Every Writer Has That One Story That They Don't Even Intend To Write Down Anymore, But That Is Forever

if you feel like you forgot how to write: good. forget the rules. be ungovernable. invent a new genre.

The barista in chapter three? She has a life outside of giving your protagonist coffee. The villain’s henchman? Maybe he’s just trying to pay off his dad’s medical bills. Every character has their own story, their own motivations. The world doesn’t revolve around your protagonist, don’t write like it does.

Writing Grief Without Romanticizing It

Grief is raw, messy, and deeply personal. It doesn’t follow a neat arc or fit into tidy narrative beats. While stories often use grief as a dramatic device, romanticizing it can cheapen the emotional reality. Writing grief authentically means embracing its discomfort and unpredictability, not sanitizing or idealizing it. 

What Romanticizing Grief Looks Like

Characters who seem emotionally wrecked but always manage to look graceful in their suffering.

Overly articulate monologues that sound more like a eulogy than a real moment of loss.

Depictions of grief as a singular, cathartic event instead of a long, jagged process.

Romanticized Grief:

“Every day without you is like a piece of me fading away into a tragic, beautiful void. I’ll carry this pain forever, for it’s all I have left of you.”

This might be poetic, but it lacks the authenticity of how most people actually process grief.

Realistic Grief:

“I forgot your birthday. I didn’t mean to, but when I remembered, it was already too late. And then I hated myself because forgetting felt like erasing you.”

Writing Grief Authentically

1. Show the Physical Toll

Grief isn’t just emotional—it’s physical. Insomnia, headaches, exhaustion, or even the inability to move can be part of the experience.

“She woke up in the middle of the night again, choking on the air. Her chest felt like a cinderblock had been wedged inside, heavy and unmoving. It was three days since the funeral, and she still hadn’t slept longer than an hour.”

2. Let Grief Be Messy

Grief isn’t a perfectly linear journey. There’s no logical progression from denial to acceptance—there are setbacks, breakdowns, and even moments of denial long after healing has started.

“He yelled at his mother for throwing out the cereal box. ‘It was his favorite,’ he said. She didn’t remind him that it had been expired for months. She just handed him the trash bag and walked away.”

3. Avoid Glossy Sentimentality

Sometimes grief isn’t poetic; it’s ugly, blunt, and devoid of grandeur. Characters might lash out, shut down, or isolate themselves.

Romanticized: “I’ll cry every day, but I’ll keep going because you’d want me to.”

Realistic: “They said time would heal it. But it didn’t. Time just put more space between me and the life I knew before.”

4. Let Grief Manifest in Small, Unexpected Ways

Grief isn’t always about sobbing—it can show up in mundane moments: hesitating to delete a voicemail, holding onto an old sweater, or instinctively setting the table for someone who’s gone.

“She turned to tell him the joke, the one about the broken lamp, and stopped halfway through. The silence hit harder than the punchline ever would.”

5. Highlight the Absurdity of It

Grief can be absurd and disorienting. Characters might laugh inappropriately, obsess over trivial details, or feel disconnected from reality.

“At the funeral, all she could focus on was how crooked the flowers were arranged. She kept wanting to fix them. If she didn’t, she thought, none of this would feel real.”

6. Explore How Grief Changes Relationships

Grief doesn’t happen in isolation—it affects relationships, often in unexpected ways. Some people pull closer, others drift apart.

“Her friends stopped asking how she was doing after the first few weeks. She didn’t blame them; she didn’t have an answer. ‘Fine’ wasn’t a lie—it was just easier than saying, ‘I still can’t breathe when I see his empty chair.’”

7. Show the Longevity of Grief

Grief doesn’t end when the funeral does. Let it linger in your story, showing how it ebbs and flows over time.

“It had been five years, but she still called his number when something exciting happened. She didn’t know why. Maybe it was just habit. Or maybe it was hope.”

