Don't kill if you don't have to

Thoughts on Crybaby chapter one and why I tell my writing students not to kill

It’s very easy and tempting to kill people in fiction. Too easy.

If you hold a writing competition in a high school—and I speak from experience here—90% or more of the stories you will then have to read and mark are a bloodbath, especially from the boys.

Obviously, in some stories such as The Hero's Journey or the Slaying The Monster type, death and killing are going to factor in at some point, especially in the Monster story. Jaws wouldn’t have much bite if the shark didn’t! In Jaws, the opening chapter features a grisly death, but that’s because of the nature of the shark—it kills and eats.

Unless the beast is the centerpiece and title of the story, then you might want to rethink things. Killing someone is extremely easy to write… "He shot him dead," "He stabbed him through the heart," but it's so easy that it is tempting to forget what the repercussions of this would be in any context at all. Even the most incredible gangsters and assassins don't shoot ten people a day. Neither did so…