I was nearing graduation from high school, my father had all but abandoned his writerly dream. Xia Bei Zi Ba, he’d murmur to himself, boxing up his manuscripts. Wait until the next life.

(How Asian Americans Can Stitch Ancestral Stories Into Personal Narrative.)

I was due to choose a university field, and Dad realized what a bad influence he had been on me. I had ploughed through tomes of Chinese and Western classics, and written and rewritten multiple short stories, clutching my portfolio and harboring the same foolish, futile ambition. To undo the damage, he took me to visit a friend from his literature program, the only one who had succeeded as a full-time writer. Not so subtly, Dad asked his friend how he made his living. The answer was a snicker and a sigh, followed by his secret formula—toiling in advertisement and writing the occasional soul-sucking scripts for the nascent rom-com TV industry. At the end of the visit, he showed us his closet-sized office and pulled open a bottom desk drawer overflowing with paper.

“My reject drawer,” he announced. “Though, truthfully, most were never submitted; I already knew the verdict.”

“So what’s the point…” I blurted out thoughtlessly.

“Of writing them? Ha, your dad understands.” He clapped my father on the back. “Once in a while, you’ve got to let your instincts take flight, or you’ll burst, right?”

Dad nodded: “Xia Bei Zi Ba.” Then they both let out a quiet chuckle.

Six months later, I entered a sensible STEM major at a Shanghai university.

The sensible major landed me on a straight and narrow path that pleased my parents. It led me to North America and eventually to a busy but stable job that paid the bills. Caught in the fast-paced daily grind, I was put on autopilot, the unceasing demands extinguishing my once-burning itch to read and write again.

Ten years ago, after I became a Canadian citizen, a non-profit organization founded by a former Governor General contacted me. Their mission was to engage new Canadians in their political rights and responsibilities, and they wanted to do a focus-group study to find out why naturalized Chinese Canadians had one of the lowest voting rates compared to other ethnic groups. Twelve of us were ushered into a small, faintly smoky conference room in the heart of Chinatown to discuss our voting experiences. I was the only one at the table who had ever voted.

“What made you all want to come here today?” a young intern shadowing the group facilitator piped up, a touch of frustration in her voice.

A beat of collective silence.

“I heard you give out Canadian Tire gift cards,” one replied finally, prompting nods from several others. The facilitator, undeterred, cleared her throat and posed her next question: “What factors have prevented you from voting?”

Busy raising kids. Juggling two jobs. An ailing parent.

As the young intern, herself a Canadian-born Chinese, smiled and poured chrysanthemum tea around the table, the participants began to relax. “It’s best not to get involved in those things beyond our control,” a woman of my parents’ age whispered. “You never know who’s watching you.”

“What do you mean by that?” the facilitator pressed.

“You don’t want to be seen as political in any way,” a middle-aged man added. “Puts a target on your back.”

“But we are talking about Canadian politics,” I interjected. “Why would that put us in danger?”

Several shook their heads at my naivety. “Politics is politics. You pick a party to vote for here, but maybe someone on the mainland don’t like the party, and you end up in the crosshair. You never know.”

“Anyone can take a picture of you and send it through WeChat. I have a friend who went to a protest with her white boyfriend; she found her pictures online. Weird calls and email hacking followed. Canadian police won’t lift a finger to help.”

“Politics can get ugly so fast.”

“Best keep our heads down.”

“Haven’t we seen it all before we came here?”

But you DID come here! Escaped! We can’t all live in fear forever! I wanted to say, but I bit my tongue. The facilitator nodded nonstop, scribbling notes in a blur. She posed a few more questions, but nothing she said swayed the participants’ opinions. Time passed, marked by yawns, darted eyes, more conspiratorial remarks, and a few quiet scoffs commonly directed at well-meaning but clueless white folks. Finally, Canadian Tire gift cards were distributed, and the focus group was dismissed to everyone’s relief.

