Writing Grief: Tips for Writing About Grief

Grief is a sorrowful emotion that often manifests from the sudden or expected death of a family member, loved one, or best friend. Breakups, disappearances, and other upsetting events in your writing can also trigger grief for characters. Five stages of grief trace the usual arc of this emotion—denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance—and your characters may find themselves at various grieving stages.

Grief is a challenging emotional state that can play an essential role in developing characters. For example, incorporating grief into your story might imbue your character’s arc with loss, yearning, and emotional depth. The elasticity and nuance of grief make it an appealing figment of a writer’s craft; one day, the main character may be moving about happily, and the next, they may find it challenging to get out of bed.

If you are writing a memoir or essay, writing about your own grief may serve an additional purpose. The act could help you explore your loss or even provide some sense of closure. In this scenario, you become the central figure (or character) in your writing, but readers will still be able to relate to your arc and the emotion in your work.

Grief can manifest in different ways in various genres. In a work of realism, such as David Lindsay-Abaire’s Tony Award-winning play Rabbit Hole (2007), the protagonist Becca grieves the loss of her young child by compartmentalizing her emotions, shirking support group attendance, and delaying the appropriate grieving process.

Ari Aster’s horror film Hereditary (2018) also features a mother, Annie, as a grieving person. In this film, however, the specter of her lost daughter unravels Annie’s mental health and leads to supernatural invasions and terror.

In her book The Year of Magical Thinking (2005), author Joan Didion wrote about the loss of her husband, writer John Gregory Dunne, and her daughter’s illness, exploring her journey through grief in the aftermath of these events.

A figure or character’s grief may be an integral part of a memoir, short story, play, novel, film, or TV series. Consider how you can mindfully incorporate grief into your sad story or other written works with these tips:

• Let characters experience grief in their own ways. Grievers may show their emotions differently; some may turn to drink, others may move away from where the suffering began, and another may seek therapy. How characters exhibit grief should be true to their nature and reveal their humanity.
• Let characters go on a journey. Grief is sometimes the definitive part of someone’s day, and sometimes it is not. Varying the stages and embodiments of grief makes for more dynamic writing, and letting your character grow through grief can make for a more compelling character.
• Make the loss specific. Grief is grounded in deep loss, and for readers and audiences to better understand the grieving process of the characters, that loss should be hyper-specific. It should be clear who the character is mourning, how long the process has been going on, and how grief moves through the character’s body and emotions.
• Make the reader care about the character. Grieving may automatically help make a character a sympathetic character. Still, you should not define the character by their grief. Give them passions, hobbies, relationships, and other features that create a well-rounded and interesting character.
• Try employing flashbacks. A flashback is a narrative technique writers may use to highlight simpler times for characters where they get face time with the person they are grieving. This fleshes out the dynamic between the main character and the one they are missing.

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