Am I the only one?

[Justin4Fun]

I pour my heart and soul into a story. My characters are my children. I dream about them, and later, if I remember the dream, I write about my dreams. When I get a comment, I can take criticism of my writing style, but I'm hurt if someone says something bad about one of my kids.

That said, when I'm writing an emotional scene - the loss of a child, or the death of a friend - I cry while writing it. Even more embarrassing, I cry when I read it. Even three years later, if I read about the death of one of my kids, I cry.

Am I the only one?

[kbois]

Nope. 

I killed off one of my characters and still regret it, even after a year. Granted, the character originally was supposed to be an ass, but somewhere along the way, he showed me his true colors and he became one of my favorites. I loathed killing him, but a huge premise of the story depended on his death. It sucked big time. 

[Mancunian]

Definitely not the only one. I haven't written many deaths but the ones I have written stay with me and I shed a tear when I go back and read them. I'm so bad that an emotional scene with many of my characters can still evoke goosebumps and make me feel emotional again. Many of my stories still make me shed a tear or two, how sad is that?

[re2]

Writing is visceral. The characters are visceral. And the demise of one is also visceral. 

May they Rest In Peace. 

[Lee Wilson]

On 12/5/2023 at 8:21 AM, Justin4Fun said:

Am I the only one?

Hell no!

[LJCC]

Kill your darlings, as what good ole' Willie said. I don't like my characters in general. But when I fall in love with a character, that's a problem.

Like if the character I wrote is literally a person I could fall for in real life, and if I met this guy at a party, on a dating app, bumped into him at a cafe, museum, event, or a hookapp app, oh you betcha, I'm gonna put a ring on that finger.

Cause when you're writing, you're subliminally subverting your character's personality to align with whatever you want and need. And sometimes, your characterization slips past that wall of distance you've put out so that you won't get attached or affected.

So when it does affect you, when you've written a character that's very similar to your past, present or future, and your brain tells you, "You know that there's no way he's gonna live. He's destined to die. You're aware of that, right?" The only choice is to step back and take a breather.

That's what I'm doing now. Take a breather and wait 6 months to write again, till I get to the hearbreaking scene where he gets shot in the head, and I have to narrate the experience by getting inside the head of main character dragging his dead lover in the tundra--which I know will last for an entire chapter. 

 

[Krista]

I DNF'd a story 'because' the main character's love interest died in the beginning. The more I wrote about the character remembering the one he lost, the less I wanted to write the damn thing. I 'wanted' that character to be alive, I 'needed' the happy ending. It could no longer happen, not with the way I wrote the story. I would have had to write in a second love for him, but I couldn't, because that idea already felt cheap to me. I would have to end the story as I intended, with him still reeling from the death, but learning to cope. All the while, telling and experiencing the guy's life as his family knew him, and as he knew him. It was also an anthology that I ran out of time on and the writing got too long to submit it anyway. I tend to do that with every Anthology, so.

I want to say that I can step away from my characters... and I can somewhat, but when they hit hard, they hit hard. I am rather tame when it comes to my writing though, I don't kill very many of them off... there isn't a ton of torture for them to overcome either. I did all that in my earlier works. I wasn't, and still am not all that invested in those earlier stories either. I don't think I ever really was, I wrote them in high school, mostly because friends told me to. Then when I posted them online, they got a lot of attention, so I continued. I started writing for the wrong reasons, to be honest. I was also very young, a teenager. But anyway, there are some characters that I love, some that I write and never think much about ever again.

[W_L]

Well, since I am playing in the Isekai genre right now, the idea is to kill your character, then reincarnate them into a different world/era 😛 

I do feel bad about killing characters or ending their stories. It's human nature to love our creations, a somewhat narcissistic reflection of self-love as well.

[drown]

I'm currently in editing mode on a story I massacred together ages ago. While reading through everything multiple times, I got attached to the characters in yet another light. Not only are they my children, but it feels like I get to know them all over again. From a distance.

This morning I arrived at a pivotal point where I killed off someone I really really really like. It ended me.

I was sobbing uncontrollably, and had to stop. I'll try again tomorrow.