The Writing Life Too

The morning sky is a hazy, unpromising gray. I had dinner with a student last night after teaching a plot workshop and a long day of talking. It was a class on plot, so it tends to feature a lot of lecturing, but I think that next time I teach it I want to create a new handout so we can dissect the structure of a novel together. (In the class I often use movies for examples because I can never find a single novel that everyone has read that can be discussed).

Later, our dinner conversation reminded me of a topic that I believe always needs exploring in writing. It is loss, the open wound that we all feel at times. And it is loss that people are defined and tempered. In fiction a writer can use loss as a means to bring clarity to a character and shape empathy in the reader; but loss is also a powerful topic for essays and natural road for exploration in memoirs. Centuries ago Marcus Aurelius said in that “Loss is nothing else but change, and change is Nature's delight.”

Fiction is built on a structure of changes happening to a character, in fact it’s a sort of record of threatening changes, designed to throw a character off balance and supply endless torments. In real life a person can be defined by the grace with which he navigates change. And loss is irretrievable change. The word is derived from the Old French grève, meaning a heavy burden. In English “grief” connotes an experience of deep sorrow, one that touches every aspect of existence. Grief can literally “weigh down” the person who must face this harsh reality.

And where writers must turn their attention. There is the loss of widowhood, of losing a friend, a pet, of a lover leaving, of a friend dumping you because you said the wrong thing. There is the loss that comes from rape when you lose the sanctity of your body and your safe place in the world. There is the loss when a job is shipped overseas or downsized or turned over to a younger person. There is the scary loss of financial security, the loss of youth, the loss of hope, the loss of trust when your partner is abusive or cheats on you. There is the loss health, the dreadful loss when someone we love commits suicide and we imagine again and again the person’s suffering and terrible aloneness.

A few months ago when a friend died suddenly in her sleep I walked around feeling not only bereft, but fragile. It was as if my skin was suddenly bruised and too thin, the planet was tilting dangerously, as the meaning of everyday details paled. When you write of loss it must be done with aching specificity. Write about bed you once shared with the yawning, empty side where the beloved slept. Write about the smells you miss on the body of your beloved. Write too about the way the body reacts; the loneliness, emptiness, anger, sense of injustice, your numbness and inability to concentrate.

And find figurative language so that we can feel how absence goes through a person keen as a knife blade, grief that feels bottomless.

Sometimes you can pass through the valley of loss with grace, dignity and strength, sometimes not. Sometimes you bury it, sometimes you linger too long. Loss belongs on the page to be shared. And here is one last thought by Norman Cousins: “Death is not the greatest loss in life. The greatest loss is what dies inside us while we live.”