On the Chinese National Day that year, I was returning to my downtown office during lunch break when I suddenly found myself thrust into a jungle of opposing colors. On my left, an ocean of blazing red; on my right—a deep black sea that swallowed all light. My anxiety kicked into high gears, months of media onslaught reeling through my mind: the apologist Chinese mainlanders vs. the heroic Hong Kong protestors. Caught in between and caught off guard, I was ready to flee. But it was the national day after all; my urge to belong, somewhere, was overwhelming. I wanted to embrace the red and the black, each soul a should-have-been fellow tribesman. Give their cause a listen, I imagined saying to the red, we are all fighting for the same ideals. Turning to the black: Respect their rights to mark the day, to celebrate their birth identity as normal human beings; don’t fight the wrong enemy. I pivoted to the left, “Communist pig,” someone’s shouting. I pivoted to the right, “Don’t be a traitor,” a stern voice hurting my ear. Then I saw the Union Jack carving into the sky, clashing with a five-star red flag. I felt an ancient, primordial heat rising in my blood. I turned around to take a big gulp of air, only to have a large mic shoved in my face. A reporter’s blue eyes sparkled with anticipation. A loud expletive leapt out of me like a lightning strike. “I can’t wrap my head around this!” It must have sounded like a wail. And that was it, the reporter had moved on, leaving me with my five seconds of infamy.

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Shortly after, I enrolled in a part-time humanities graduate program. I spent the year immersing myself in Franz Fanon, colonialism, multiculturalism, and above all, Chinese history and politics. Growing up in Shanghai in the 80s and 90s, I was often puzzled by the adults around me, by their hidden ire and pain, their daily debates that unveiled old grudges from a tumultuous time barely traceable in my history books. Now I had access to the tabooed past of my birth country, but it wasn’t easy to understand. In Chinese politics class, the avuncular white professor struggled to piece together a cogent narrative about a country that was full of contradictions. A country that lifted billions of people out of poverty. A country that targets its own flesh and blood, quashing those who demand more freedom and rights. A country that still brands itself “communist.” A country’s powerful state capitalism and years of free wheeling and dealing has helicoptered some to the top of the world and sent others down the chute. A country whose name conjures up a Party and an autocrat, but also a land, a people, a culture, foods, sounds, and smells that, like Proust’s madeleine, could instantly resurrect the vivid world of a past life, sending waves of nostalgia through the diaspora.

During office hours, the same professor confided that he was barred from conducting fieldwork in mainland China. His attempts at remote research faltered too, as friends in China grew silent. “Luckily I secured tenure before they tightened the controls,” he lamented, weary. “I don’t know what the kids in the pipeline could do, if they’d ever have any kind of academic career.”

Xia Bei Zi Ba. I heard my father’s voice, traveling from my youth.

I developed a depression whose intensity ebbed and flowed, accompanied by a physical ache each morning. I tried psychotherapy but only made my roster of therapists sigh and shake their heads. But one beneficial outcome emerged: I began to journal. Later, reviewing my entries, I saw the incongruence, the prevailing fears, the lack of a coherent narrative of who I am and where I came from. Humans possess an innate drive to make sense of their history and experiences, and the ongoing collective amnesia had, piece by piece, taken away my humanity.

Then, on July 13, 2017, Liu Xiaobo died. I recalled my ignorance about the man when he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize seven years earlier. I had never heard of him in China. I did some digging on the outside of the Great Firewall then. I learned he was one of the “Four Gentlemen” of the 1989 protests, who risked their lives negotiating with the Army to prevent a larger bloodshed. He was in and out of prison numerous times for political “crimes” and yet repeatedly refused the asylum offered by Western governments. I read his prolific writings on political reform in China—his love for his country palpable on every page—and how, with a few sick twists, those words could be used against him.

