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?
Do you see that small group of people laughing in the corner over there? That’s my writing group. They are laughing because they all know how much I love to kill people in books. Ok, maybe love is too strong, but I certainly don’t have a problem killing anyone in a book. In fact, I have a character that dies in every book except Apollo (somehow it just didn’t work in Apollo, and my hatred of this person has slowly drained away in the cathartic killing of her throughout five other books).
But I don’t just kill random characters (although if you would like to die in one of my books, reply to this post and let me know – you can even choose your method of death as long as it’s not too ridiculous). I have been known to kill my favorite characters, too. I killed Rebecca in the first scene of Lane’s Girl, and then killed Lane in the last (trust me, by that point he was begging to die). Rebecca’s a pretty tragic character – I still haven’t found a world in which she doesn’t meet an early death. Kindra also dies (I won’t tell you when) and that tore me up inside. I was crying and sick for days when I wrote that. It made my writing group cry too. If you ever need a good cry let me know – I’ll send you the scene.
As for my favorite death scene – it’s got to be the first one. The character I kill in every book had her first death scene in Fie Eoin, when Pike chases her into a crowd and slits her throat to get everyone’s attention. She’s so terrified, and he’s so cruel. It’s deliciously evil. In After Ancient she’s ripped apart by a giant gar in the Mississippi Ocean. In Pike’s Revenge…. well I don’t remember how she dies in PR. Probably plague. Everyone dies of the plague in PR. But the most interesting way she dies? In Phooka Tales a bottle of acid explodes onto her face and she collapses into a puddle of it on the floor. Her face is eaten away until she looks like Two Face from the Batman Comics. I think that was such a good death scene that I haven’t had the urge to kill her since.