HNT - Getting Away With Murder

This past weekend, one of the panels I sat on at EerieCon was entitled: "Getting Away With Murder" - I sat on the panel with Sephera Giron, Nancy Kress and Caro Soles. We had a fun topic, the details of which were outlined as: "How and why would you kill of a major character? Is it a good idea? What was your readers' reaction?"

The panel begins
Nancy Kress, Mark Leslie, Sephera Giron, Caro Soles - Photo by Derek Sullivan

'Twas a fun discussion, indeed as we shared examples from our own writing and kind of came up with, under Nancy's direction, a list of four main reasons why a writer might kill off a major character.

Me talking with my hands - Photo by Derek Sullivan

1) Hook -- to draw the reader in (concept of killing a character at the beginning of the story then backtracking through what happened to lead to that point)
2) To underline the seriousness of what's at stake (if it Bob just got killed, then none of us are safe)
3) The plot development requires it (you need x to happen before y can occur, and the only way to do that is to kill off a certain major character)
4) Because you can't stand the character (what can I say? Even writers can be affected by the characters they create)

A great shot of one of my favourite t-shirts - Port Dover Friday the 13th
Photo by Derek Sullivan

Of course, the setting for this discussion was in one of the basement meeting rooms which was, fittingly, as cold as a morgue. Nancy was quite chilled so I loaned her my blue flaming skull shirt for the panel.

Nancy Kress, Mark Leslie - Photo by Derek Sullivan

Sephera's fiance, Derek Sullivan took tons of great pictures at the convention -- I particularly like the "candid" aspect of most of the shots he took -- I liberated a couple of them here for this week's Half-Nekkid Thursday post. Isn't it wonderfully appropriate how we all had black tops on for this topic? Honestly, we didn't plan that ahead.

Nancy Kress, Mark Leslie, Sephera Giron, Caro Soles - Photo by Derek Sullivan