Above all, I learned that he belonged to a near-extinct breed, those few men and women in the entire history of humanity who were willing to give up everything just to be able to live truthfully. In Xiaobo’s case, he had so much to lose—a promising academic career, his first marriage, contact with his only son, friendships and reputation, and the freedom of himself and his loved ones. And yet, in an interview he gave shortly before his arrest in 2008, he told the reporter that he felt freer than ever—unlike his subservient and thus successful former colleagues, he was living entirely by his conscience.

I called my father in China the day after Xiaobo died a political prisoner. Dad was unaware of the death. After listening to my ramblings about the man, Dad sounded stricken with worry. “Don’t get yourself worked up about this,” he cautioned. “There’s nothing you or I could do. Give it time. Be patient and focus on your own life.” His raspy voice scraped my insides. I could see the blank look on his grooved face, the aged man who once taught me the importance of free speech, who had wasted his writerly talents and waited in vain for the tides to shift. I heard defeat and utter resignation in his voice when he hung up.

Unwisely, I called a Chinese friend in my sorry state and told him about a vigil for Xiaobo that night. The conversation quickly went off rails. “Why does this matter to you? To us?” he asked. I lost it. Like an idiot, I yelled on the phone, about our generation’s indifference to our history and future, how easily we were dazzled by materialism and subdued by censorship. “We’ve lived in fear for too long! It hisses in our ears and follows us wherever we go—even a passport change won’t stop it from inflicting on our minds. Is this dignity?” My friend mumbled a few words of sympathy and a lame excuse to get off the phone.

That evening, I stood among dozens of mourners in a candlelit vigil. As pink streaks of clouds turned to a bruised purple, we paid tribute to Xiaobo before a banner depicting the now-iconic “empty chair.” Tears obscured our vision, but a rare clarity struck me. Merely a month earlier, I had stood at a breathtakingly futuristic intersection in downtown Shanghai, wondering aloud why I had to live a self-exiling life in a foreign land.

Write, I heard a firm voice in my head now. No more Xia Bei Zi Ba.

Check out Su Chang’s The Immortal Woman here:

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It is not lost on me that it has been another decade since.

(7 Ways Writing Heals Us Even After Terrible Trauma.)

The talk among the candidates was immigration control via border walls. That’s what I remember. According to the Pew Research Center, the talk among the people was “economy,” “terrorism,” and “foreign policy.” Next was “healthcare,” “gun policy,” and “immigration” in descending order.

Writing the poem felt askew of appropriate: I was a white American who had visited Palestine with my Christian College in the early aughts. The trip was formative, but not because I enjoyed it. I was what I then called “spiritually depressed,” going through the shift from faith to doubt to whatever liminal space that would happen after. But I hadn’t told anyone.

That silence is telling–a closeted crisis of faith for a closeted person who was also shy.

I had been embarrassed by how young and American my group was, how loud, how obviously out of place. I was embarrassed by how much space we took up, unapologetically, as if we belonged wherever we went. So many layers of privilege.

But what is more, I believed I would die on that trip, that class–a geography and history of key Biblical moments we’d visit in real time and space–traveling from Egypt to Jordan to Israel and Palestine. Places of holy movements and centuries of war, oppression, genocide, disease, famine, death, often at the hand and/or blessing of a god I no longer wanted or could not get myself to believe was real.

What made this worse was I did not believe enough in God to say I believed in God, but I believed enough to be afraid of hell and to think I was destined for it because of my unbelief.

This could be the beginning of a poem from that time: “Oh mind fuck, of swirling circle of hell, oh tight-lipped moment of my own undoing…”

* * *

I was pacing. I was in the Santa Cruz mountains at a self-made retreat, surrounded by the A-frame gorgeousness of the cabin I had rented for far, far below the going rate. The impulse I had was to start something new, something I hadn’t planned, something that would articulate the images that had been knocking around my head for years about that trip I’d taken with my college class.

