: Re: When do I successfully kill off an important secondary main character... in a series of five books? TL;DR: How much time and development is necessary for a character I intend to kill off and

@Welton431

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May I offer my opinion not as a hobbyist writer, but a professional ICU nurse. I do not like the concept of throw away lives. If a character dies, so be it. We all die and that is a fact of life. What I hope matters is not our deaths, but how we lived during the hyphen between our birth date and the date of our death. Even in literature I believe we should respect life, even fictional lives.

I was writing a scene where a young Asian girl is infected with a new variant of flu and I planned to let her quietly die alone because it furthered my plot. I altered my story when a friend pointed out that my characters Asian name, Mei Li, sounded very much like my great granddaughter's name, Miley. This bothered me so much I changed the entire plot to spare the girl instead of using her death to advance my story. Apparently, I made the correct decision because a female engineer, who is Asian and actually lives in the same region of China, asked me if the girl lived or died. Like me, she had invested emotion into my fictional character and I realized that I had improved a little as a writer.

I guess I have seen way too many real deaths to treat even fictional ones trivially. Write your character to live and share their life and then the reader will actually understand and maybe even share the grief of her friends at her death.

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