Some Fucking Resources For All Ur Writing Fuckin Needs

Do you have any advice on how to write a grieving character? Thank you!!

Hi!

Grieving isn’t pretty. It isn’t always dramatic, either – while some people certainly do go home and throw their favorite vase against the wall, some people retreat into themselves and become emotionally unresponsive (that’s what I do). Violence or anger is more likely to occur if the death is sudden – so is retreating into an emotional shell, really, because it’s often a result of shock. But both can occur outside of a sudden death – cancer isn’t always sudden, but many people still become angry when their loved one is diagnosed with or dies because of it. Basically, if the death feels unfair in any way – if it’s sudden, or if it feels like it happened too early, such as in the case of cancer or of some sort of cardiac disaster (a heart attack, a stroke, etc) – it’s more likely to provoke anger or shock, depending on your character’s temperament and attachment to the dying/dead character.

That was just a general disclaimer. Now, onto the meat of grieving!

Firstly, grieving can begin before the person is technically dead – you don’t have to wait for the person to go flatline and physically stop breathing for your other characters to feel a sense of loss. If your character suffered a medical disaster or an accident that rendered them comatose, or if your character is obviously fighting a losing battle (again, terminal cancer comes to mind), your other characters could start grieving them even though they’re still breathing and their heart is still beating. However, the likelihood is that your characters won’t be able to really start working through the five stages of grief until your character actually does physically die, because rarely does death really hit home until it has occurred.

Speaking of the five stages of grief, those are important! They’re as follows:

Denial/Isolation: your characters can’t believe your dead character is really dead. This is a defense mechanism of sorts for your mind – a way to delay at least some of the pain, and give yourself time to process what’s happened (although that processing happens subconsciously, because on the surface you’re denying that anything’s happened at all). If the dead character fought a long battle with an illness before death, this stage may be expedited by the fact that your characters had time to process the character’s dying as it was happening. If the death was sudden in any way, this stage may be prolonged, because it will be harder to comprehend something that happened so quickly, and shock will be more likely to occur.

Anger: the pain your characters were masking in the denial stage starts to come to the surface, and as a response to the pain, your characters get angry (just as many other vulnerable emotions, such as fear, are expressed as anger – anger is a tough emotion, as opposed to fear and grief, so most people subconsciously opt for anger because it makes them feel less vulnerable). They may feel they’ve been robbed of your dead character’s companionship. Their anger may manifest itself in many different ways: isolation, irritability, or self-destructive behavior, to name a few. Their anger may also direct itself at various places: the medical professionals who failed to save your dead character’s life, God for taking your dead character, even the dead character him/herself, if they could in any way be responsible for their own death (if they were driving intoxicated, if they never ate healthily and suffered a heart attack, etc.).

Bargaining: before death, this stage may manifest itself as “please God, just let them live and I’ll tithe my ten percent and go to church every Sunday”, or “please, [Dying character’s name], just hold on and get better and we’ll [do that thing the dying character has always wanted to do]”. (Keep in mind that most people have an astounding impulse to be religious during a time of crisis, whether they’ve been religious in the past or not.) After death, this stage may manifest itself in the “could’ve-should’ve-would’ve” philosophy: “if only we’d taken them to the doctor sooner”, “I should’ve made him stay home”, “I knew there was something wrong with him!”, and so on. This stage is generally an attempt to regain control of the situation – your characters feel like they’re taking some kind of action by offering a proposition, or by placing blame.

Depression: there are two types of depression associated with grief. In the first (which is almost more similar to anxiety) your characters worry more about others: what if I haven’t been there for people when they needed me, how are we going to pay for the funeral/burial services, and so on. Basically it deals more with the practical aspects of the character’s death. The second type is more introspective – your characters may retreat into themselves and analyze old memories of your dead character, and their feelings on everything that’s happened. This type is private, and your characters probably won’t share much about their thoughts if they experience it.

