Death Scenes (And my love hate relationship with them)

Since I'm back from the lovely writing workshop I suppose I'd better blog about what I've learned I'm good at. You know, my greatest strengths in writing. I have a lot of weaknesses too but there are a few things that just flow more easily onto the page when I type.

One of those things is death scenes.

Ah, death scenes. How I both love and despise you. What is it about you that makes me such a time bomb of emotional instability?

Well it's the reader and writer at war inside me of course. The reader in me is screaming, "HOW COULD YOU?! YOU ARE A TERRIBLE HUMAN BEING AND YOU DON'T DESERVE TO LIVE!" But the writer is saying, "Good, good! Make your readers cry! Squeeze every drop of depressing you possibly can out of these words. Dance puppets, dance!"

This is all going on at the same time while I write death scenes. I can't help but feel both self hatred and joy when I write because I am good at death scenes. I don't know what that says about me as a person but I'm good at making people cry.

So this year at the workshop I decided to try an experiment. I met a friend while I was there who was very empathetic and easily prone to tears. She cried at everything... well not everything... but she got easily invested in characters so when it came time for them to die she was sobbing. It was a kind of empathy that I really admired in her (Being a cold, heartless, cynic myself)

So I decided to try an experiment. I had written a death scene for my current project that was undoubtedly the saddest thing I ever wrote. It was so brutal I was crying when I wrote it and I don't really cry at books. So I wanted to take this scene that my friend had no prior emotional investment in and see if she would cry.

She did. Hard. And she screamed at me. Even though she didn't know this character. And I couldn't stop smiling because, well, SUCCESS!

Now, that's just my empathetic friend but imagine if she had been with these characters for four books. The reaction would be much more intense.

It's interesting that this is my talent because I've never witnessed death. The people I've known who have died I haven't been particularly close to. I don't know what it's like to feel that empty and can't right from experience. I just create it in my head somehow. I imagine the feeling. According to people who have read my stuff I'm pretty close.

Death scenes are also difficult for me to write in an emotional sense because I always seem to kill off my favorite characters. In fact in my top ten characters for my book every single one of them dies, almost dies or is psychologically tortured. Or sometimes more than one of these. It's just because I love them that much I guess.

What are your strengths in writing? What scenes come the easiest to you?

-Authoress Anonymous