Episode #334: When Dying Is Your Story's HEA {II}

This pic was taken nearly a week ago, after I had finished my morning walk and was in my backyard refilling the bird feeders. If it looks washed, it's because while we and the deer were in the shade, the backyard was bright and sunshiny. About a minute later, they had gently hopped over the fence and back into the mountain.

Part two of our series about death, talks mostly about the process I had used in order to make an informed decision on who (singular and plural) I should kill off in the series.

I am one of those writers who's a mix between a pantser and a plotter. I used to be a 100% pantser, but I soon realized with this series, I was going to have to add a little planning into the mix.

So what I did next, I really wouldn't recommend, especially if you're a planner: I stopped writing book #3 so I could properly plot out which character(s) were going to be kill outright; which would determine the direction that the rest of the series would go in order to achieve the pre-determined ending.*

*note: at the very beginning of this series, back to when it was a nearly four dozen page dreck of a novella, I had a definitive ending in mind. So we're talking nearly a dozen years holding onto an ending for this story.

So I waited until I was at the midway point with a chapter completed, before temporarily putting the book to the side. I then pulled out my handy-dandy clipboard, pen/paper, and spent the next two days charting out which character could be participating and their relation to others.

Then I worked out what I felt was the most important aspect: Once dead, do they stay dead?

I also sketched out a few different scenarios that would reasonably answer both of those questions. By the next day, I had made my decision on how I should answer the important question of "once dead, do they stay dead?", by selecting a character from both sides.

Was I 100% comfortable with my decision making process? Yes, I was. I am one of those people who, upon realizing that making informed decisions about a particular scenario, whether real world or the fictional world, likes to gather upon as much info as humanly possible.

Was I 100% comfortable with the choices that I decided to make once I had all of the information needed? Not entirely, but those choices were, in my honest opinion, the easiest to write to a satisfactory conclusion, because they both lived up to the expectation of the title of book #4, and we hope to the expectation of whatever the title of book #5 will be.

I would like to point out that this particular series of posts were originally written back in March/April of this year, which is why it states that no title was picked for book #5. As we all know, a title was picked prior to editing book #5, just like I had done with the previous four books.

(to be continued)

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