What We Carry With Us

⟢ ⟢ ⟢ LONG POST!!! ⟢ ⟢ ⟢

⋆˙⟡ Grief is not sad all the time and that will mess your character up more than the sadness does. There are going to be hours where your grieving character forgets. Where they're laughing at something stupid on their phone or annoyed about traffic or genuinely hungry and thinking about what they want for lunch and then it comes back and the forgetting makes it WORSE. The return of it after a moment of normal is its own specific violence. It feels like betrayal. Or it feels like proof that you're not grieving right, that you didn't love them enough to remember every second. Writers keep their grieving characters sad in every scene because it reads as respectful and consistent and it is WRONG. The grief that ambushes you in the cereal aisle is realer than the grief you perform at the funeral.

⋆˙⟡ THE STUFF!!! nobody talks about the stuff. Someone dies and suddenly there is a BODY and there are OBJECTS and both of these things require immediate logistical decisions that do not pause for your feelings. What do you do with their half-finished cup of tea. Their reading glasses on the nightstand. Their voicemails still on your phone. Their shampoo in the shower that you cannot bring yourself to use but also cannot throw away so it just. Sits there. Getting lower somehow. Did someone use it. Did you use it without noticing???? the material reality of someone's absence is brutal and specific and most grief writing floats above it in abstraction like feelings are the main event. The feelings ARE happening inside a body that is standing in a house full of objects and that matters. SO WRITE THE OBJECTS.

⋆˙⟡ Grief makes people act completely out of character and everyone around them handles that badly. Your character might get mean. Might get inappropriately funny. Might make a terrible financial decision or sleep with someone they shouldn't or stop showering or clean the entire house at 3am for the fourth time this week. Drief does not make people into better, softer, wiser versions of themselves on any reliable schedule. Sometimes it makes them into someone they don't recognize and that is terrifying on top of everything else. Snd the people around them (friends, family, whoever) they want the grief to be legible. They want it to look like grief is supposed to look so they know what to do. When it doesn't look right they get uncomfortable and then they get scarce and then your grieving character is also somehow dealing with the secondary loss of people who couldn't handle it. which is its own thing.

⋆˙⟡ Someone died and your character didn't like them very much. Or loved them and also resented them. Or is relieved and then immediately guilty about the relief. Or is grieving someone who hurt them, someone with whom things were unfinished in a way that can never be finished now, someone who they had been estranged from, someone who they were about to reconcile with, someone who they had been slowly losing for years before the actual death so the death was almost anticlimactic except that it closes the door in a way that slow losing doesn't. Grief for a complicated person is complicated. You grieve who you wished they were alongside who they actually were. You grieve the relationship you deserved and didn't get. None of this is clean. None of this resolves. Stop writing grief like the person who died was beloved and simple. MOST PEOPLE ARE NOT SIMPLE.

⋆˙⟡ The body keeps doing its thing and that's horrifying. You know what happens the week someone close to you dies? you get hungry. You get tired. You wake up at the normal time. Your body does not know. It has not been informed. It wants breakfast and it wants to stretch and at some point it is going to want things you feel like you have no right to want right now. The physical continuation of your own life in the immediate aftermath of loss is one of the stranger things a human being has to experience and almost nobody writes it. Your character needs to eat. They need to sleep. Their back hurts. They have a headache that won't quit because they've been crying and dehydrated for four days. They are a body doing body things in the middle of the worst thing that has ever happened to them and those two realities exist at the same time with no resolution.

⋆˙⟡ Anniversaries and dates are only half the ambush. the random Friday is the other half. Everyone knows about the first birthday without them. The first holiday. The one year mark. Those dates are braced for. Your character knows they're coming and steels themselves and sometimes that even works. What nobody warns you about is the random Tuesday in March that isn't any significant date at all except that something small happens: the light is a certain way, a song comes on, they see someone wearing the same jacket, and it is somehow worse than the anniversary was. Grief has terrible aim. it does not respect the calendar you've organized it into. it goes quiet for weeks and then destroys you on an unremarkable Wednesday because you drove past a gas station you used to stop at together. Write the random Tuesday. it's realer than the anniversary scene and it will devastate people who know.

