Writing Birth, Giving Birth, and the Internet
By Greer Macallister | March 7, 2022 |
If you’re trying to figure out how to do something you’ve never done, you seek advice, right? Some of that advice is bound to come from the internet.
And if you’ve ever sought advice on the internet, you know some of that advice is bound to be terrible.
For writers, that’s a big danger. But you have to start somewhere. When I put out a call for topics on Twitter recently, I got more requests than I would have guessed for advice on how to write scenes of labor and childbirth. Curious, I then went in search of existing advice on the topic: and wow, is there some pretty bad stuff out there.
- “Start with the first contraction.” Well, you could, but how long is that scene going to be?
- “Share the perspective of other people in the room.” Do you spend a lot of time sharing the perspective of other people in the room during other types of scenes?
- “The waters can break before or during birth.” Or, believe it or not, they can break and re-seal. Or they might not “break” at all. Or a doctor or midwife might rupture them. So many things that sound authoritative aren’t so clear-cut.
Even if you’ve experienced giving birth to a child personally, as I have, it’s a pretty daunting subject to write about. One, it’s hard to describe. Two, it’s different for everyone. And three, it rarely appears in fiction – at least partly because of points one and two.
But if the story calls for it—if you’ve decided you need to incorporate that perspective—how do you even start?
For me, because I had my own experience, I could start with that. Early in the drafting of my new novel Scorpica, because the book is set in a matriarchal fantasy world called the Five Queendoms, I was obsessed with including five of everything. So I was going to kick off the book with five birth scenes.
I was already four birth scenes in when I reconsidered the wisdom of that plan, and only two of the scenes remain in the finished version of Scorpica. But writing that variety was a great exercise. I took special care to make each of them different, drawing on a different part of my experience for each one, and still, they were all engaging, detailed scenes of how a mother might give birth. Because, again, this is an event that can unfold in an unlimited number of ways.
For that reason, if you don’t have your own experience to start from, I’m going to give a potentially controversial bit of advice: start from someone else’s experience. Like birth itself, writing about birth is different for everyone. There’s no secret, no formula, no plan you can follow to make it all work out. You can start with one person’s experience, preferably one that’s close to the experience you’d like your character to have, and go from there.
Depending on what type of scene you’re trying to write, writing about things you haven’t personally experienced can be either 1) a terrible, fraught idea or 2) exactly what fiction is made of. In the case of birth, because the experience varies so much, I wouldn’t say that someone who hasn’t experienced it shouldn’t write about it. But I would caution you to get your advice about what childbirth is like from someone who’s been there, someone you know and trust, if at all possible. Get a beta reader who will tell you the truth about whether what you write is ringing true.
Just like giving birth, writing about birth works best when you’ve got flexibility, support, and trust.
Q: Would you ever write a childbirth scene in your fiction? Have you already written one?
Raised in the Midwest, Greer Macallister earned her MFA in creative writing from American University. Her historical novels have been named Book of the Month, Indie Next, LibraryReads, Target Book Club, and Amazon Best Book of the Month picks and optioned for film and television. Her latest novel, The Thirteenth Husband, is inspired by Aimee Crocker, the Paris Hilton of the Gilded Age. Macallister also writes the ongoing Five Queendoms epic fantasy series as G.R. Macallister. A regular contributor to Writer Unboxed and the Chicago Review of Books, she lives with her family in Boston, MA. www.greermacallister.com
My second novel included the protagonist starting her contractions after a car accident, giving birth, and the dark days afterward. Time passes and she gives birth to twins. Writing those scenes were some of my most blessed moments. I cried, I felt her pain, and I relied upon my own experiences and those of the women in my life. Some of my best work.
This is a great article and it’s so true that births vary so greatly. I wish people would remember that and not insist they must be one way or the other.
On my last son, my fourth child, the nurse came in and checked me and told me it would be hours yet. I’d already been in hard labor for hours. I could tell I was close, but she insisted I wasn’t. “No, honey, it’s going to be hours.”
She left and I started taking the IVs out. My husband looked at me horror-struck. “What are you doing?”
“That’s it. I’m done. I’m going home.”
No one ever said giving birth made you sane.
I have a birth scene in my Civil War novel. The MC is in occupied Alexandria, Virginia and visiting a friend who is a doctor. Some Union soldiers have offered to post guards around the house and are in the parlor visiting with the wife, niece, and MC. In the back, the doctor is assisting a woman through a difficult labor. Some of the men are horrified by the screams and vow never to have children.
Another major arrives with his men and demands everyone in the house leave because the doctor hasn’t signed an oath of allegiance/ There’s a big delay while they look for it and finally the MC puts a Deringer (spelling is correct spell check) to the major’s head and threatens to vacate his brains if he doesn’t leave the doctor alone.
The doctor has to perform an emergency c-section without chloroform to save the baby, but loses the mother.
I had a foaling scene the beta readers loved, but it is in the rag bag due to word count cuts.
I read a scene once where a woman describe an animal being born with horns. No, just no. Stop and think. That isn’t the way it works.
In an odd coincidence, I wrote a birth scene for the first time yesterday. I’ve never given birth or witnessed one myself and admit that I have almost no idea what I’m talking about, so I’m counting on my critique group can give me useful feedback on how well it worked. In my case, the scene is from the POV of the village healer who is acting as midwife, and the labor and birth itself is shown in fairly broad brushstrokes.
Do you (or anyone else) have any recommendations for online resources that would give a good overview of what’s usual and also what the variations might be?
Good topic. The cycle of birth and death. We need both and I’ve written about them in my novel basing it on my own experiences and of course, research. They are powerful scenes to both write and read.
