Kill Off Your Main Characters. Please. Not As A Cheap Ending, Or Right At The Beginning For Shock Value.

Kill off your main characters. Please. Not as a cheap ending, or right at the beginning for shock value. Kill them in the middle, and do it well. Leave every character reeling and unable to comprehend what happens next. Leave your antagonists without a solid enemy, wondering if they've gone too far.

When you shatter the heart of a story, a thousand tiny shards will spilt away and grow. Focus on the side characters; the supporting cast, the love interest. Think about how they would change, break and reform. Think about the growth, the quiet moments of reflection and depth.

You don't have to do it, but think about it.

If your story stops with a single character, your story is weak.

Kill the protagonist.

Have you become so addicted to doing what you like that now you don’t even have time to do what you love?

“It’s so hard to forget pain, but it’s even harder to remember sweetness. We have no scar to show for happiness. We learn so little from peace.”

— Chuck Palahniuk

meliora couldn't tell you where it went wrong if you asked her.

maybe it was when her mom died, leaving her father and five year old self alone.

maybe it was when her father did things just to lose himself, to dilute himself with other substances.

maybe when she wasn't allowed to leave the house anymore?

when she started reading about gods; maybe that was it.

when she started reading about gods and their tales, their victories and their losses, their smiles and their tears. their wants and their needs.

she didn't know why it was eleutheria, really. maybe it's because she hadn't left the house in a decade? nonetheless, she worshipped her. made her a secret altar with what she had, and honoured her.

or maybe everything went wrong when her god gave her what she wanted; freedom.

or maybe it was just another form of being trapped. moving a bird from one cage to another.

though this place wasn't as bad as home. there was no alcohol-father mix to torment and trap her, no loneliness. no, these people were nice to her. she even made a few friends for the first time in years!

the grass beneath her feet seemed greener, the paradisiacal world's saturation values seemingly turned up in contrast to the place she used to call home.

used to; this was her home now. Collatio, the place Eleutheria had led — or, technically, kidnapped — her to.

a place far away from humans (except the five she was staying with, though she liked them). a place no one could reach.

she'd almost called her new friends crazy when they asked for her help to leave.

leave? leave Collatio? leave this perfect home?

...leave her?

no. that's what she'd told them; no. this place, these people, it was all too good to seperate from. she won't help them ruin a good thing.

and then owen got taken.

the group had gotten overwhelmed during battle for the first time, and since meliora had decided not to come along, they'd lost the battle. lost owen.

when they came back home to meliora, the group was frantic. understandably so; one out of six humans in this realm had just gotten captured.

killed? they didn't know.

meliora didn't know.

and fuck if it didn't feel terrible. she tried to stick to her values, she really did. but a voice in the back of her head kept telling her it was her fault owen was taken. that if she'd helped her friends, they'd all be here now, happy and safe.

so of course she joined the rest of the humans to go back to the boss and save owen. how couldn't she?

you know how the story goes. meliora went with her friends, they all saved owen, then meliora decided to join the humans in their endeavour.

not because she was happy they'd leave, but because she know it'd hurt more if her friends got hurt again because of her.

and so, the weeks went by. she trained, she talked, she lived, she laughed. some might even say she loved these new friends of her.

oh, how silly she was.

because then she found out there was a traitor amongst her new merry band of humans. one of her friends was not a human. no, they were a spy. one sent by god knows who, for who-knows-what reason. all she knew is that they didn't want the humans to leave Collatio.

but surely it wouldn't be an issue. surely, as long as she stayed focused, she could still help her friends leave.

notice how i said something went wrong? you wanna know what it was?

meliora and her friends were fighting the king. all eyes were on the king, when-

“meliora.”

SLASH.

“my sincerest apologies,”

a sword behind her lifted once more.

“and my deepest condolences.”

she could barely feel like a piece of paper getting stapled, before the idyllic world went black.

« GAME OVER »

Random linguistic worldbuilding: A language with six sets of pronouns, which are set by one's current state of existence. There's a separate pronoun for people who are alive, people who are dead, and potential future people who are yet to be born, and the ambiguous ones of "may or may not be alive or aleady dead", "may or may not have even been born yet", and the ultimate general/ambiguous all-covering one that covers all ambiguous states.

The culture has a specific defined term for that tragic span of time when a widow keeps accidentally referring to their spouse with living pronouns. New parents-to-be dropping the happy surprise news of a pregnancy by referring to their future child with the "is yet to be born" pronoun instead of a more ambiguous one and waiting for the "wait what did you just say?" reactions.

Someone jokingly referring to themselves with the dead person pronouns just to highlight how horrible their current hangover is. A notorious aspiring ladies' man who keeps trying to pursue women in their 20s despite of approaching middle age fails to notice the insult when someone asks him when he's planning to get married, and uses the pronoun that implies that his ideal future bride may not even be born yet.

A mother whose young adult child just moved away from home for the first time, who continues to dramatically refer to their child with "may or may not be already dead" until the aforementioned child replies to her on facebook like "ma stop telling people I'm dead" and having her respond with "well how could I possibly know that when you don't even write to us? >:,C"