In our Craft Capsules series, authors reveal the personal and particular ways they approach the art of writing. This is no. 286.
Grief is a core subject of writing, but when writing nonfiction, how do you craft a scene around someone or something no longer present? How can you write dialogue when both the emotion is amorphous and the person who’s at the subject of your writing is invisible? Singer-songwriter Nick Cave said: “Language became the blanket that I threw over the invisible man, that gave him shape and form.” Although he was talking about actualizing God through the love song, words are indeed the net we cast over our losses to try and give them enough shape and structure that we can engage with them.
Although the past is so often what we are trying to write about, memory is not our only tool in nonfiction. By seeking out immersive experiences that connect with our losses, we can create an objective correlative, what T. S. Eliot describes as a set of objects or experiences meant to create a particular emotion in a reader. Utilizing physical objects as a stand-in for someone or something we’ve lost can pull a reader into the present and the sensory. We can also find new events to write about that let us talk about the past.
When I wanted to write about my mother’s death, I went to a museum of haunted objects and even paid to spend the night in a haunted house. Since I entered those experiences knowing I was going to write about them, I was able to take notes about everything from weather to wallpaper. I didn’t have to rely on memory to recreate dialogue because I could look at my notes. Rather than doing the murky work of sifting through emotional fragments and recollections, I could use the present as a way to summon a memory and write that ghost into an essay that was full of clear scenes and details.
Grief is a powerful emotion, but it can also be too powerful for some readers. A writer can also slip into melodrama. By choosing a set of objects or engaging in a new experience, a writer can approach a topic from the side. Just like having a deep conversation in the car while staring out the window rather than making direct eye contact, sometimes the sideways approach—or oblique perspective—can help us reach an intensity or depth that’s hard to confront head on. Holding a purportedly haunted doll helped me write about my own childhood. Staying in a haunted house let me talk about my desire to connect with my dead mother. Sneaking into a graveyard at night let me unpack my feelings about the afterlife.
There is no right or wrong way to talk to your dead or lost in nonfiction. But by engaging in a new experience, the past can dress the memories in fresh sensory description, casting that blanket of language over the invisible to give it shape. Maybe that helps us finally hold its hand again. Maybe it even whispers back.
Traci Brimhall is a professor of creative writing at Kansas State University. Her most recent book is a collection of essays, The Grief Artist (Sarabande, 2026).
image credit: Jill Dimond