Writing original fic, killing of characters

[Golden Talisath]

Sorry I’m so late for this, but I had to answer to this! I don’t like killing my characters, and I make different excuses why some character, that’s supposed to be years dead by now, is still living.
I do have one character in a book I’m writing (it’s a series of book, really) that’s an exception. He was ok in the first book, but now, in the second one, he’s become a major pain in the neck for the other main characters, and I can’t wait to kill him! I first though of killing him in some battle, but than I decided that he did his part, and he, being bad or not (it’s mostly my fault of what became of him, anyway), deserves a nice go. So, I suppose he’ll die without any pain, surrounded by family members and such…
As for the happy endings bit, I like them, but not every book can have them (but, my mostly do).

[vyon]

Another question - have any of you found that your stories have become darker over time? When I was contributing to this thread I'd have had difficulty killing anybody off at all. But right now I'm trying to finish something that I wrote ages ago and made a fair copy of in a fine-tipped felt type pen. It got in a flood and completely lost the bottom 1/3 to 1/4 of every page. So now, end "a" on one page has to be joined to beginning "b" at the top of the next page. And in the last such join I had one young character randomly drop dead, another revealed as a mass murderer, the same one attempt to murder his priestly brother, and dropped three characters off the top of an escarpment on a mountain. Two survived. Nobody is likely to mourn the one that didn't. Then I have to get a badly injured protagonist and a captive bandit off that mountain top and attach the whole story to the next "beginning b" at the top of the next page.
The most likely solution at this stage is to change POV and describe the whole schemozzle from the bandit's eyes.

[Anareth]

Never say 'darker,' say 'more sophisticated.

I just killed a canon character in a fan fic. The reviews (all variations on a theme of NOOOOO) that immediately flooded in were absolutely catnip. No wonder George RR Martin loves this...Yes, I liked the character, a lot, to the point of feeling guilty about it, but it was so perfect.

[vyon]

Those aren't the same thing at all. "Darker" refers to content, and "More Sophisticated" refers to the complexity and presentation of the content. The current presentation of my "Slave King" stories is probably both. There is murder, suicide and family abuse in the rewrite, which I wouldn't even have thought of when I originally wrote the story. That's what I mean by "darker." I also realised that there was nowhere near enough description in the original and there is more complexity in the relationships. That's "more sophisticated." So is the creation of chapters, chapter headings and an index, which was much more difficult to do in a handwritten manuscript.