Death Fails to Faze

Maybe it’s a coincidence or maybe most writers don’t have much experience with violent death. Still, some things would seem to be self evident. I’ve read two novels in the past two weeks, one on Authonomy and the other by a major author, both of which have similar violent scenes: in the first one, a family traveling by wagon in 19th century Spain is attacked by bandits. The young son witnesses his middle-class father shoot bandits, yet seems completely unfazed both by the violent death of bandits at his own father's hand and by the bandits' threat to rape his mother. The next day, when the family arrives at the grandparents' farm, the boy is shocked--shocked, I tell you!!--at the poverty of his grandfather’s tenants.   I would think the truth would be the other way around: a boy living in a 19th-century Spanish city would take poverty for granted, while being at least somewhat traumatized by the bandits and their deaths. In another novel, a teenage girl working in a bed & breaakfast finds a guest  with a knife so deeply embedded in her throat that the woman is impaled onto the mattress. If seeing this macabre scene upset the girl, the reader wouldn’t know it. The next day, she’s flirting with one of the suspects and getting crushes on the police inspector. Though as writers, we create artificial worlds governed by rules that we impose, if we are writing about characters who are based on human beings and not Spock, we need to ask ourselves, “How would a sixteen-year-old react to finding the body of woman murdered in the house where she works? How would seeing such a horrible, violent scene affect her?” Or, “How often does a young Spanish boy see poverty in 19th century Spain? How often would he see his well-to-do father shoot men?” The answers to these questions, not preconceived character notes, should guide character development.