Requested by: Love_Ya_3000

Writing a dying character can be tricky, especially because you want to represent the illness correctly. So, as always, my first piece of advice is to research. 

Research the illness until you're sick of hearing about it. Understand the symptoms, the life expectancy, the treatments, how the treatments affect the person, the causes, so on. The worst thing you can do is misrepresent the information about the illness itself. Because every illness will show itself differently, especially serious ones. And at times, the treatments can be worse than the actually illness in terms of side affects and pain.

Moving on, it the character themselves and their reaction to it. This will be an overall view, but obviously, every character will react differently depending on their personality and how they were raised.

At first, the character will likely be in denial. They'll trust in their treatment, look at the odds in their favor, research every option they have. Your mind wants to go on even though your body is slowly giving up. The two don't line up and that causes conflict. The character won't be able to do things they used to, they'll hate their body and their mind/body will be against them at all time. It'll be torture.

Then, slowly, they'll accept it. They'll run out of options, see that the treatment isn't working, and look at the odds more realistically. Their mind will catch up with their body, and they'll accept their limitation. They'll look at the time they have happily, thankful they have any time at all. They'll, in a sense, stop fighting. Because they've fought long enough. They were brave, they were a warrior. Now, they could rest.

A good example for all of this is Fault in Our Stars. I highly recommend reading it if you haven't if you want more info. Some people say it's unrealistic, but I honestly think it is. Most of the characters go through what I said above, and it's a good guide to go off of if you need more info.

Requests are open, so is asking questions!

~Lydia