: Re: Should I write the actual death scene? I am writing a novel, and in one part, a boy falls off the building. I feel like it would be very gory. Most people said to write in great detail,

@Holmes449

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The thing with novels is that they're really squishy in form/shape until you decide what you want to do with yours.

So as for "should I show the death"...what do you like to read? Are you turned off by explicit scenes? Or do you feel that without showing the scene, something important to your story is lost? As others have said, often the shape your book should have--including questions like "should I include this scene or not?--become clearer once you have a draft. Then you can go back and realize, "this scene screws up the entire tone of the book" or "I was too squeamish about this scene, but now I realize not showing it made it really hard to care about the dead kid, I might need to go back and add it".

You can always write it out explicitly in the first draft, then remove or tone it down in a later draft.

Second, I saw you mentioned "write what you know". And that "rule" makes me sad so I'm going to talk about it.

Don't take "write what you know" super-literally. I write sci-fi and fantasy, and I've never been in space, nor seen a real live dragon. The idea of "write what you know" more means that you should draw from experiences you have to enhance the ones you're writing about. It's not meant to imprison you so that you ONLY write what you know (which would be boring in my case since I'm an office-dwelling white suburbanite!)

For example, I've never been divorced, but I have had a hard breakup with a boyfriend. I can draw details of how I felt when grieving for a dead relationship and apply them to other situations where someone might feel grief. I have never been a chef, but I like sharp knives in the kitchen, so I bet a harvester on a farm probably needs to be sharpened from time to time. There's little details like that that you can apply even to the strangest, most made-up situation that you never hope to actually be in yourself. That's what "write what you know" means. It's not a prison to prevent you from writing about situations you have never actually experienced. It's a tool to help you add veracity to those fictional situations.

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