⋆˙⟡ People say insane things to grieving people and the grieving person has to just stand there and take it. They're in a better place. Everything happens for a reason. i know exactly how you feel, when my dog died--and your character cannot say anything because this person means well and grief has a strange etiquette where the bereaved is somehow responsible for managing the comfort of everyone who comes to comfort them. The grieving person ends up performing okayness for the people who came to check on them. Ends up reassuring people. Ends up saying thank you for coming when what they want is for everyone to leave and also for no one to ever leave. This role reversal is so common and so rarely written and it is one of the most exhausting parts of early grief. Your character is drowning and spending energy making sure everyone else feels good about the life jacket they brought.

⋆˙⟡ The person who died keeps getting fixed in time while everyone else moves. This one is strange and i don't see it written enough. Your character ages. Changes. Has experiences. Develops opinions. And the person they lost stays exactly the same age they were, exactly the person they were, forever. Which means the gap between who your character is now and who the person was gets wider as time passes. You become someone they never knew. You have thoughts you can't tell them. You reach an age they never reached. Eventually you outlive them. You are older than they ever got to be. And the version of them in your memory is younger than you now. The relationship you carry continues to evolve even though only one of you is still here to evolve it. That is bizarre and sad and completely human and almost nobody writes it. WHY??? :///

the five stages of grief were never meant to be a checklist your character moves through in chronological order across three chapters. Let me save you from writing a grieving character who is simply having scheduled emotions:

⊹ Grief is not primarily crying. i know that sounds wrong but hear me out. a lot of grief looks like doing laundry. cooking something the person liked and then not being able to eat it. watching a show they recommended and never told anyone you finished it. grief goes very quiet and very domestic for long stretches and then ambushes you at completely unreasonable moments like a petrol station or a Friday at 4pm for no reason at all.

⊹ people who are grieving often seem fine. not because they're suppressing or being brave or in denial, but because humans are genuinely capable of functioning and being devastated at the same time. your grieving character can make jokes. can go to work. can have a good day. can feel guilty about the good day. can feel guilty about not feeling guilty. grief has a very active internal bureaucracy that has nothing to do with what's visible on the outside.

⊹ Grief also changes shape over time in ways that aren't necessarily about getting better. the first year is often adrenaline, there are things to do, people around, ritual and structure. year two is frequently harder because the adrenaline is gone and the world has moved on and expects you to have moved on with it. your character being more visibly undone eighteen months later than at the funeral is not a pacing problem. it's accurate.

life's taken an absolute highway for me so it's been sidetracked, but been working on an illustrated webnovel called What We Carry With Us. The story's central theme is focused around trauma but the fun thing about it is

It's in space, and it has space cowboys and space "pirates" (félix is a sailor not a pirate but ya know, SCHEMATICS)

I'm excited. Chapter 1 is actually halfway written and I have other chunks written out, but ya know, moving internationally does something to you

The plot is tied to the setting, in that everyone is in space and other planets because the earth is destroyed, BUT its heart is alive and well, just itty bitty. It's very powerful, as such everyone sort of wants it. Félix finds himself with the heart and the main crew has the mission to return the heart to the husk of the earth so it can rebuild itself again

as previously mentioned, there's space cowboys, space sailors, I traumatize all the characters, there's space whales and space dolphins and space sharks, there's a revenge plot, there's a bit of a classic pirate "treasure" hunt, and some mild cosmic horror cuz we're in space and I just gotta have that

Name: Captain Félix Davis Age: 26 Gender: Male Sexuality: Asexual, Aromantic From: Aion’s moon, Etna Misc: Félix’s ability to defy death and make all voyages he’s been on successful has earned him the nickname Lucky-Charm by his former crew. Now he’s ready to sail as a captain instead of just a crew member.

