One -and I felt like Joan Wilder in Romancing the Stone. It was for my robot story. I felt so bad I decided he was just broken and had him fixed. I don't often kill off characters as I'm never sure if the gesture is warranted or I'm just using it for cheap drama.
I have recently killed off one of my characters, and crying was the last thing I felt like. I really didn't like him and I'm glad he's dead.
I cry when my characters die, I am sad when they are sad, I laugh when they outsmart a situation or do something stupid, I get overly excited when something good happens to them, I giggle when I realize they are falling in love. Not all the time, but I don't hold it in when it happens. People at cafes look at me weird . . . Specifically, I cried when I realized one of my characters in my novel needs to die at the end. I love him despite his flaws, I don't want to see him go, but he has to, it's inevitable. And this happened during planning . . . I dread the moment I will have to write the scene.
You guys make me feel a lot better about myself. In an end scene I had one of the three villain's get killed by a gunshot, and I thought that was brutal enough. (Teasing)
Funny!! It's a good thing technology goes out of date sometimes, it stops us going into the dark and murky past...
You know your antagonist is well and truly on the wrong side of the moral event horizon when you're fully aware of all the details of his tragic backstory and you're still looking forward to the moment when you finally get to kill him.
This forum has improved my writing quite a bit. I had a rat scene in my latest book, and some GREAT forum members gave me some tips, and encouraged me to be a bit bolder in my approach to that scene. I researched some rat scenes in movies and books, then wrote the rat scene pretty boldly, and really liked the added intensity. My hesitation seems silly now I admit, but who would make a young, pregnant woman walk barefoot through a sea of rats? One memorable, nasty villain, that is who! This site has been really humbling, and that is a REALLY good thing for my writing!
I do not kill characters, unless I consider it necessary for the plot to proceed as intended. Anything short of that is an unproductive waste of resources and, frankly, sort of cruel. I want to think of myself a more responsible creator than that. So, no. If they die, it's for a greater purpose - one their ends were fated to bring about. As such, I expedience no sadness or remorse when they pass. If you do, perhaps you should question your own motivations for killing them. That's is what you're doing, yes? Killing people - albeit fictional ones - in order to further your designs. It's up to you decide if it's worth it. Being the god of a whole reality if full of little responsibilities like that, don't you agree?
It's odd beyond measure that you would believe killing a fictional character while writing a story has moral ramifications similar to killing a real human being.
I'm curious. How do you write the surviving characters convincingly, if you aren't feeling the emotions they're feeling? I'm aware that some people are able to do this, but I struggle to understand how.
No. I am extremely cruel with purpose, and I want my readers to feel more pain. In Westworld, Dr. Robert Ford approaches a technician who is working on a deactivated robot. The technician has placed a cloth over the naked robot. He rebukes him, reminding him that as a creator, he must not be afraid to be break his character. At least their misery will have more meaning than the random misery that our own gods have dealt us. "It doesn't get cold. It doesn't feel ashamed. It doesn't feel a single solitary thing we haven't told it to."
Lots of death and sadness in all these stories. I like to go the other way with my fiction. I like to crack myself up. Smoke some good pot and just jump into absurd situations. I want my characters to make me laugh. Though, I will say, my humor is a bit twisted at times. I spend a lot of time writing and I want to have a good time with it. Real life is sad. If my fiction is sad, I want it to be so sad it becomes funny.
Almost. I wrote a short story about a ghost that manipulates a young man into committing suicide, including distorting a phone call from said young man’s mother to make it sound as though she is disappointed and angry with him. I welled up a bit when I wrote the phone call in its entirety, in which his mother is actually telling him that she loves him and hopes that he is safe.
Yeah, I have cried when I kill off one of my characters, especially when that character had a big role in my story. But sometimes it is necessary to keep the plot going. For example, one of the characters in my story is murdered, and though that person was the main character's lover, it was crucial to make my story go the way that I wanted it to.
That's a bit harsh lad... then why was the character in the story if u disliked him so much he had to die?
I'm guessing that the character in question was an antagonist- you know, a baddie. Very few people like those, but it's hard to write a likeable story without them and killing them off is usually very satisfying.
I always felt like I tended to make my bad guys not really bad enough. Of late, I have really strived to make my Baddie do something really vile so that when he was killed off, readers were not really upset by the fact that they were.
Apparently killing off characters bothered William Shakespeare enough so that he created a literary technique we still use today. Before a horrific scene, he had something called "Comic Relief" where he added humor just before a blood bath.
