Today I am in the throes of a dilemma. To kill or not to kill, a character. The person in question is my main character's mother. I feel her death does little to push the plot forward, beyond hurting the main character. After many minutes of indecision, I turned to Google for the answer, as I do often.
During my Google search, I came across a blog/website, Brain Pickings. There I found literary advice from a selection of the greats. Kurt Vonnegut instructed "Be a Sadist. No matter how sweet and innocent your leading characters,
make awful things happen to them-in order that the reader may see what
they are made of." I'm sure he would vote to kill the mother. Faulkner would've been with him based on his "kill all your darlings" quote.
Joss Whedon would have no problem sticking it to the broad. He is famous (or is it infamous) for killing characters people have come to love. He has embraced the advice of Faulkner and taken it to a whole other level. Does it make him a better story teller? I have no idea, but I don't know if I can forgive him for what he did to Wash.
In the end, I decided to leave the mother's death in my story. Her death will warp my character into the person I need her to be at the end of the tale. The funny part is, I'm more torn up about the death of a secondary character who has a bit part than I am about the demise of one of the main characters. I knew he would die when I was imagining him. I guess you could say he was born to die.
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