I grew up watching horror, and I don’t scare easily. But while I was writing The Grief Counselor, there came a point when I had to close everything and walk away for a little while. The problem wasn’t what Elias Shepherd did. It was realizing how far inside his head I had to go to write him honestly.
I don’t scare easily.
My granny always had horror movies on when I was growing up, so horror was never this strange thing I discovered later in life. I love Stephen King. I love thrillers. I love smaller horror writers. I like creepy shit. I write creepy shit. At this point, frightening myself should probably be considered an occupational hazard.
Still, The Grief Counselor got to me.
Not because I wrote something gruesome and then couldn’t handle it. Gore isn’t really what gets under my skin anyway. It was Dr. Elias Shepherd himself, and more specifically, what I had to do in my own head to write him.
I couldn’t write Shepherd as a cardboard monster.
That would have been easier.
If he were simply evil all the time, if everything he said was obviously sinister and every person who met him immediately felt that something was wrong, there wouldn’t be much of a story. Nobody would trust him. Nobody would sit across from him and hand him the parts of themselves they can barely talk about.
He had to be good at what he did.
Worse, he had to genuinely understand people.
That was where I started getting uncomfortable.
To write him, I had to stop standing outside of him judging what he was doing and figure out how he understood what he was doing. I had to know how he could sit across from someone who had just lost a person they loved and know exactly when to speak, when to be quiet, what to notice, and what that grieving person needed from him.
Then I had to hold that version of him in my head beside everything else he was capable of.
At some point I realized I didn’t like where my brain had to go.
So I stopped.
I needed a minute.
And honestly, I think part of what made writing that book harder was what was happening in my real life while I was doing it. My best friend had died in January. We had been best friends for seventeen years. She was my children’s godmother. She wasn’t somebody who existed on the edge of my life. She was woven through it.
I was grieving while writing about someone who understands grief well enough to use it.
That’s a fucked-up place to spend your afternoon.
At the same time, my body was having its own reaction to everything. I’d had health issues for a long time, but after she died and the stress piled up, things started getting louder. My hair started falling out. My hands were giving me trouble. Eventually I was diagnosed with psoriatic arthritis.
There were days when sitting down and typing wasn’t even the easiest way for me to write.
So I’d sit by myself, open my Notes app, and talk.
That’s still one of the ways I work through a plot. I talk until I can hear what isn’t working. I talk through the characters. I talk through what I want the book to actually do instead of just listing all the horrible things that could happen in it.
And I kept coming back to Shepherd.
I realized that if I was afraid to let him think, I was going to ruin him.
I had to go back.
What makes him disturbing to me isn’t simply what he does. It’s that part of him can be useful. He can say something to a grieving person that actually helps. He can recognize the things other people miss. He understands that after somebody dies, everyone comes around at first. They bring food. They call. They ask whether you’ve slept or eaten. Then eventually everybody else has a Tuesday to get to, and the grieving person is still standing in the middle of a life that doesn’t make sense anymore.
He understands that.
And I had to let him understand it.
That doesn’t make what he does less horrific. It makes it worse.
There is also this strange separation inside him that made the narration harder for me than simply saying the book has two perspectives. Yes, there is Rachel. There is Elias. But in my head, there is also Dr. Shepherd correcting Elias.
I know. Completely normal person to spend hours thinking about.
But that distinction mattered while I was writing him, and I think someday I could probably write an entire post just about that.
What I learned from having to stop wasn’t that I had gone “too dark.” I don’t really believe darkness is automatically meaningful just because it’s dark. I learned that I had finally reached the part of the character where I couldn’t fake understanding him anymore.
I either had to back away and make him simpler, or I had to go in.
So I went back in.
I still didn’t like him in there.
I don’t think I was supposed to.