How Story Structure Mirrors Our Grief Process
All of us have known grief in some way. For many of us, it has touched our lives, lingered, threatened to take over. But when it moves on, it always teaches us something new: How strong we are, how short life is, how our lives aren’t predetermined but blank canvases that hold the paints of who we are.
(5 Tips for Writing About Grief Without Bogging Down Your Reader.)
When I first started my novel Pocket Full of Teeth in late 2020, I was in the throes of grief. Like many of us, I was isolated and lonely from a year of quarantine. I was unhappy in my career. I was grieving relationships of the people I’d lost, and it was abundantly clear which relationships I’d outgrown. On top of that, I was living with health conditions that doctors only took seriously when I couldn’t perform everyday tasks.
To escape, I dove into the story of Cat and her haunted manuscript. In many ways, my first draft was a sad, sappy version of what it feels like to experience loss and be completely consumed by grief. Thank goodness, that’s where good editing came in on the second, third… okay, fifth drafts, but it was only when my novel was finished that I realized something greater: Storytelling (and writing in particular) is about the circle of grief.
Many writers are familiar with Joseph Campbell’s “The Hero’s Journey,” and many more are probably familiar with “The Five Stages of Grief.” When I looked through my own experience writing, I could see that they matched up perfectly, and that in many ways, storytelling is its own grief process that helps us let go of our old selves to accept something new.
Grief and Leaving the Ordinary World
The Hero’s Journey starts with a hero in their ordinary world who gets called to adventure. Something shakes them up so completely that their lives are changed forever, and they can never go back to life as they know it. Many times, the hero is called several times before they finally accept their role as the hero and embark on their hero’s journey. They are in denial (the first stage of grief) and can’t comprehend why or how the events are happening. They are left stunned and questioning how it can be true until they realize that there’s no going back.
As writers, we experience denial when an idea first comes to us. An idea pops into our heads and simply won’t leave us alone. We question if it’s a good idea or if we’re able to pull it off. We don’t have all the answers, but we know that ultimately we must follow the tough topics and leave our old ways of thinking behind. If, for example, we’ve always thought that love is unconditional, we might be forced to explore this topic through the eyes of a character who has known nothing but conditional love.
We leave our idealistic ways of thinking behind and ask what might happen if someone was only shown conditional love. How would that affect their relationships? How would that affect their self-esteem? How would they raise a child of their own? Following these questions, the writer is forced from their comfortable place behind the keyboard into the story of their hero.
Entering the Unknown
Once the hero enters the unknown world, they are faced with allies and adversaries who will test and teach the hero as they work to realize their great potential. They are in constant motion–and constant friction–so that they might shine just like a plain piece of coal would after experiencing high pressure. It is only after this intense period that the hero can become who/what they were meant to be all along. This process is NOT comfortable, however, and the hero experiences constant setbacks, frustration, and anger.
Much like the tests and trials experienced by the hero, a writer is tested when they work through their novel. Often, they will let anger (the second stage of grief) take over. They toil with the larger themes in their writing. They wrestle with big issues and allow tension to build. They see what works and what doesn’t work and find that the things that don’t work often teach them more than the things that do.
This is the slog. It is hard, and it is messy, but it is essential to the writer’s voice and the character’s journey.
Battle Royale
When the character is ready to finally fight their big battle at the climax, they face the hardest challenge they could ever imagine. Similarly, writers often face the challenge of finishing their work. What answers have they learned along the way? What inconsistencies do they see? What are the many possible ways the character could work through their conflict and what does that reveal?
It is usually at this point that writers give up. They enter the bargaining stage. They convince themselves that they aren’t writers and that they have no idea what they are doing. They question their talent and the quality of their ideas and sometimes their sanity. They’ve tried to slog through the mess and finish their work, but writing is hard. Yet, this is where the magic happens.
This is the big battle that all writers face–embodying their identity as a writer. Through the big battle, they can finally understand that they are a good writer and that they can explore tough topics that change a reader after the story is done.
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The Darkest Hour
After the climax, every character experiences a type of death. Sometimes this is a real event where someone dies. Other times, death is a loss of innocence or heartbreak or saying goodbye. They must grieve the things they have lost along the way. They have entered the abyss.
Writers also go through a darkest hour. The fourth stage of grief–depression–often follows after they finish their book. They come off the high of completing a manuscript and can finally see the next steps… but that also means they see the amount of editing and submitting and marketing they need to do to get a book into reader’s hands–all of which are not for the faint of heart. It truly is the darkest hour.
Lessons Learned
Just like our hero who returns to the ordinary world after their journey, so too do writers. They enter the fifth stage of grief–acceptance–however this stage is like a comforting welcome home. They’ve finally reached the point where the work is over and they have come to terms with their own journey in the process.
For the writer, though, this entire grief cycle isn’t final. It’s cyclical. It comes and goes and restarts as many times as necessary to work through an idea or a chapter or their work as a whole. The important part is that we trust the process because we all go through it and it allows us to become great storytellers along the way.
So What Can That Teach Us?
As writers, we are always working through the complex situations and relationships around us. We can see how things work and see interesting ways to convey our big ideas into stories that can change lives. Yet, we are finding ourselves as much as our characters are finding themselves as we work through ideas of identity, love, legacy, revenge, and society (just to name a few) in our own writing.
I knew I had to follow the ideas that came forth from writing Pocket Full of Teeth, such as how do our perspectives influence the stories we tell and can we get a complete picture of a story if we include multiple perspectives? The process wasn’t comfortable or easy. I definitely went through all the stages of grief as I wrote the book, but through this novel, I became a better writer with a better understanding of those complex questions.
As writers, we have ideas that won’t leave us alone, we follow them into the unknown and face big questions in an epic battle (often bargaining for the story to work, please, work!), and ultimately we let our old ways of thinking die so that we can accept a new reality with a new–and often more nuanced–way of thinking.
We are all storytellers, so it would only make sense that our stories mirror our process for growth. In this way, we are not consumed by grief. We learn from it. We share it. We learn complexity and empathy because of it. And we become better writers–and better human beings–because of the stories that connect us.
Check out Aimee Hardy’s Pocket Full of Teeth here:
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