I had resisted the allowance because of sheepishness and shame: What did I have to say about a religious and political conflict not my own? If I did have something to say, who the hell was I to say it? I didn’t want to take up any kind of space–airspace, pagespace, worldspace, or otherwise on a topic that felt so out of my daily life and half a world away–like my American college class had done.

If I wrote some of the images–the headphones in Yad Vashem, the sculptures outside, the Dome of the Rock built on the Temple Mount, the monastery at the base of the “holy mountain”–wouldn’t I also have to write something insightful? Something clear? And how could I edge towards something political and not implicate myself in the process?

Bingo.

I’ve had enough therapy–and spent enough time with the book this poem is in, When I Say the Bones I Mean the Bones–to see that making peace with self-implication was the key to releasing my ability to write and write it as well as I could. I felt guilty about traveling because it was, in fact, guilt-ladened. I felt guilty for my silence around so many subjects of race and religion because I was, in fact, guilty. I felt ashamed of my shame. Oh mind fuck, indeed.

Another poem in the book has a line in it I added very late, and after I allowed myself to write it the rest of the poem finally fell into place.

The poem is “Spermaceti,” and it began as a hater poem for the men of the whaling era–the 18th and 19th centuries in America–and also cryptically to white western “expansion” and “exploration” from Europe of the warmer oceans and the Americas from the 15th century on. The line is just past halfway, and it visually and thematically acts as a barb for the speaker, who has just finished a rant on how destructive the men were, environmentally, relationally, and sexually, and then it hooks: “This is the moment I become truly afraid/I am hardly doing any different. Often silent/when I need to speak. All logic lost at a woman’s touch.”

The barb was implication. This is one of only a few references to sexuality in this book, and it shows how I was feeling about it when I came out and was finishing the poem: I felt like the cisgendered straight men of centuries and millennia past who I’d been annoyed and harassed by–and navigating–my whole life. I did not speak up when I saw injustice, and I was as susceptible to my own desires as any other human, male or otherwise.

That was how I found peace to finish “Americans at Yad Vashem.” I allowed the implication that was implicit in my story. Of course the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was not my experience. Of course it also was: I was raised on stories of Ishmael and Isaac, and the spiritual lineage was my own. Of course the Israeli occupation of Palestine was and is not my experience, but I saw the walls with my own eyes. I just had to land on the shape of the connection, which, as it turns out, is and was not declarative and loud. It was something else more humbled.

Isn’t that how we write? We ask ourselves what story we must tell, where our stories brush against other stories that seem so far apart? And I also ask what it means to risk, to risk being wrong, to be ok with that implication.

For me, and for the poem–and for the book as a whole–the permission and call to speak is central to its themes. As a shy person, I have sat in many seminars incapable of jumping into the mix.

What is interesting though is how my resistance to speech continues still. I had a very hard time sitting down to write this essay when Gaza is under rubble, when people are barely surviving, when my knowledge and action is wildly incomplete. I struggle like many to know how to be of service, to speak or act against this hulk of war and genocide and hate.

Before the election I took an op-ed writing class with Megan Mayhew Bergman. She’d offered it for free to encourage more people to write political articles on topics that might make a difference for who was elected and what measures and laws were voted into place. The big takeaway: It doesn’t have to be huge. Write what is nearest your heart. Write from your actual experience. People listen when they hear authenticity. People change over wide swaths of time. Just speak. Just write. Maybe try humbleness. The rest will fall into place.

Check out Amanda Hawkins’ When I Say the Bones I Mean the Bones here:

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(Things Writers Should Know)

A character instantly dropping dead from an insulin overdose sounds dramatic, but it’s also very wrong. And many readers today are savvier about drugs than ever before. They may be recovering from addiction, struggling with diabetes, or a healthcare worker. Or they may have been personally impacted by the growing fentanyl overdose epidemic. 

For these readers, a blatantly inaccurate drug-related scene can ruin an otherwise great story, leading to negative reviews. It also robs them of an emotional-roller coaster while the character struggles, as the drug slowly begins to create trouble.

