May your characters be so interesting that you could hang out with them for hours.

May your manuscript be easy and fulfilling for you.

May you reach your writing goals or break forth with amazing new ones.

May you find good books to read, and meet authors that inspire you.

May you make new friends to help you with your creative journey.

May you find yourself in fiction. May you learn from the truth, as well.

May you become the writer you always dreamed you would be. May you become an inspiration to the next generation.

In honor of my post “Killing Your Darling Characters” being one of my most influential Writeblr “hits”. (Am I a “hit”? Funny, it’s more like a viral hit-and-run. Wow, how did I ever get to this point of sleep deprivation and puns.)

Here’s a (brief?) list of characters you should try and let live to the end of the story.

1. The LGBT+ ones. Darling, I’m all about representation. Just don’t place the sole gay character in an early grave, please. Thank U, Next. (Non-cis too!)

In my experience, sleep and creativity… they’re both parts of an age-old paradox. Maybe it’s just the fact that I need caffeine to focus (and have since I was 16), but I digress.

To be able to have enough energy to make art, write stories, sing songs, or even get out of bed to make delicious waffles, you need to sleep a decent amount. I love mornings. I love the illusion of productivity: of seeing the day just get started. The amount of time I have before the rush of midday sets in, that’s wonderful.

I remember a time when I laughed at people who thought video games were art.

Then I played a couple that proved me wrong.

I remember playing a point-and-click game at age twelve that sent me spiraling down the crazy thought process of nihilism. (I know some people could handle that better than me, but I freaked out when I first really considered the concept). It was a video game about a young businessman who just… gets bored of it all. So bored that you could just click and point for him to walk out of his car and pet a cow in a grassy field. He just didn’t show up to work. He threw coffee at his cruel boss. He laughed and stared up at the sun.

It’s a bit like staring at old photographs in a scrapbook (or selfies from a couple years ago for those who never lived through the scrapbooking era). You see the subtle shifts, or the not-so-subtle changes. Maybe you started working out. Maybe you cut your hair, dyed in, then grew it out again. Maybe you had different friends, family, or lovers. You see the photos, and sometimes the memories of what you used to be come easy. Maybe they struggle and move away from you, wriggling like fish in a river, sliding downstream.

It’s difficult. You work and work and work and somebody ALWAYS seems to be winning more awards than you.

Their writing isn’t even that good… You think, mumbling incoherently to yourself as you stare into your mug of coffee, simultaneously scrolling through Twitter feeds. Feeds filled with people discussing how they got signed. How they’re on tour. How they’re so famous that people stop them in the streets just to ask for their signature.

That should be me out there.

I understand this mode of thinking. Hell, sometimes I’m still a little bit like this. But, what I’ve found is this.

Every week, I force myself to write a blog post for Tumblr by Monday night. Then, I need to send in 2-3 articles for my digital media magazine by Saturday. THEN, I need to update a 1,500 word chapter for Wattpad by Friday.

Sometimes, like this week, I end up postponing to Tuesday instead of Sunday night. Sometimes, I drop the ball.

Sometimes, I stare at a blank screen, and instead of writing…

I open up a tab on the internet and fall down a YouTube hole.

Shalom. Salaam. Peace.

In a world where it seems

we open the news and everyday see it.

Hate, death, destruction.

Remember this.

That we treasure the time to love instead of the time to hate

that hate only brings

Anger, chaos, calamity.

But love is:

Healing.

Love is:

Fixing.

Love is:

Saving.

And love is anything you want it to be. But it never asks for cruelty to be done in its name.

I remember my first villains. I made them extremely evil. In my stories, written fondly at age eleven, they had fangs and darkness in their eyes. Their souls were full of mud, and they made the Grinch look like a sweetheart.

As I grew older, wrote more stories, I realized that those weren’t the real villains. Not really. Real villains aren’t cardboard cutouts, after all.

Real villains have just as many motivations as the good guys, they’re just in the opposite direction.

So, when it comes to killing off characters, nobody knows the struggle better than a writer. (Notice I said characters, not people. Please ensure that I mean FICTIONAL people of IMAGINARY worlds. Murder is a big no-no IRL!)

Writers search up these weird things all the time: how people act at funerals, what happens to the body, and can poison actually kill you 100% of the time. And, somehow, we stay semi-sane.

But there’s good and bad ways to kill off characters, and there’s good and bad reasons to do so too, but the moral part is another post.