Death is a natural part of life so it should be no surprise
that it makes an appearance in a writer’s work. I knew that I was going to have
to refer to it at some point in The War
Wolf as this is a book about violent events and violence often ends in death;
especially when there’s a battle!
There are several approaches that one can take with regards
to this subject and it all depends upon the nature of the death that you are
writing about. The Battle of Fulford Gate gave me two kinds of approach. The
first was a more objective account in which large numbers of men meet in combat
and a significant percentage of them died. The removed nature of the account
actually results in a kind of distance being achieved between myself and the
often undefined characters that I am writing about. I did put in the occasional
more detailed account of someone dying horribly on the point of a spear but
these were largely cameo appearances.
The more subjective accounts came when I involved the characters
that I had defined, moulded and developed. In this instance I actually found
the writing more emotionally charged. I don’t know if that came across to the
reader, no one has actually mentioned it yet, but for me the scene in which
Hereric commits the ultimate act of courage, sacrificing himself to save his
lord, honouring his death-oath as a huscarl, meant a lot when I wrote it. I
wanted it be heroic and not just another bloody event. When I thought about it
I was humbled by what I imagined to be the courage of a man who accepts the
price of his own loyalty on a field of battle will be his death. To stand there
before your enemies knowing that you will not live beyond the encounter and yet
not shirk from it; that is true bravery.
There are other deaths, however, and they are not all as
brave. In my new novel Eugenica, a
work currently in progress, I wrote a scene where a young girl dies as the result
of a severe beating. I found actually writing the scene surprisingly easy, I
thought that I might have had a problem with that as I have no experience of
visiting such violence on another person, but it flowed from my keyboard. The
real emotional response came after the beating when she is rescued by a friend
and dies in the company of what few other friends she had. That actually got to
me. I remember reading an interview with J. K. Rowling in which she admitted to
crying over a death scene that she wrote for Harry Potter, I don’t think that I
was too impressed. I was wrong to have that attitude. When you invest time and
effort into a character they do come alive and start to live in your
imagination, then you kill the off and although they never leave you they are
never the same either.
What I discovered was that it was not the moment of the
death of the character that I had a response to, it was the impact that that
death had on the other characters. In For
Rapture of Ravens I had to deal with the aftermath of the Battle of Fulford
Gate and one of the characters has to grieve for her husband. I’ve attended my
share of funerals so I was able to set the scene well enough, I think, but what
came out as I wrote the dialogue surprised me. I think it is one of my better
moments of writing but I’m going to have to wait for the book to be published
to verify that.
Art imitates life, they say, therefore so should writing. In
life the moment of someone’s death can be terrible, painful, quick; slow,
observed by a crowd or go unknown. The moment of death is not the part that
provokes the real emotional response; that comes as part of the realisation
that this person really has died. It is the reaction of one human to the demise
of another. We are largely empathic beings and we feel the hurt of another
otherwise would a reader be affected by the death of a person who is just a
figment of the writer’s imagination?