So, how can you avoid these pitfalls? By simply using the power of real drug facts. These facts not only offer authentic scenes, but enough peril to draw readers from page to page. Prefer a light-hearted scene? A few real facts can have your readers laughing, as they watch a mom hallucinating in the fruit aisle of the grocery store, after taking far too much cough syrup. Real drug facts can also help writers develop characters with complex backstories: the parent whose teen overdosed on left-over pain pills or the recovering heroin addict.

Thankfully, writers don’t need in-depth drug knowledge to successfully develop these realistic scenes. Following these simple, but key, tips will help assure accuracy:

1. Check the Historical Timeline

While it may seem obvious, it’s important to check that the drug or medical device used in your plot had been discovered by the historical time period of your story. Paying attention to details, such as which kind of drugs were available and in what form (pills, injection, etc.) is important. 

A 1630s pilgrim shouldn’t be using a modern-day drug patch for his pain. Instead, swapping that patch for a mustard poultice would suit the historical context. Likewise, a midwife shouldn’t give a shot to ease the labor pain of that pilgrim’s wife. A tea infused with herbal pain remedies would be more realistic. 

This doesn’t mean an historical story can’t lend itself to peril for your character. That mustard plaster may sound boring, but, as a writer, you can take your readers through the emotions of hope, as the healer applies it to the moaning townsman, relief as the man begins to rest, and finally plunging into worry, as the bandages are pulled back to reveal angry, blistering skin from a plaster left on too long. And what about that midwife? She’s young and inexperienced. What if she mixes too strong of a tea, sending the laboring mom into an overdose, even as the baby is born. Now what?

Historical accuracy is also impacted by a number of other variables, including changes in prescribing trends, as new treatments are discovered. These trends impact the products diverted to street drug supplies or available in home medicine cabinets. In addition, drug abuse trends are impacted by the influx of illegal drugs across borders. The recent upsurge of overdose deaths from fentanyl-laced counterfeit pills, such as oxycodone, is a prime example. A scene set in the mid-1990s could realistically involve stolen oxycodone from a medicine cabinet, whereas in a modern scene that oxycodone is more likely illicit and laced with deadly fentanyl. These sad realities readily lend themselves to believable trouble for your character.

2. Learn the Language

Many of us are familiar with the drug-related terminology we heard from friends or in movies while growing up: terms like weed or bong or phrases like chasing the dragon. But like all colloquial phrases, the slang associated with illicit and recreational drug use has greatly changed over the decades. 

For example, getting stoned has morphed into being baked or faded. Having a contemporary character ask a friend for a doobie would be outdated, while asking for a blunt or vape would be more modern. 

Even the language associated with obtaining drugs has evolved. Instead of a whispered exchange on a street corner, your contemporary character could simply send coded emojis via a social media app to order illicit drugs and schedule their delivery. When your character gets a text of a school bus and a chocolate bar, he’ll understand his ecstasy will be delivered to him at the school playground.

3. Verify the Legal Accuracy

Drug-related laws are rapidly changing, offering a wide array of creative scene options. Laws can vary from state to state and even between individual states and the federal level, creating confusion for people, not to mention the risk of potentially inaccurate stories for writers. 

For example, recent changes in some states have led to the legalization of hallucinogenic mushrooms. These mushrooms are under tight control, however, so your character shouldn’t just walk into a drug store to buy them off of the shelves (well, not yet, anyway). In most other states, hallucinogenic mushrooms remain illegal. 

If you want to have some legal fun, your character can buy a large supply of hallucinogenic mushrooms while on vacation, only to be arrested when she flies to her home state, where they are illegal. It’s much like the trouble Brittany Griner found herself in, when cannabis vape cartridges were confiscated from her luggage in Russia, sending her to prison and creating an international drama.

