As I’ve been working on my WIP, two main themes have emerged so far: time and mortality. The passing of time and impending death are common themes in some of my favorite novels, poems, and plays. Death is the great equalizer, after all. Since this is Halloween month, I thought it was a good time to explore this topic. What is it about time and mortality that demands our attention?

Writing Defies Time

Writing preserves moments that might otherwise slip away. A character can relive their childhood. A setting can capture a season that’s past. A single sentence retains the sound of someone’s laughter long after the echoes have ended. As writers, we use words to hold on to a moment, and in the process we defy the passing of time. We say “I was here and this happened. This mattered.” Writing can be seen as a time capsule so that we can look back as pasts real and imagined and recall the way things used to be.

Mortality Fuels Urgency

Every writer feels the tug of the ultimate deadline. Knowing that our time is limited creates a sense of urgency to capture stories, ideas, and experiences before they vanish. That urgency can spark creativity, pushing us to write out all the thoughts and feelings we’re desperate to share. Our characters, if they are well rounded, should feel the same about the march of time, unless they are paranormal, of course, and I’ve written a few characters that live forever. Even preternatural characters understand the passing of time. They just consider it differently. 

Imaginative writing allows us to manipulate time. A novel might cover decades in a few chapters, or a single moment might stretch across an entire book. Writers compress, expand, and reorder time to find meaning in the chaotic, finite nature of life.

Dickens, Time, and Mortality

In addition to finishing the second draft of my WIP, I’ve been working on some literary criticism about my main man, Charles Dickens. Like many writers, Dickens wrestles with time and mortality in his fiction. His works are steeped in thoughts about aging, memory, and the inevitability of death. Here are just a few examples.

A Christmas Carol (1843) 

The most obvious example is Dickens’s most famous work, A Christmas Carol, since the entire novella is structured around Scrooge confronting the memories of his past life and then his own death. The Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come forces him to see how time will erase him if he continues his selfish life. The three spirits embody time itself, past, present, and future, and Dickens shows how our choices and our memories shape who we are.

David Copperfield (1849–50) 

Which just happens to be my favorite novel in the whole wide world, by the way. Death touches nearly every stage of David’s life—his father dies before he is born, his mother dies young, and later friends and beloved figures like David’s first wife, Dora, die too. Mortality underscores the fragility of relationships and the shaping of identity. Dickens casts the novel as a retrospective, an older David narrating the story of his younger self. The act of telling the tale is about memory and the passing of time and how experience can be reshaped when looked back upon.

Bleak House (1852–53)

Dickens’s description in Bleak House of the fog in London is one of the best things he wrote. This is from Chapter 1:

Fog everywhere. Fog up the river, where it flows among green aits and meadows; fog down the river, where it rolls defiled among the tiers of shipping and the waterside pollutions of a great (and dirty) city. Fog on the Essex marshes, fog on the Kentish heights. Fog creeping into the cabooses of collier-brigs; fog lying out on the yards, and hovering in the rigging of great ships; fog drooping on the gunwales of barges and small boats. Fog in the eyes and throats of ancient Greenwich pensioners, wheezing by the firesides of their wards; fog in the stem and bowl of the afternoon pipe of the wrathful skipper, down in his close cabin; fog cruelly pinching the toes and fingers of his shivering little ‘prentice boy on deck. Chance people on the bridges peeping over the parapets into a nether sky of fog, with fog all round them, as if they were up in a balloon, and hanging in the misty clouds.

Gas looming through the fog in divers places in the streets, much as the sun may, from the spongey fields, be seen to loom by husbandman and ploughboy. Most of the shops lighted two hours before their time, as the gas seems to know, for it has a haggard and unwilling look.

The raw afternoon is rawest, and the dense fog is densest, and the muddy streets are muddiest near that leaden-headed old obstruction, appropriate ornament for the threshold of a leaden-headed old corporation, Temple Bar. And hard by Temple Bar, in Lincoln’s Inn Hall, at the very heart of the fog, sits the Lord High Chancellor in his High Court of Chancery.

Never can there come fog too thick, never can there come mud and mire too deep, to assort with the groping and floundering condition which this High Court of Chancery, most pestilent of hoary sinners, holds this day in the sight of heaven and earth.

You can read the rest of Chapter 1 here. Fog itself becomes a character in the story.

In Bleak House, endless fog and endless delays of Chancery court echo human mortality, and generations of Jarndyces have wasted away waiting for the completion of the court case that is so old no one remembers what it’s about. Through Jarndyce v. Jarndyce, Dickens critiques how the legal system squanders precious time and money. Shop-owner Krook dies of spontaneous combustion, a blood-splattering symbol of human corruption and decay. For Esther Summerson, the act of narrating her life by recalling her memories push against the erosion of time. The more distance we have from an event, the less likely we are to remember it clearly.

Our Mutual Friend (1864–65)

The Thames is full of death in Our Mutual Friend, with drowned bodies pulled from the water and scavengers living off remnants of mortality. Dickens uses death as a backdrop for questions of rebirth and identity. The story is about inheritance, and we can’t inherit something until someone has died. The inheritance plot dramatizes how wealth and the timing of death can determine someone’s destiny. The characters in this story live in the shadow of others’ mortality, waiting for fortunes to fall.

Dickens’s treatment of time and mortality can be social as well as personal. He doesn’t simply meditate on the fleeting nature of life. He shows how unjust systems, poverty, and neglect steal time, and often life. For Dickens, mortality isn’t just inevitable. It’s a call to improve the lives of the living before it’s too late. How we spend our time defines our humanity. 

Writing is a Kind of Immortality

Everyone understands mortality. We all know what it means to lose someone, or, if we haven’t yet, we will at some point. And memento mori—remember that you will die. Yet while life is temporary, words last. Every time we pick up a book, we’re hearing the voice of someone who may have died centuries ago. When you read or write, you’re not just experiencing something today. You’re joining a conversation taking place over generations.

Time and mortality are important in my current WIP, as they have been in other stories I’ve written. I’m not obsessed with time and mortality because I’m morbid—although maybe I am, a little. I’m obsessed because time and mortality shape my every day life. By wrestling with these big themes on the page, I’m able to understand them a little more. If Dickens has anything to teach us, it’s that though time claims us all, what we do with the time we have in front of us today can echo far beyond our own lives.