Hey Greer,
No, I’ve never given birth, nor have I ever witnessed one firsthand, but your post did make me think of the Netflix limited series, Sense8, about a group of eight people from various parts of the globe who were born at the same time, drew their first breaths together, and shared a collective consciousness. One scene showed the birth of each, which skipped over the lengthy labor process and mainly concentrated on the last push and crowning of the baby. So, in writing that scene, they described the mother’s face, sweaty and blood red from exertion, then went down to the hoo-ha, which could best be described as a vertical mouth blowing a bubble. One was a water birth, so it was essentially a bubble bath. The next thing you know, each baby was swaddled and given to the mother and everything was happy, happy, joy, joy. Of course, I make light of the subject and would never write it that way, but I would gladly describe their writing that way.
I also remember reading a birth scene from a book in my youth that told of the woman standing while giving birth, aided by two midwives. Yikes! And then there are the set of twins’ births from Big Business, the Lily Tomlin and Bette Midler movie. The rich woman (Bette’s mother) was hollering loud enough to wake the dead because it was her first birth, and the poor woman (Lily’s mother) was crocheting or knitting and barely making a peep, seeing as though it was like her tenth child or so.
If I were to write a childbirth scene, it would depend on the book as to how I approached it, but I would definitely get an opinion from those who’ve experienced it.
One of my novels, unpublished–my main character is an L&D RN, labor and delivery nurse. I can write about this, because I also worked as an L&D nurse in a large downtown Chicago hospital. The career was fascinating. The book includes childbirth scenes, but snippets: twin birth, aging mother, one of the twins doesn’t make it. The memory of a baby being born, “wearing the caul.” I have looked for, found and read other novels written my medical professionals to see how they handle this information. I’ve shared scenes with doctor friends. But it’s my comfort zone. Legal aspects of a novel–that’s another “story”. Research always helps.There is even a current publication by a nurse to help writers deal with this aspects. It’s in my Kindle, but I haven’t read it.
“Writing about things you haven’t personally experienced” is “exactly what fiction is made of.” At some point, this idea got lost in notions of cultural/sexual/gender/racial appropriation. Taken to its logical end, this means that no one can write about anything other than the writer’s self. I’ve written a series of novels, in which much of what happens is seen through the eyes of a young woman journalist. I’m old and male, so I’m “appropriating” all kinds of material. But I also rely on professional editors, in hopes this will help me avoid dunce moves made by a male writing from the POV of a woman. As for describing giving birth, that may be why my character has decided not to have children.
I don’t think the issue of appropriation for a writer is really that one shouldn’t write about anyone different from you–though that is the way it’s discussed. I think, rather, that it’s difficult to write well about people who have less power and privilege than you do (whoever “you” happen to be), and that writing badly about people without much power could hurt them. So, yeah, if you know it’s a difficult task, you can take steps to make sure you do it well.
Another great reminder of how unique but similar the human experience is! A scene in one of my books included the hero (a rancher and vet student) and heroine (a rancher newbie) helping to birth a calf on his ranch. The cow had been in labor for too long, and without intervention calf and cow could die. I started the scene at the point the foreman told the hero, “There’s a problem,” and hero and heroine entered the barn to help. Thank you, YouTube, for the stunning visuals! A friend of mine who grew up on a farm reviewed that scene and said it was spot on, with enough detail to get across the urgency but not turn it into a medical text.
I did write a birth scene in my first novel–and I had no idea it’s supposed to be a difficult topic to write about. No, I had never given birth. I still haven’t. That was many years ago, now, when I had more youthful arrogance to give me confidence, but in those days I liked reading midwifery magazines, and so I’d read dozens of first-hand accounts of childbirth, both from the perspective of the mother (more rarely the father) and from the perspective of the midwife. I’d also read several childbirth scenes in fiction that all seemed o be done quite well, so I had no idea such scenes are rare. So I just used the reference material I had and did it. Perhaps surprisingly, it turned out pretty well. Beginners’ luck?
Beginner’s luck? I don’t think so. You did your research and it paid off. :)
I’ve written a couple. One was a home birth, from the POV of a late-arriving father who shows up just in time for the actual birth. The other was from the POV of the mother’s Security head, watching another out-of-hospital birth with complications (but, essentially, with all the supports a hospital could give). In both cases, I basically just wrote a very broad brush description of the process.
And yes, I’ve had one child…
I’m a big fan of leaving the actual experience to the reader – after providing enough connections so each reader can tap into their own mental database. I’m not an obstetrics textbook writer.
The details are much easier to provide accurately and with originality at the same time – and get in less in the way of an intense experience for the reader that is entirely personal.
There will be a birth in the final volume of my mainstream trilogy, it is pivotal to the story, and it has to be just right – why do I keep saying that last bit about every scene? I’ve learned to trust the reader of my kind of fiction with about half of the story.
As you said, we start with experience – and the internet – but what we put on the page has one job only: to provide an emotional experience to a willing reader. Let TV do its fake birth scenes (and if I never see another one…) and fake sex scenes and fake… I judge my actualization by whether readers get a satisfactory experience – their own. My beta reader has now had her own child. This is going to be fun.
My nomination for Best Description of Birth goes to humor writer Dave Barry. As he explains it, the nurse in the prenatal class showed the parents-to-be a bowling ball and a drinking straw. “This,” she said, holding up the bowling ball, “has to go through this,” and held up the straw. Enough said.
Yes! Not only have I experienced childbirth myself, but I’ve been a labor & delivery nurse for 35 years! If you ever need somebody to review for obstetrical accuracy, let me know!