I held a human brain in my hands

Confronting my own mortality helped me become a more disciplined screenwriter. Here I share what I learned (so you don't need to hold one yourself).

Photo by Priyanka Singh

I spend a lot of my time writing about death.

So far, in the four TV thriller movies I’ve had commissioned, I’ve killed seven people. The horror I’m outlining currently will be at least five more. That’s not even counting the dozens and dozens of other shorts, features and short stories I’ve written in my life.

Maybe that’s part of the reason why, every single night, I wake up suddenly and the first thought that I hear is: You’re going to be dead someday.

It’s not a wishful thought. It’s not an accusatory one either. The voice that makes that statement is absolutely matter-of-fact. I’ll then spend the next 10 minutes thinking about how my body will be dead, unmoving, decomposing and then—a big pile of ash.

The hands I am using to type these words right now, for example, will be ashes. I’m not being dramatic or hyperbolic. They will quite literally be pushed with the rest of me into an incinerator some day. It’s so so easy for that to feel like fiction.

That’s because human minds are incredible at avoiding what is laid out plainly in front of them when it comes to our own mortality.

I know this to be true because once I held a human brain in my hands.

My Peter Parker job is working as a copywriter at a medical technology company. We once did an excursion to a lab that had a large collection of preserved human bodies that they used for research. We were allowed to pick up and hold several specimens (don’t worry, the specimens had specifically gone to the institute before they died to donate their bodies knowing that some morbidly curious copywriter would probably be manhandling them someday).

One of them was a head bisected down the middle, right along the midline. One was cut in half the other way, from ear to ear. Some of them were just brains in jars.

I put on some latex gloves and a smock and I picked up one of those brains, cradling it in awe in my hands. It was kind of like you’d expect it to feel. It was hefty and rubbery. It was slightly smaller and more compact than human brains are depicted in movies.

It was then that I noticed this avoidance of mortality in full force for the first time.

My brain would not accept that I was holding an actual human brain. It was just silicone, my own brain thought. It was a prop. It wasn’t real. It couldn’t possibly be real.

I tried to force my own brain to accept that this was the same organ that was struggling to process that it was holding a cadaver version of itself. It was like trying to push two positive poles of a magnet together. Just as my mind would get close to accepting what it was in my hands, the thought was thrust away by an invisible force.

That’s what it’s like trying to accept that I’m going to die someday. My brain happily offers that invisible force, pushing away any shred of acceptance. It can’t possibly actually and really and truly be true that the years, hours, seconds of my life are a finite number and many of them are already behind me.

I will die. You will die. We will all die. None of us will escape this fate. We’re all on a death march, we just don’t know how much time we have left.

Every night, I’m working, slowly but surely, to flip the magnet around until those opposing poles—death and the acceptance of it—snap together, finally united.

So what the hell does all this have to do with screenwriting? The closer I get to unabashed acceptance of the fact that I will die, the better I become as a writer and the more opportunities I create for myself.

The visceral knowledge of my eventual demise drives me to make the best of these finite seconds. It has me stopping the scroll and focusing on my craft. It has me fully absorbing the films and TV I watch. It has me appreciating every bump in my journey, no matter how small, good or bad, because these are my bumps to experience, and what a unique privilege it is to live and be able to create.

My best screenwriting advice? Imagine someone told you that you had 6 months to live. What would you write? What stories do you need to tell before you go? Go write those now before we’re all worm food!