That's so sad about the boy lost in the sea. I know he's not your boy, but any local death causes a ripple of sadness, especially when the victim is so young. With us, sadly, it's mostly car crashes that kill the teens. G lost one of his students last summer. But when my daughter was about 10, one of her classmates was swept away in the river and drowned. There is such a tremendous power in water and mostly we just don't realise it.
Re using the death of young people gratuitously in fiction, there's an interesting bit in David Lodge's How Far Can You Go? where he says (of the death of a small child in a road accident):
I have avoided a direct presentation of this incident because frankly I find it too painful to contemplate. Of course, Dennis and Angela and Anne are fictional characters, they cannot bleed or weep, but they stand here for all the real people to whom such disasters happen with no apparent reason or justice. One does not kill off characters lightly, I assure you, even ones like Anne, evoked solely for that purpose.
One of the things he's doing in that novel is seeing how far you can push the illusion of reality in fiction without actually breaking it completely, but I feel he has a point and I really hate it when characters are created just to be killed and the author seems to revel in their deaths.
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timeasmymeasure
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Re using the death of young people gratuitously in fiction, there's an interesting bit in David Lodge's How Far Can You Go? where he says (of the death of a small child in a road accident):
I have avoided a direct presentation of this incident because frankly I find it too painful to contemplate. Of course, Dennis and Angela and Anne are fictional characters, they cannot bleed or weep, but they stand here for all the real people to whom such disasters happen with no apparent reason or justice. One does not kill off characters lightly, I assure you, even ones like Anne, evoked solely for that purpose.
One of the things he's doing in that novel is seeing how far you can push the illusion of reality in fiction without actually breaking it completely, but I feel he has a point and I really hate it when characters are created just to be killed and the author seems to revel in their deaths.