How do you decide who lives and who dies? Do you know before or is it up to the characters?
How do I decide who lives and who dies? I just decide based on the demands that they make to me by their character arcs and the risks they want to take. I don’t ever feel like I’m killing characters off, I feel like I am writing the stories that need to be written the way they have to be written. They often are planned out ahead of time, I’m an architect as a writer, I come up with an outline and then I hang my story on it. But characters have veto power over the story, if they decide they want to go somewhere else. If who they are growing is somebody the story demands– I say they decide, it doesn’t really happen that way for me. If when I’m writing the story I’m like “This character would not make this decision. I either need to put in a new character in this place or I need to rebuild my outline to match who this person is.” And both of those have happened to me. Usually I’m not replacing the character except in the early parts. Usually if I like the character enough as I’m going I replace the plot.
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