24. How willing are you to kill your characters if the plot so demands it? What’s the most interesting way you’ve killed someone?
Fairly willing, though I’m more likely to kill of a minor character than a main one. A death can set a plot in motion, for instance. The problem I have with death in fiction is that often it’s used to ratchet up angst in a manipulative kind of way, instead of providing a catharsis. 
And if you ever kill of a character and end up pissing off your audience, UR DOIN IT RONG. If the only ending you can think of “rocks fall, everybody dies,” your plot needs work.
Icon has nothing to do with lingering bitterness, oh no.
Anyway, I try to justify the hell out of any deaths I write, and since my primary goal in this business to make people happy, I don’t write deaths often. Characters will have loss in their backstories, of course, because everybody’s lost someone, but that’s just trying to make a life, really.
I can’t think of any interesting ways I’ve killed a character. One in a WIP dies of a stroke, and another WIP has two characters who lost parents/parental figures to cancer, and the main character in a challenge response lost his parents in a car crash … not so much with the interesting, really. I’ll leave the “interesting” to other people.
What’s the line from Buffy? “The hardest thing in this world is to live in it”? Yeah. Death is too easy. I’d rather characters have to go on living.
Originally published at Jenna Jones.com. You can comment here or there.