: Re: I want to write about a suicide, how should I do it? I want to have a book (or multiple) have a suicide in it, and I want to write the suicide. I don't know how exactly to go about that.

My take on this comes from many years of supporting someone with crippling anxiety and depression, listening to them talk about suicide and learning what makes them think that way.

I canâ€™t answer the question in your edit (which Tau has covered amply) but I will try to answer the question in your title, and hope that it helps you consider whether a suicide scene is the right approach for you. Iâ€™m going to assume you genuinely want to tell a story about someone who canâ€™t see a way to continue living and/or the impact their death has on the other characters.

Suicide is a very difficult and complex subject. Ask yourself how/why your character has got to the stage of taking their own life. There are many different reasons people do this, and every journey to that point is different. In order to write the end of their life, you need to fully understand their whole life.

There may be a trigger event, but there will also be reasons why your character reacts in an extreme way to an event that another person might cope with. What has happened in their past? How did other people react to them? What fears and beliefs did your character develop as a result that now haunt them? Why canâ€™t they get the support they need?

I would argue that the journey is more important than the end result and you donâ€™t actually need to show any physical details of the suicide itself. If you convincingly portray a character who can only see one way out, the reader does not need the details of how they achieve it.

If youâ€™re writing primarily about the impact on others, focus on their relationship with the character, and how their own beliefs influence how they react to the suicide. Again, you donâ€™t need to show the suicide scene itself in order for it to have emotional impact.

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