Death: The D-Word in My Writing

A short rant on my feelings of killing off characters in my writing.

Okay, well, for all of you who don't really know, I'm an amateur writer. I really like writing horror or thriller stories. One of the biggest parts of horror and thriller stories is death. Particularly bloody and unpleasant ones, at that. I have a morbid fascination with writing that kind of thing and enjoy writing short stories that are nothing but horrifying murder scenes.

Right now, I'm talking about my bigger projects, such as my "Wastelands: Part one" or "Sugar" or "86" stories. These stories have developed characters that go beyond the characters in the short murder-scene stories. They have lives and personalities that go beyond a single emotion. To me, their creator, they are my children. To be honest, if they were living beings under my care, I'd be in jail and they'd be in foster homes because of the things I do to them. Let's be thankful that they are just words on pages.

Of course, like I said, I don't think of them as just that. Like I said, I feel like they are some part of me, as though I birthed them and they are my children. And, as I stated before, a major part of my writing is the D-word. Death. And what can I say? I'm a sadistic b*****d when it comes to death scenes. Of course, with these babies of mine, I sometimes find myself feeling bad about killing them. After all, what parent wouldn't feel a pang of loss after infanticide? (Unless they were a monster, of course... Of course you'd have to be a monster in the first place to kill your child... wait...yeah... let's just get back on track, eh?)

I don't necessarily have a list of characters and how they die, but when I do kill a character, I remember doing so and, unless the character was a b*****d I feel a little bad about it. I think it's that feeling that makes everything just fine. Killing this character and that in any old one-shot story without feeling is fine and dandy, but when you develop the character, you're killing a person in a way, because that character will have a personality, inevitably, independent from the writer. They could fend for themselves in the real world.

Like I said, if you get that pang of regret when you kill a character, like I do, I think it's the right thing to feel. I think this way because it shows not only that you have a clear distinction between life and death, but you have compassion for beyond living things. This kind of compassion allows you to turn anything into something vivid and amazingly alive. You don't see the world as alive and not-alive, but see it as everything having a sense of live to it, even if it something you thought up and put to paper with a Bic pen or whatever. 

Anywho, that's a look into my mind on character deaths. It might sound insane and creepy, but, hey, that's me in a nutshell!