Writing About Mortality: What Lieke Marsman's Final Memoir Teaches Student Writers
You write about serious illness and death without self-pity by making the essay a record of your thinking: let readers watch your certainty crack, question itself, and rebuild in real time. Writing about mortality works when fear becomes inquiry: precise details, honest reasoning, and even playfulness keep the piece humane instead of sentimental. A strong model is On Another Planet They Can Save Me, the posthumous memoir by former Dutch poet laureate Lieke Marsman, which a Guardian review describes as part scream, part song, charting the dissolution of her rational assumptions. This article turns that example into practical craft exercises for student writers.
Let Readers Watch Your Reasoning Break
The most useful lesson in the review is structural, not emotional. It describes a book whose real subject is not illness itself but the collapse of a worldview: Marsman charts, in the reviewer's words, the gradual dissolution of her own rational assumptions, which govern everything from her views on God to extraterrestrial life. In a line the review quotes, she warns that no matter how attached you are to your rational worldview, your rationality will not survive long under the threat of imminent death. For students, that reframes the hardest personal essays. Your task is not to prove you suffered bravely; it is to show a mind encountering something it cannot think its way around, and thinking anyway.
Our exercise for this is a certainty inventory. Before drafting, list three things you confidently believed before your illness, bereavement, or crisis entered your life. Choose the belief that wobbled hardest, then write two short passages: one arguing your old position as persuasively as you can, and one showing the exact moment it stopped convincing you. Draft the essay between those passages, so the reader experiences the shift with you rather than being told about it afterwards. We suggest testing each scene with one question: can a reader see the reasoning change here, or only its conclusion? If only the conclusion survives revision, the scene is summary, not story, and it will read as assertion rather than experience.
Precision Displaces Sentiment
Self-pity rarely announces itself; it arrives through vagueness. Phrases like a long battle, a difficult journey, or devastated beyond words are borrowed containers that ask readers to supply the emotion for you. The review's description of Marsman suggests the opposite discipline: her reflections are called agonising and profoundly life-affirming because they engage mortality through specific arguments, questions, and ideas rather than through ready-made grief language. The reviewer's phrase part scream, part song also matters. It names a tonal range, not a single register of lament. When you cannot yet face a subject directly, precision gives you somewhere to stand: the exact sentence you could not finish, the specific afternoon, the particular question that would not leave.
Our exercise here is a cliché purge with a strict rule. Draft one page about your hardest subject quickly, without self-censorship. Then underline every phrase you suspect you have read somewhere before, including your own favourite formulations, and replace each with a detail only you could write: a measurement, a misheard sentence, an object in a specific room. We recommend keeping one abstract sentence per page at most, so the concrete particulars carry the emotional weight. Read the revised page against the original and notice where feeling actually deepens. In our experience of this exercise, specificity does not cool the writing down; it concentrates heat, because readers trust writers who report the world accurately over writers who demand to be consoled.
Playfulness Is Not Flippancy
It may seem indecent to pair humour with dying, yet the review calls Marsman's book brilliant, playful, layered and humane, a plea for openness and hope written from what it calls her own foxhole of intolerable suffering. That combination is the craft lesson. Playfulness in serious writing is not jokes at the subject's expense; it is intellectual mobility, the willingness to approach fear sideways through a scientific fact, an absurd hypothetical, or a memory that refuses solemnity. The review even opens with social science, citing a 2019 survey by Joseph Henrich and colleagues of nearly two thousand people in Uganda, Sierra Leone and Tajikistan on how conflict shapes religious belief. Serious questions can be carried by curious forms.
Our exercise for tonal range is counterpoint drafting. Write one paragraph that faces your subject at its darkest, holding nothing back. Then write a second paragraph on the same subject that approaches it obliquely: a strange detail, a question about something adjacent, a moment of dry observation. Revise by braiding them, alternating registers sentence by sentence until neither tone dominates. We suggest a simple test while revising: mark every place where the tone has stayed identical for five sentences or more, and break it. Uniform solemnity numbs readers exactly as uniform cheerfulness does. The goal is not balance for its own sake but a voice supple enough to hold agony and attention in the same breath, which is what keeps an audience reading.
Preparing the Piece for Competition
For students submitting personal essays or memoir excerpts to competitions, finish with structural honesty rather than polish alone. At the Cosmopolitan Writing Award, entries are accepted on a rolling basis with no shared closing date during the live period, and valid AI feedback arrives privately after processing, so a draft can be tested and revised without public exposure. You may submit multiple works in the same category, each eligible for its own assessment, and you can opt in to the provisional monthly AI leaderboard if you want a comparative signal; it is not a formal award. Processing time varies, and failed assessments do not receive invented scores, so build revision time around that uncertainty rather than assuming instant results.
Two compliance points belong in your final checklist. Any AI assistance must be clearly declared in your submission, and the work must primarily reflect your own intellectual and artistic contribution; plagiarism leads to disqualification. Use a readable PDF, DOCX, TXT or Markdown file, and preserve intentional line breaks and formatting, since automatic assessment depends on it. Our exercise for the final pass is the read-aloud trust check: read the essay to one listener and mark every moment their attention dips or they look confused, then revise those spots before anything else. We also suggest a last question drawn from Marsman's example as the review presents it: does the piece end more open than it began? If yes, you have written thinking, not a eulogy for your own certainty.