Craft
On Writing Grief Without Sentimentality
The first draft of The Silence Between Worlds was, by any honest measure, a disaster. Not because the prose was bad — though it was — but because I was writing about grief the way I thought grief should be written about: with solemnity, with weight, with the full orchestral swell of feeling.
What I had forgotten, or perhaps never known, was that grief is not a single note. It is a chord. It contains, simultaneously, the most devastating sadness and the most absurd comedy. It contains rage and tenderness and boredom. It contains the moment you laugh at a funeral and feel immediately ashamed, and then laugh again.
The breakthrough came when I stopped trying to write grief and started trying to write Nadia — a specific woman, in a specific body, on a specific Tuesday afternoon, standing in a kitchen she doesn't recognise as her own. The grief was still there. But it arrived through the particular, not the general.
This is, I think, the central lesson of writing about any large emotion: you cannot approach it directly. You must come at it sideways, through the small and the concrete and the specific. The colour of the light. The smell of the room. The way a person holds a cup of tea when they are trying not to cry.
Sentimentality, as the critic James Wood has observed, is the unearned emotion — the feeling that hasn't been paid for in the currency of specificity. The antidote is not coldness. It is precision.