8. Allow for Moments of Respite

Grief isn’t constant agony. People still laugh, find joy, and go about their lives—sometimes feeling guilty for it.

“She smiled for the first time in weeks, and then immediately hated herself for it. It felt like betrayal, like forgetting.”

Nothing frustrates more than the realization that the world behind your eyes will never look back at you like a mirror from the page. But the frustration dissipates when you realize that if you fill the entire page so airtight with your world, then there would be no room for the reader.

Writing is like, type type type, clackity clack clack- and whoops im on social media now

"I don't want to read this" is totally valid.

"This is disgusting to me" is totally valid.

"I don't want to read this because it is disgusting to me" is totally valid.

"I don't think anyone should be allowed to read or write this because it is disgusting to me" is authoritarian.

I feel called out and I don’t like it

Hey, stop scrolling and start writing. The book ain't gonna write itself.

It will never not be frustrating to me that amputees appear in fiction ALL. THE. TIME. and yet they're almost never acknowledged as such. The Cyberpunk genre is especially guilty of this: amputees and prosthetics becoming a normalised part of life are a defining part of the genre/aesthetic and yet no one even consults with any amputees about how we get represented there. Most writers in those genres don't even consider that giving your characters cybernetic arms and legs means they're an amputee.

CW: Ableism, dehumanisation

This makes it REALLY uncomfortable to engage with stories in the genre because another common aspect of cyberpunk is the idea of losing yourself and becoming something distinctly not-human anymore because you have too many cybernetic augmentations/implants. Shadowrun even has mechanics for this, which state if you get too many prosthetics, which is what cybernetics are 9 times out of 10, your character becomes a monster. These mechanics and discussions surrounding "how many robot bits make you not human anymore" are really, really uncomfortable when you remember this isn't something that's unique to a far-off future setting. Those people you're discussing the humanity of already exist. They're called amputees. If you reframe the question as "how many amputations can you have before you stop being a person" I hope you can see why an amputee like myself is not going to feel safe around you or in your fandoms.

And it's a shame, because I REALLY want to like Cyberpunk. I really, honestly do. I love the aesthetics, I love the idea of big corporations being the villains and the anti-capitalism at the heart of the genre, and I love the idea of prosthetics being not only destigmatised, but desirable. When written from a disability-inclusive lense, it honestly has the potential to be an incredibly uplifting and empowering genre. but as the genre stands right now, it's actively hostile to the very folks who are usually the stars of its stories: amputees, all because people just refuse to acknowledge us.

Cyberpunk isn't the only genre guilty of this, it's common all throughout sci-fi as a whole, but Cyberpunk is the only one where it starts becoming a serious issue due to its rampant dehumanisation of a real group of people. In other sci-fi settings, it's just kind of annoying and while it can be a form of erasure, it's not usually harmful, just...frustrating. Fantasy does it on occasion too, think pirates with a hook and a peg leg, but nowhere near as much.

If you, as an author or creator, use any of these words to describe a character or their tech in a sci-fi setting:

cybernetics/cybernetic enhancements

bionics

robot limbs

cyborgs

augmentations

You are probably writing an amputee. Please, at the very least, acknowledge it, and be mindful that those are real people who actually exist, not just a fantasy group you can speculate about.

hey when you make posts, i just want you to know, thou/thee/thy/thine/ye are like he/you(object)/your/yours/you(subject) okay? "thou art wearing shoes," "i will wear shoes for thee," okay?

you say thine if the next word starts with a vowel and thy if the next word starts with a consonant and they both mean "your" so "thine own shoes," "thy shoes," okay?

and ye means you and refers to the subject of a sentence, "ye members of the brotherhood of shoes," okay? you need this information to create better knight yaoi. i'm personally more interested in nun yuri but we are a community

I used to try and resist what comes naturally to my writing, fearing judgement. I have learned that, through writing what I am passionate, I get stuff done. This is your sign to add that thing to your WIP. You know what that thing is to you.