Five Questions to Ask Before Writing a Funeral

By Kasie Whitener

The cemetery sloped. They dug the grave into the side of a hill and the apparatus that would lower Aunt Carolyn into the earth leaned left-to-right. The crooked casket held our straight-laced and tightly buttoned spinster aunt. She had a concert musician’s posture and a strict moral compass. Her faith had been true and unwavering for decades. But the site of her final ceremony had a slant like a crooked wig. The kind of hill you only notice if you’re pushing something up it or balancing a casket on it.

She had been sick for a while. Death was a relief. When we staggered toward the mortuary’s tent, we were not exactly grief stricken as much as gravity challenged.

Funerals are trite. The death ritual is a cultural standard, one that in its familiarity provides comfort and closure.

But fiction writers cannot afford to be trite. Each page in a novel or short story must have economy. It must move the plot forward, reveal characters’ intent, or complicate the hero’s journey.

Writers must build action into every scene. How are things different after the scene occurs? In that respect, funerals are easy. The action is inherent. Before the scene, someone was dead. After the scene, that person is buried.

The rituals of death make the scenery, props, costumes, and sounds predictable: outdoors or in a church, flowers and caskets, black suits and dresses, and sniffling mourners or contemplative hymns. Writing about funerals requires the writer to be even more creative because we already know what the scene will entail.

If there’s a funeral in your story, try answering five key questions:

First, does the funeral scene need to be told? If the story can survive on the before and after, then skip it. Many writers do just that.

Second, what details can be used to make the scene unique? High heeled shoes sink in cemetery soil, for example. Better to go with sensible flats or wedges graveside.

Third, how does the main character behave? People tend to behave the way they think they should at a funeral, not in their genuine character habits. Use the main character’s habits to add fresh action to the scene.

Fourth, what would disrupt the balance of the ritual? A drone flies overhead, its buzzing pulling people’s eyes, its camera curious and invasive like flying paparazzi.

Fifth, how have the relationships shifted because of the shared, or not shared, experience of the funeral? Did someone laugh? Who disrupted the dignity of the proceedings and how did the others respond?

Making trite scenes fresh takes intention. Write the boring, typical scene first and then, during revision, disrupt the scene with unexpected details and action. Let people be free in your fictional funeral; their unexpected absurdity will make the scene better.

A writer that finds contrasting details at a funeral makes it familiar and unique at the same time like the last slanted above-ground moments of our very straight Aunt Carolyn.