Behind the Lens: The Origins of My Post-Mortem Photography Story

I’ve just been going through some notes on my story ideas document and came across a lot of my older notes for stories I’ve written - some of which are in my upcoming collection, In Plain Sight, Unseen.

One such story is titled Posed. In this story, we follow a post-mortem photographer as he goes to fulfil his obligations on a job that he has been paid well for, a job that becomes far stranger than expected.

You can read it here:

👉Posed part 1 | 👉Posed part 2

Post-mortem photography was a way of having a family photo when a relative had died. Lots of people were unlikely to have photographs since it was an expensive emerging technology, and this would be their last opportunity.

I wanted to share the notes I made before writing Posed, and see what changed between them and the final product.

Title

To start with, there are a couple of different ideas for titles that I had written down.

Death Eye / Death Stare / Posed.

I won’t begin to explain what my thought process was for the first two because I can’t remember.

In hindsight, Death Stare might be referring to the deceased person in the photographs having their eyes open, or having eyes painted over their closed eyelids. This really happened.

Story Ideas

I started by writing the initial concept when the idea came to me.

A Victorian photographer of the dead. Photography was new and expensive so people would wait until their relatives died before having their picture taken.

This is the character we follow as he experiences the worst photography session of his career.

Then I wondered what he would be like while working in strange conditions. On the one hand, he would be the expert, but on the other hand, he would be in a situation out of his comfort zone.

He asks clients if the subject is actually dead (it is my duty as a professional to ask this, but…) because of people being buried alive.

In the Victorian era, people were buried alive often enough for it to be a thing. This led to several inventions to help if you were to wake up from your illness in a coffin in the ground, inventions like a string to pull that would ring a bell on the surface to let people know you had risen.

I write about that in this essay:

This didn’t end up in the finished story for reasons that will become obvious when you read it and learn more about the subjects in the photos.

One time the subject is not in the chair or the room that the family says he is.

This didn’t end up in the story either, but it appears I was thinking about someone who wasn’t dead (or was undead), which follows on from the previous note about the photographer asking if the subject was actually dead.

Then I started to think about the other characters in the story.

The photographer could be running a scam by photographing people that aren’t dead but puts makeup on them and promotes his services using these photographs.

This story doesn’t pan out quite like this, but Conrad Campbell and his little crew certainly stemmed from the idea of running a scam.

Before settling on the name, I remember thinking that the character that became Conrad should have a first name ending with the letter S. And because his last name is CAMpbell, those four letters spell the word ‘scam.’

Then the name Conrad came to me, which has the word ‘con’ built into it, which I thought worked well. That bit is not in my notes, though I remember it clearly.

It comes full circle when someone he thinks is dead takes care of him.

Who knows what that sentence means?

Not me.

But the next part is something that made it into the story. This will become clear when you read it.

The group of scammers will be left posed by their killer when the police arrive.

In a way, the scammers being posed by their killer does bring the story full circle. Could that be what I meant in the previous note?

I didn’t start the way I write in the following quote at all. The start I went with was vastly superior.

I should start with the police at a murder scene.

That is all the notes I had. Posed has a lot more going on than is in the notes. This may explain to you what I already knew about myself in terms of plotting versus pantsing (having a plan before writing versus making it up as you write, for those that don’t know).

I always have a plan of some description to make sure I stay on track. But when I come to the writing part, a lot of the details come to me in the moment.

This story is around 3000 words long, and every word of the ‘plan’ is in this post, so I didn’t need much planned beforehand. Comparatively, the novel I’m about to start writing, my first novel, has a plan of 3000ish words.

If you liked this type of post, make sure you let me know, because I have notes for other stories as well that I could turn into a post like this one.