𝐀𝐓𝐋𝐀𝐒, WRITING TIPS

* . ᵏⁱˡˡ ʸᵒᵘʳ ᵈᵃʳˡⁱⁿᵍˢ.

༉˚*ೃ 𝐊𝐈𝐋𝐋 𝐘𝐎𝐔𝐑 𝐃𝐀𝐑𝐋𝐈𝐍𝐆𝐒 (𝐇𝐎𝐖 𝐓𝐎 𝐖𝐑𝐈𝐓𝐄 𝐂𝐇𝐀𝐑𝐀𝐂𝐓𝐄𝐑 𝐃𝐄𝐀𝐓𝐇).

( spoilers. the hunger games, the queen of blood, wilder girls, game of thrones / a song of ice and fire, stranger things, IT chapter one and two, strange the dreamer, muse of nightmares, the last of us, the maze runner / the death cure, the haunting of hill house (both the netflix show and the book), harry potter. most of these spoilers are minor but read at your own risk! )

though the term "kill your darlings" doesn't actually relate to the idea of killing your characters, and rather the concept of cutting out unnecessary parts of your story (and i acknowledge that), it is definitely one of my favourite sayings for doing just that. i love killing characters, though not as much as i used to when i was younger (my favourite is making them ALMOST die but just scrape by, the potential for ANGST), but there's definitely a correct way to do it! in this chapter i'll run through the proper way for how to kill your darlings, when to know to not, and the different ways they can go. plus, as a treat, a bit of a preview into how a character might experience grief (which will be a chapter of its own at some point).

TOO MUCH CHARACTER DEATH.   →      *   .    &

one important thing i want to preface is that a lot of amateur writers want to be angsty and kill all their important characters for pain and edginess, which was, like, totally me at that age too, but it's extremely important to realise that killing off too many characters could make readers not want to read your story anymore. this is definitely a massive problem. yes, there are writers out there — george r. r. martin, i'm looking at you — who kill off like 90% of their characters and get away with it, but i would strongly avoid it.

i feel like pretty much everyone knows that feeling when their favourite character dies. soul-crushing, will stick with you forever. but if that character dies unjustly, too suddenly, or if too many of your favourite characters die, there's a pretty big chance you'll just stop watching or reading all together. this happened to me with the 100 (season 3, cough cough) where three of my favourite characters died in three consecutive episodes, and after the third i promptly turned off the show and never watched it again. sometimes is just too much. as a reader who loved those characters, you become discouraged and lose your motivation to read, with your favourite characters gone — so you just stop.