4. Rewrite Instant Death Scenes

This is a Hollywood favorite: A drug is swallowed, followed by the character instantly dropping to the ground in a seizure, foam dripping from his mouth. And while the foam part may be accurate, the instant effect is not. Nor is having his distraught co-character immediately announce his death. Yes, it’s visually entertaining. And completely wrong.

Most of your readers know it takes a bit of time for drugs to work. After all, most of us have suffered headaches, while waiting for a pain pill to work. At the very least, a drug first must be absorbed. Then, it takes a little time for an effect, good or bad. Why risk alienating audiences, when you can take advantage of this knowledge, allowing your screenplay to take readers on a rewarding journey, tensing as their favorite character begins to slur, then stumble, then… fade to black?

Now, that’s a page-turner.

5. Choose the Right Symptoms

Giving your character the wrong drug symptoms (or making up your own) can hurt your credibility. A melatonin overdose won’t cause an adult character to stop breathing. A few extra vitamin capsules won’t cause hallucinations. But there are plenty of interesting real symptoms that will fit your plot, provided you choose the right drug.

If you really want those vitamins to cause hallucinations, instead of creating fake symptoms, a pill mix-up can be your answer. If you’ve sprinkled the bread crumbs well, your character, who stores bottles of vitamins and hallucinogenic mushroom capsules next to each other, can end up in an adventure she wasn’t planning. 

As she makes her coffee, blurry-eyed, and grabs the wrong bottle—downing a few mushroom capsules instead of her vitamins—your readers will be anticipating what will happen during her upcoming morning interview.

6. Verify Overdose Potential

A drug overdose can be woven into your story. With some drugs, your character can even be brought back from the brink of death. Opioids, such as fentanyl, can shut down the ability to breathe, leading to rapid death. The antidote naloxone, if given in time, can undo that breathing effect, allowing your character to survive. 

Some drugs, though, have little or no ability to cause an overdose death. A desperately depressed character that swallows too many melatonin tablets is likely to get very drowsy, but it’s not realistic to open the next scene with the family weeping by her coffin. Melatonin overdoses in children, however, is another story entirely. 

If your character’s child mistakes Mom’s melatonin gummies for candy, the next scene could believably open with the family holding hands bedside, the child on a ventilator in the hospital, the doctor looking somber.

7. Use Reliable Resources

Online resources have made researching drug effects simpler over the decades, although not all information is factual. From newspaper articles to websites, wrong drug information abounds. 

For example, gross inaccuracies were perpetuated online regarding the risk of death from merely touching fentanyl pills. The increased use of artificial intelligence for information searches can amplify this kind of inaccurate information. However, there are numerous reputable drug information sources. 

Drug Package Inserts (also called Prescribing Information) reliably offer insight into possible symptoms and can be searched online by the drug name. Poison Control Centers and the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) are great resources for overdose trends. And the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) periodically posts comprehensive updates that detail illicit drug abuse and trafficking trends.

As writers, we’re accustomed to researching pertinent facts and information. Accurately portraying real drug facts should be no different. Applying these seven key tips can help you avoid blatantly unrealistic scenes, while offering a better reader journey. But synthesizing these ideas into authentic scenarios can be a little more difficult. 

Once your scene is complete, consider including beta readers with backgrounds in drug-related fields, such as pharmacy, emergency medicine, addiction, or even forensics, as a valuable step to validate your interpretation, assuring your readers will love every page. 

The post 7 Key Tips for Writing Realistically Perilous Drug Scenes appeared first on Writer's Digest.

(Courageous Discomfort: Thoughts on How To Have Important Conversations About Race and Racism for Writers, Readers, and Other Human Beings)

If you wanted to get published, you wrote to that brief. Thankfully, that is changing. The industry is becoming more diverse and inclusive. It is a glorious (and about time) thing.

But, as writers that have grown up reading that canon, it can be hard to unlearn that ingrained preference. Here are a few tips to wean yourself from that mindset and authentically voice your once marginalized culture and heritage into your writing.

