I am currently putting one more revision on my favorite book (so far), and it occurred to me that among all these ghosts and even a small pile of dead bodies, there is no actual funeral anywhere. Yes, I kill off the poor sots and leave them rotting somewhere outside the pages. That doesn't really seem fair, does it?
Yes, I'm in the "kill your darlings" stage (how ironic), so I don't want to load up my manuscript with another mountain of words. But there are some things missing. So it's time to weed out the blah and add a little more "gotcha!" Perhaps some up close and personal time with a corpse is the ticket. There are some good questions in this quest, though. Do I stay true to a regional 19th century funeral rite or branch out into something more experimental to suit the avant-garde community I've created? Or something to suit the ill-fated character in particular? How specific should I be? These are the things that make writing so fun!
Since the avant-garde community doesn't always follow the norm, no matter what century, how about adding a wacky/spooky/shocking encounter between the living and the deceased, ill-fated character? Something very private. Shhh! Something very eerie. Something that nobody would believe really happened!
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