Acceptance: this stage is marked by withdrawal and calm – it can sometimes be difficult to distinguish from depression. It’s not a stage of joyous frolicking and exclaiming, “It’s okay! I understand everything about [Dead Character’s] death!”. Your characters may still not understand the purpose of your dead character’s death, but understanding and acceptance are not synonyms, nor are they mutually inclusive. The important thing about this stage is that your characters can make peace with the death, and can move on.

Keep in mind that while I’ve listed these stages in what is regarded as their general order, every person (and character) grieves differently – they may experience these emotions in a different order than that above. They may also go through one or several of the stages more than once, or cycle through the first four of them multiple times before reaching the fifth. Some characters may not even reach the fifth at all – depending on the circumstances of the death and the character’s attachment to your dead character, they may never fully accept your dead character’s death. The stages above are just a general framework for grieving.

Also, keep in mind that if your character’s death was tied in any way to traumatic incidents for your other characters, it may complicate the grieving process for those other characters, because the character’s death will be tied to other painful or triggering memories.

I hope this helps! If you need anything else, please feel free to ask. - @authors-haven

Send me “Restrained” + a number for a starter in which one or both of our characters are:

Or send “Restrained?” for a randomly generated number.

1. Locked in the trunk of a car 2. Tied to a chair 3. Chained up to the wall 4. In a cage 5. Behind prison bars 6. In a room with a locked door and barred windows 7. Hand-cuffed to an object of their choice 8. Hand-cuffed to one other person (or each other) 9. Stuck in a hole underground 10. Trapped in an attic 11. Trapped in a tomb or mausoleum 12. Stuck in the back of a police car 13. Stuck in an elevator 14. Locked in a vault 15. Strapped to a table

"The Picture of Dorian Gray" sentence starters

goldendorito:

ask-meme-addicts:

❝ There is only one thing in the world worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about. ❞

❝ The ugly and the stupid have the best of it in this world. ❞

❝ We shall all suffer for what the gods have given us, suffer terribly. ❞

❝ I have grown to love secrecy. ❞

❝ Your cynicism is simply a pose. ❞

❝ You know we poor artists have to show ourselves in society from time to time, just to remind the public that we are not savages. ❞

❝ Conscience and cowardice are really the same things. ❞

❝ I choose my friends for their good looks, my acquaintances for their good characters, and my enemies for their good intellects. ❞

❝ A man cannot be too careful in the choice of his enemies. ❞

❝ Is that very vain of me? I think it is rather vain. ❞

❝ None of us can stand other people having the same faults as ourselves. ❞

❝ I like persons better than principles, and I like persons with no principles better than anything else in the world. ❞

❝ There is nothing that art cannot express. ❞

❝ The harmony of soul and body—how much that is! We in our madness have separated the two, and have invented a realism that is vulgar, an ideality that is void. ❞

❝ My heart shall never be put under their microscope. ❞

❝ It is only the intellectually lost who ever argue. ❞

❝ I feel that I have given away my whole soul to someone who treats it as if it were a flower to put in his coat, a bit of decoration to charm his vanity, an ornament for a summer’s day.” ❞

❝ In the wild struggle for existence, we want to have something that endures, and so we fill our minds with rubbish and facts, in the silly hope of keeping our place. ❞

❝ Those who are faithful know only the trivial side of love: it is the faithless who know love’s tragedies. ❞

❝ People are afraid of themselves, nowadays. ❞

❝ Courage has gone out of our race. Perhaps we never really had it. ❞

❝ Every impulse that we strive to strangle broods in the mind and poisons us. ❞

❝ The only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it. ❞

❝ Nothing can cure the soul but the senses, just as nothing can cure the senses but the soul. ❞

❝ You know more than you think you know, just as you know less than you want to know. ❞

❝ Wherever you go, you charm the world. Will it always be so? ❞

❝ Time is jealous of you, and wars against your lilies and your roses. ❞

❝ Our limbs fail, our senses rot. We degenerate into hideous puppets, haunted by the memory of the passions of which we were too much afraid, and the exquisite temptations that we had not the courage to yield to. ❞

