Summary: This week on Hide and Create, Debbie Viguie, Joshua Essoe, Jordan Ellinger, and Michael J. Sullivan continue their discussion about killing characters. During this two-part episode we talk about reasons to kill your characters and reasons why you should not. We talk about how to do it well and ways we’ve seen it done poorly. Also, beware of a few spoilers along the way. In addition to what we say there, I’d like to add a couple more thoughts. If you want to really create a strong emotional impact with your readers, try offing your character after they have been well developed. We’re not talking red-shirts here, we’re talking about a character who in some way is integral to the story. No matter how many babies and puppies you kill, you will never achieve the same emotional experience you can with a character your readers have an investment in and an attachment to. Try killing a character that has become superfluous. First make sure that this character should be in the story at all — there is no reason to have extra characters wandering around. In fact a good exercise is to look at your cast and see who can and should be combined into a single character. But for those that are necessary, sometimes they become not so necessary at some point. Some characters who are integral in a first book, for example, finish up their arc and are no longer needed as the series continues. This is a great kind of character to have lying around if you’re the kind of author who really likes to gut your readers, because you’ve got all this depth and emotional investment built up in this now unnecessary character that you can use to make your readers even more invested in your story and other characters. Remember, when you’re killing an important character off, make it count. Go for the heart.
