{"id":592,"date":"2010-11-16T08:23:39","date_gmt":"2010-11-16T13:23:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.old.caraghobrien.com\/book\/?p=592"},"modified":"2010-11-16T11:46:41","modified_gmt":"2010-11-16T16:46:41","slug":"killing-them-off","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.caraghobrien.com\/book\/writing\/killing-them-off\/","title":{"rendered":"Killing Them Off"},"content":{"rendered":"

My friend Jenn Hubbard recently posted about the reader-writer contract<\/a>, and how a promise is delivered to a reader within the opening sentences of a novel.\u00a0 It reminded me of another contract I\u2019ve been pondering, the kids\u2019 books one that promises not to kill off major characters.<\/p>\n

\"\"

The End of the Road<\/p><\/div>\n

Wait.\u00a0 No.\u00a0 What makes me think such a promise even exists to break?\u00a0\u00a0 I read White\u2019s Charlotte\u2019s Web<\/a><\/em> when I was too young to question what was happening, and while I was heartbroken about Charlotte, I didn\u2019t feel any particular, personal sense of betrayal. \u00a0Possibly it mattered that Charlotte was old, and her death seemed natural. \u00a0It was one of my first books ever, a seminal reading experience that should have been a basis for any patterns I began to recognize later.\u00a0 Yet, when I read Paterson\u2019s Bridge to Terabithia<\/a><\/em> for the first time as an adult, I was devastated.\u00a0 Not only did the loss wring me out, but I also felt like the rules had been violated. \u00a0In the years between White and Paterson, I\u2019d absorbed that deaths weren\u2019t supposed to happen to people I cared about in kids\u2019 books.\u00a0 I\u2019d imagined a promise that, once broken, could never be trusted again, and that unglued me.\u00a0 Since death could happen to my friends in kids\u2019 lit, there was nowhere safe left to go.\u00a0 I never wanted to read anything again.<\/p>\n

No, truly.\u00a0 I never wanted to read anything ever again.\u00a0 Certainly not a kid\u2019s book with engaging, imaginative characters.<\/p>\n

But I did.\u00a0 Eventually.<\/p>\n

Now I\u2019m feeling squeamish.\u00a0 I\u2019d love the power of killing off a key player in my next novel and realistically, it could happen in the setting I\u2019m working with.\u00a0 But I just feel like it would be wrong, with a capital \u201cW.\u201d\u00a0 In the past, stuff that felt Wrong has led me to my most disturbing discoveries as a writer, discoveries that have rippled into my real life as a person.\u00a0 But do I want to go there with death?<\/p>\n

The worst thing of all, I think, would be to use death opportunistically, just for shock value, just because a writer could.\u00a0 That would be mean and unfair, not only to the reader, but to the stories that have truly earned their meaningful deaths.\u00a0 Like Charlotte\u2019s. \u00a0It’s safer to avoid it completely than risk being cheap.<\/p>\n

Why do I even need to grapple with this?\u00a0 I resist, squirming.\u00a0 I\u2019m nowhere near the scene, yet, where this could happen, so there\u2019s no need yet to prepare.\u00a0 I\u2019m fully aware, too, that I\u2019ve already had some pretty awful deaths in my writing, so this isn\u2019t completely new territory.\u00a0 Those deaths had to be there and I didn\u2019t question that they did.<\/p>\n

But certain deaths.\u00a0 I don\u2019t know.\u00a0 They would be Wrong.\u00a0 Wouldn\u2019t they?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

My friend Jenn Hubbard recently posted about the reader-writer contract, and how a promise is delivered to a reader within the opening sentences of a novel.\u00a0 It reminded me of another contract I\u2019ve been pondering, the kids\u2019 books one that promises not to kill off major characters. Wait.\u00a0 No.\u00a0 What makes me think such a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[37],"class_list":["post-592","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-writing","tag-writing-2"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.caraghobrien.com\/book\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/592","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.caraghobrien.com\/book\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.caraghobrien.com\/book\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.caraghobrien.com\/book\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.caraghobrien.com\/book\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=592"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.caraghobrien.com\/book\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/592\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":600,"href":"https:\/\/www.caraghobrien.com\/book\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/592\/revisions\/600"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.caraghobrien.com\/book\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=592"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.caraghobrien.com\/book\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=592"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.caraghobrien.com\/book\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=592"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}