Death

I don't kill my characters all that often...I've killed one major one. He was murdered. And I'm planning on killing one of my main characters at the end of her story; she kills herself. I do mention death often, though its not always there in the face of the reader. I do like slow, dramatic death scenes though. :)

My main story is a zombie based survival horror so death is a huge part of the story. While minor characters die quite frequency whenever there is a major death i have (and plan to in the future) make a seriously big deal of it. A lot of people kill off a character, then 2 or 3 chapters later they seem to all forget as the author themselves has forgotten. Death doesn't work like that. You can never forget.

Killing off a character is sometimes not that big of a deal to me depending on the story. If I am not too interested in the story itself and just wish to finish it, then I couldn't care less. But I think if I was to kill off a character in a story I felt a deep emotional connection to I might actually ALMOST cry. For instance, in Never Ending (posted) I couldn't just leave her for dead in the river. I had to continue the story and give her a chance.

PS. Irrelevant, but I personally fear drowning, not swimming but drowning.

I kill off lots of characters. War/survival usually features heavily in what I write, and I also just really enjoy writing death scenes and I like to play with how other character's react.

My current story is based around the idea of war and revolution, and contains lots of fighting, so it's almost inevitable that someone has to die. It's hard to get the right balance - if I kill off too many people, then it feels like I'm just killing them for the sake of it, but if I don't kill enough of them, then it feels a bit fake; as though, even though hundreds of people have died, all the main characters have 'miraculously' survived. I often end up killing off one or maybe two major characters, because it gives me a chance to write a really emotional scene and work out how all the other characters react to it. There will usually be a few minor characters who die as well, just to make the whole thing seem more realistic.

I've only ever killed off one character, but that was at the very beginning of the story and it was because his death was the thing that set the story in motion.

I remember the backlash and apparently tears people shed when I killed Captain America off in my story that was about killing Captain America. I do try to approach the actual death scene of killing off my characters in a fashion such as this.
Death of Future Gohan