Featured locations: Aion

list from here: (note I do not answer all of the questions)

What does your character’s singing voice sound like? - definitely doesn't sound professionally trained, but he's done enough sea shanties with his original crew that he's no slouch either

Is your character obsessed with anything? - SPACE and SAILING and for a long while pirates, until he learned that irl pirates and completely different from fictional pirates haha! Good thing he's a sky sailor. He's in love with the sky and in love with his ship

How would your character react if they were gifted something handmade? - he gets emotional and would store it somewhere safe. If it's something he can wear you can BET he'll only ever take it off if it risks breaking

What is your character's favourite season+weather+time of day combination? - Félix has a love/hate relationships with storms and he prefers them during the warmer seasons but being so cold you're completely numb has its appeals to him

What about your character still remains a mystery to you? - how TF does this man keep functioning. like he just keeps going. sleep, wounds, exhaustion, trauma be damned. If you need him he will step up

How does your character feel about people seeing them cry? - Félix goes to great lengths to suppress crying and hiding it from others if at all possible

What's the easiest way to annoy your character? - being rough/haphazard with his ship

What's the easiest way to entertain your character? - literally just toss this man a book and you're gold. It doesnt matter what, he will read it

How would your character react if they learned they're immortal? (if they are, how do they feel about it?) - if there's a character that desperately wants to be immortal in this story it is NOT him

If your character had to get a (new) tattoo right now, what would it be? - he already has five. If he gets another one it's either going to be another swallow (he's nearly due for another one anyways) or something that's meaningful to him

How does your character think whatever they're going through is going to end? (if they already survived, did things go as they once thought?) - he doesn't.

What is your character's most unique physical attribute? - it's subtle but he does have central heterochromia

Does your character have a catchphrase or something they repeat a lot? - "As Barnabas used to say-"

Which sense is the most important to your character? - surprisingly, touch closely followed by smell

Who does your character think about when they want to feel safe? - Félix thinks about Barnabas

On a scale from 1 to 10, how much does your character's past haunt them? - Félix would have you believe that number is 0. it is not

What does your character value more than anything? - for a long time all he could focus on was survival, either of himself or of those around him

coxswain - coxsun

crossjack - crojik

forecastle - fo'c'sle - folksil

gunwale - gunnel

mast- mist

sail- sill

schooner - skunner

tackle - taykull

topgallant mast - t'garns'l mist

boats are big, the ocean is loud, and there's a lot of stuff that gets in the way of words traveling coherently across the deck. it's also so rare to get a command when you aren't already entrenched in something else, and so may not be able to turn your head before acknowledging that you've heard. i've linked an NPR article from 2015 about how words travel in different environments, but basically the big takeaway for this scenario is: consonants get lost easily in windy or obstructed environments. there's been many a time (even in fair weather) where i'm having a conversation, on the opposite side of the boat, or even down below when an order is given, where i just hear the cadence of a command i'm familiar with and know immediately what i'm supposed to be doing.

on particularly well-practiced crews, i notice that even the tonal pattern of the officer giving the command is repeated. even without the tonal match, it's critical for the officer to have immediate feedback AND immediate response. when you get an order, you lay into it with urgency; therefore, if you repeat just as you head to your station, redirection can be given swiftly if an incorrect order has been transmitted, BUT if you heard it right the first time there's no delay in the task.

quick example (callback italicized):

"haul away!" "haul away" clear! exactly the same! i know they heard and the sail is doing the thing!

"haul away" "hauling" sounds an awful lot like holding.. is something wrong? did we forget something? was someone not ready? oh the sail is going up they said HAULing

(x) (x) (x .)

Boatswain -> bosun

(x) (x) (x .)

Mainsail -> mains’l

The full word boatswain has two degenerate feet (aka half a foot containing only one syllable) because both of the syllables are heavy. The changes @specialagentartemis noticed with the vowels play a part in that. Diphthongs (two vowels in the same syllable) are heavy (in English), so they disappear from the unstressed versions. There’s also only a limited number of vowels that can appear in unstressed syllables, which is why many vowels are moved to the centre.