Embrace Learning

Just because you are of (__________) heritage, that doesn’t mean you know everything about its history. Take some time to read and learn. I am a Cuban-American that lives in Miami, where there is a large diaspora community.

I “should” know a lot about Cuba. My Spanish* “should” be perfect. “Should” is the language of shame. There is no shame in admitting you don’t know something. Take back the power. Change that oppressive language from “should” to “can.” It will free you to learn joyfully.

This year, I read Ada Ferrer’s Cuba: An American History. It helped me connect so many snips of history that I’d heard in passing but never studied. My confidence-in-heritage meter has gone way up. And I know my expanded understanding and knowledge will organically infuse my writing.

[*My Spanish is not fluent. I learned from hearing and speaking it, not reading and writing it. Accents and grammar are my weak spot. But I am committed to representing the Spanglish world in which I (and 41 million other Americans) live. So, I learn as I go, sin vergüenza.]

Details Are Everything

Do not be afraid to be specific. The cultural details in your story are gifts to your target reader, and they add authenticity to your story’s world.

I write the Caribbean Kitchen Mystery series. It is set in Miami with a Cuban-American protagonist—a food anthropologist turned cooking show star. I’ve put details in my story for every level of my readership.

For example, I use language specific to Miami, such as dale, super, bruh, and mission. Locals and former residents of The 305 will pick up on that and feel seen. For Latinx readers, mi’ja might be the thing that brings a smile to their faces. For the culturally adjacent reader and/or a connoisseur, it might be the yellow and red can of coffee that they recognize as Café Bustelo.

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Context Clues Are Better Than Explanations

Not everything has to be translated verbatim. Your target audience will know what you mean, and your wider audience will either figure it out or look it up. Remember when you first became a reader? What would you do when you encountered a new word? I bet you asked someone what it meant or found a reference book.

Here is an example from Calypso, Corpses, and Cooking. Miriam’s backyard is crawling with police officers. So, what does a cooking show star do? She offers them refreshments, of course.

I crouched in front of the minifridge and pulled out a six-pack of Coke, a Sprite, and a lone bottle of malta. The K-9 handler looks Latino, so maybe he’ll drink it.

The reader doesn’t need to know that malta is a type of soda made from fermented grains that is popular in the Caribbean, especially amongst Miami Cubans. The context clues inform them that it is a soda like Coke or Sprite. If they are curious, they might research it more. (Try it with condensed milk for a real locals-only experience.)

Choose Your Hill

What is the hill you will defend until death? Mine is no italics.

I will not allow the Spanish in my stories to be italicized. My Latinx characters speak in two languages—sometimes within a single sentence. They do not stop, change voices, and then say the words. (Watch Daniel José Older demonstrate it in this video) Italics draw attention to a word or phrase to indicate a tonal change or an inner voice or printed text the character is seeing.

In short, italics other. I do not want to other my characters. I want to break from that colonial mentality. It is important (dare I say, my mission) to normalize languages other than English in literature for English-speaking-dominate markets. Anything less perpetuates the myth that one language is superior to the hundreds of other languages (350-430) spoken in the U.S. I feel very passionate about this and could go on and on.

But my point in asking you to choose your hill is that it will help you find your true north. You will need that compass when it comes time to read comments from beta-readers, editors, and reviewers.

Be in Community

Find your writing community. Actually, find more than one because rarely is there a group that is intersectional enough to fit all your needs. I am a member of Crime Writers of Color (for allyship and comradery), my local Mystery Writers of America chapter (as a professional guild and for in-person events), and Sisters in Crime (for advocacy and education), plus several other groups for networking.

Each provides me with different kinds of support. My advice is don’t be shy. If it is an online group, don’t be a lurker. Introduce yourself. Get involved. Volunteer. Attend workshops. Network. Finding the right (and safe) space to ask questions is crucial. Writing may be a solitary act, but it doesn’t have to be a lonely journey.

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