Final Crossings: Dealing with Character Deaths

He came through the door with a smile and a sarcastic comment that set me laughing. I watched my characters fall in love with him. I watched him change their world.

Less than a week later, he was dead.

I was at my laptop, locked into the intensity of battle, focused on the story’s goal. I never expected him to be a casualty of that goal. He disappeared from the page in a wisp of smoke and ink, dissolved between my fingers like the figment of imagination he was.

Except. . .he was so much more.

He had become part of me, and with everything in me I wanted to bring him back. Sick at heart, I attempted to rewrite the scene, tried to find some way of bringing him back to life, but the scene refused to adjust.

One of the hardest thing about being a writer is —let’s be…