Storylines without fear

Sure, "without fear"; that's what I said. When you're working on a storyline and you believe something is missing in it that would make it better, though some of your readers may be displeased; go ahead and write what makes the story better. Think the story you're writing is too 'vanilla'? Think the difficulties faced by your characters are too mild and 'anybody' could prevail in the same situation in real life? Think your characters don't experience enough heartbreak? Kill off a sympathetic character. You can even kill off an important character if you want. Make it shocking and sudden. That's how it happens in 'real life', by the way. Show your characters carrying on without their friends. Show how your characters have to push the grief aside in their efforts to come out on top of the situation. In 'real life', we all have to do that. I've never understood how others could put their entire lives on hold to deal with their grief for days, weeks or months. Whatever situation I was in never afforded me that luxury and if you will take a look at the best action/adventure books and movies of our time, you will see that the authors didn't allow their characters the extra time to wallow in their grief. There was always a 'baddie' to be resisted, a life to be saved, a death to be revenged. Since I have always had trouble understanding setting aside the life I have yet to live for grieving over a death; perhaps that makes such writing easy for me. I don't know and I'm not going to try to understand it. I just use it to make my stories as believable and 'true-to-life' as I can. Of course, some of your readers may have so much empathy invested in whatever character you kill off that they are unhappy about it, but if you make the story better, they will remember that character fondly and continue reading your work. The character may be sympathetic but have certain flaws that the reader is uncomfortable with, though they like him or her anyway. By killing off the character, you can remove the uncomfortableness and let them remember the character as he/she was. This lets them overlook the uncomfortable things about the character and 'rewrite history', so to speak. Then if they re-read the book in the future, they see that the 'uncomfortable' feeling they had can be set aside and they will see that with the character flaws, the death of the character made the story better and they will see that the story wouldn't be the same if the character came out unscathed. As I've said before; I am not trying to teach a course in creative writing or anything like that. This blog is only supposed to show you, the reader, how I write what I write. Thank you, Derek A. Murphy Author of Dolly Games, Laying Ghosts, Gulf of the Plains and others.