Content warning for this whole post: I’m talking about writing about death, bodies and the dead. There are no photos here, but there are disturbing photos in some of the articles I link to at the bottom of the post. I detail this after each link so you can exercise your own judgement.
I’ve sent the manuscript of the sequel to The Fog of War this week…The Quid Pro Quo will be out on the 20th of November. So now it’s time to blog about all those interesting things I found out whilst I was writing it. And I’m starting with rigor mortis. Yay!
The book begins with the discovery of a body in the village duckpond and the characters need the time of death in order to work out people’s alibis. I’ve never written a body for which I’ve needed time of death before, so I went googling. The number of writers who do this must be extraordinary–presumably we’re all on some sort of watch-list somewhere.
When it came down to it, there’s only a page or two at most about it in the actual book, but I felt that I needed to know a lot more about the subject before I could move on with the story. This is standard for me. One of the things I find most frustrating about my own creative process is that I need to find out a lot more about subjects like this than I put in the book. To illustrate how easily I over-research, I always use the example from The Flowers of Time where I made my own butter, then clarified it to make a butter-lamp as a light source.
I didn’t go that far this time. I’m not so dedicated to my art that I’m prepared to create a corpse and observe the stages of decomposition in order to write about it properly. For both moral, practical and legal reasons. I did do a lot more reading that I probably needed to though, and squicked myself out thoroughly in the process.
Up until that point, my body, Charlotte Fortescue, had been a narrative tool–she gets offed very early in the book and she wasn’t a terribly nice person. We’re not really supposed to spend much time feeling sorry for her, she’s just the doorway for us to get into the actual plot. However, after I read all these truly gruesome accounts of what happens to a body after death, I began to feel very sorry for her indeed.
It was most uncomfortable. I didn’t want to feel pity for her…and I didn’t want reader not to feel for her, exactly, but I didn’t want people to feel they had to waste their emotions on her when she’s effectively a means to an end. I’m now stressing slightly whether I’ve struck the right balance, but it’s too late now, it’s gone off for edits and that’s that.
Here are the resources I found most helpful, whether you’re a writer looking for information, or just an interested bystander. I’ve given additional info about how distressing they are, so please do take heed. I felt wonky for a few days after reading the final one.
- For an overall summary, I recommend the lovely Ofelia Grand’s blogpost, For when the poor sod needs to die. No gruesome pictures, respectful approach with a light touch, very helpful.
- I then moved on to the Wiki article about rigor mortis (which has one photo of bodies in rigor, exercise care) and has a broad overview of technical stuff–also links to articles to all the other stages a body goes through after death. It’s very well-referenced.
- For the forensics part of the story, I read Methods of estimation of time since death (no pictures) from this very in depth NCBI* article. Interesting, mentions maggots, don’t read at lunchtime.
- However, I needed to know about bodies found in water. So I ended up at Decomposition changes in bodies recovered from water also at NCBI*. This comes with a very serious content warning, I’m not kidding people. There are photos of people who died in very unpleasant circumstances and I found it very upsetting.
*National Center for Biotechnology Information
Next time I plot something out like this I’m going to try and avoid needing forensics as a time of death because I really don’t want to have to read all these again!