❝ You like your art better than your friends. ❞

❝ I am jealous of everything whose beauty does not die. ❞

❝ Young people, nowadays, imagine that money is everything. ❞

❝ Credit is the capital of a younger son, and one lives charmingly upon it. ❞

❝ Behind every exquisite thing that existed, there was something tragic. ❞

❝ The way of paradoxes is the way of truth. ❞

❝ I can sympathize with everything except suffering. ❞

❝ Humanity takes itself too seriously. It is the world’s original sin. If the caveman had known how to laugh, history would have been different. ❞

❝ Nowadays most people die of a sort of creeping common sense, and discover when it is too late that the only things one never regrets are one’s mistakes. ❞

❝ You are quite delightful and dreadfully demoralizing. ❞

❝ I am always late on principle, the principle being that punctuality is the thief of time. ❞

❝ I adore it, but I am afraid of it. It makes me too romantic. ❞

❝ Nowadays people know the price of everything and the value of nothing. ❞

❝ Passion is the privilege of people who have nothing to do. ❞

❝ If I ever did a crime, I would come and confess it to you. You would understand me. ❞

❝ When one is in love, one always begins by deceiving one’s self, and one always ends by deceiving others. That is what the world calls a romance. ❞

❝ There is always something infinitely mean about other people’s tragedies. ❞

❝ I want to make Romeo jealous. I want the dead lovers of the world to hear our laughter and grow sad. I want a breath of our passion to stir their dust into consciousness, to wake their ashes into pain. ❞

❝ People are very fond of giving away what they need most themselves. It is what I call the depth of generosity. ❞

❝ The only artists I have ever known who are personally delightful are bad artists. ❞

❝ It often happens that when we think we were experimenting on others we are really experimenting on ourselves. ❞

❝ Children begin by loving their parents; as they grow older they judge them; sometimes they forgive them. ❞

❝ To be in love is to surpass one’s self. ❞

❝ Poor? What does that matter? When poverty creeps in at the door, love flies in through the window. ❞

❝ Our proverbs want rewriting. They were made in winter, and it is summer now; springtime for me, I think, a very dance of blossoms in blue skies. ❞

❝ I shudder at the thought of being free. ❞

❝ I know you would never harm anyone I love, would you? ❞

❝ Whenever a man does a thoroughly stupid thing, it is always from the noblest motives. ❞

❝ Of course, it is sudden—all really delightful things are. ❞

❝ The reason we all like to think so well of others is that we are all afraid for ourselves. The basis of optimism is sheer terror. ❞

❝ Unselfish people are colourless. They lack individuality. ❞

❝ You are much better than you pretend to be. ❞

❝ I cannot understand how anyone can wish to shame the thing he loves. ❞

❝ When we are happy, we are always good, but when we are good, we are not always happy. ❞

❝ The real tragedy of the poor is that they can afford nothing but self-denial. Beautiful sins, like beautiful things, are the privilege of the rich. ❞

❝ Being adored is a nuisance. ❞

❝ You are dreadful! I don’t know why I like you so much. ❞

❝ You will always be fond of me. I represent to you all the sins you have never had the courage to commit. ❞

❝ Love is a more wonderful thing than art. ❞

❝ There are only two kinds of people who are really fascinating—people who know absolutely everything, and people who know absolutely nothing. ❞

❝ The secret of remaining young is never to have an emotion that is unbecoming. ❞

The amount of serotonin it gave me to watch this grandma react to her new galaxy light 🥺

It’s dark in here- *gasps in excitement* OHH SARAH!

OHH SARAH! *giggles like a little kid* OHhHhH!!

My ceiling is filled with blue lights… and stars and everything!!

OH Sarah! I can go to bed at night looking at this. OHHHH it’s beautiful!

From this shy young boy 

to this incredible and inspiring hero 

I am just so proud of how far you’ve come ❤

me: dress how you want!! gender is fake!!! nothing matters!!!!!!

trans person: i like gender tho

me: hell yeah i respect that!!!! i apologize and don’t mean to dismiss your identity with my optimistic nihilism!!!!!!!

Oh my fucking god, you are literally the fucking best okay imma cry I can't deal with this

Sunset lover.

A little gift for @pyromanius of her lovely darling Az.

the chef is the only relatable one and i love him a lot