Katerina, I think you'd be an honourable exception, since you must know and have experienced so much more of it than the rest of it. You can have as many death stories as you like! What I'm wondering about is why lots of people who've experienced very little of death reach for it so often.

It's easier to make someone sad, than to make someone laugh I suppose.

I think this is true - I know it is for me, in print at least. See the thread in the Lounge that Griff(?) started.

Emma

<Added>

Oops! Not Griff, Sammy.

Hey Kat, I bet you're a Six Feet Under fan, am I right? I loved that series, a great alternative exploration of death and change.

I write horror and dark fantasy (and have also written a thriller). I have a good healthy body count, and whole stories where some of the characters aren't even alive in the technical sense. Death fascinates and scares me, and I guess I'm exploring that in some way.

JB

Fascinating thread, thanks.

I agree that loads of short stories 'use' death to give them weight. If you take them apart, really analyse them, the premise, the theme, although it may encompass death, is often very pedestrian.

For death to work well, be memorable, it has to be treated originally, I think. It has to be part of something unique to that writer.

Take The Ledge by Lawrence Sargeant Hall as an example; (Best American Short Stories of the Century, ed. Updike).. it has death in the plot, the whole movement of the story is towards an inevitable outcome...but is not 'about' death. It was being used to illustrate a deeply held belief. (not capital B... small b)

vanessa

Yes but everyone says you have to have the body on the first page?

Was just re reading the opening of 'Deep Secret' by the fabulous Diana Wynne Jones this afternoon and thinking how well that works.

But yes, I do think gloom conveys glamour. Pick something 'meaningful'and people take you seriously?

In one of the Terry Pratchett books there is a brilliant take on the little match girl scene which does as much as anything to debunk the 'death is art' theory.

Which just goes to prove that comedy can go deeper than tragedy? Most great tragedies have 'comic' elements that intensify the effect?

Sarah

And a lot of good comedy has tragedy at its heart.

Yes. Absolutely.

Which just goes to prove that comedy can go deeper than tragedy? Most great tragedies have 'comic' elements that intensify the effect?

And a lot of good comedy has tragedy at its heart.

I'm having (I know I've said this on other threads - sorry!) a fascinating time with The Seven Basic Plots and one of the things it's doing is making it clear that Comedy and Tragedy are a) not opposites and b) not necessarily to do with happy or sad - or at least, not primarily. It's more to do with the structure of what happens. Much, much too sophisticated arguments to summarise here.

Yes but everyone says you have to have the body on the first page?

My original decision that TMOL would kick off with the Peterloo Massacre was vulgar and commercial (though admittedly, the body doesn't turn up till page two.) I only knew it was the right decision much later in the writing, when I found all sorts of echoes and chimes and interesting ideas linked back to it.

Emma

I've just remembered the story that came second in the Bridport the year I got a supplementary. It was called 'A Swan Named Love' and was by Kristina Amadeus. I can't find my copy of the anthology, but there was a line in it that's stuck in my memory because it was so funny: she's describing a woman's wedding night and her first glimpse of her husband's - in fact of any man's - genitals. The view she gets is something like; "two trembling hamsters fighting over a bit of withered parsnip".

I spat my tea out the first time I read the line and it still makes me snigger now. It was a really witty story with an upbeat ending.

My story was a comedy too. Maybe it's the way forward - be alternative, make the judges smile?

'And a lot of good comedy has tragedy at its heart.'

Yes, I agree.

I am not sure that 'vulgar' or 'commercial' are adjectives that immediately come to mind re TMOL.

Anyone else Emma would be asked to step outside and explain themselves.

I shall have to read the seven plots book - it sounds fascinating.

Sarah

Lammi, yes, anything funny leapt of the page, compared to all the exquisitely written mortality. Didn't mean it did better in the end, I don't think, but it didn't half engage me. And I can't help thinking that at the earlier stages, when they're reading hundreds - thousands, in the case of the Bridport - whether it didn't help to get it noticed. Actually, one of the funniest stories in the Fish prize did have a death in it, and it ended up as a runner up.

Sarah - it was, of course, only that decision that was vulgar and commercial. But lots about writing is just that: appealing to the most basic human appetite for stories with beginning and middle and end (yes, do read that book. It's not at all heavy going, either). My friend Linda Buckley-Archer whose Gideon the Cutpurse has been longlisted for the Carnegie set out to write a book that her not-keen-on-reading son would really, really want to keep reading...

Emma