I think we all saw this coming one day, but perhaps not so soon. The time has come for me to ask you a gigantic favor. I need you to help me kill someone.
What? Oh… Oh, no, I don’t mean a REAL person. I mean an imaginary person. One of my characters, actually. (Ha, you thought I meant Thrangor. That’s so cute.)
The problem I find myself facing is this: I have this character who is certain to be well-loved by my readers, but the problem is that this person is not in the next book in the series. As hard as I try to think of another way, this person can NOT be in the next book in the series. The only solution is that they must perish before the end of the book. But HOW?
Come on now, put your twisted little minds to good use and tell me how I should kill off this character. Don’t be afraid to really use your imagination here. It can be murder, accident, suicide… Be detailed. At this point, I’m willing to consider pretty much anything.
VP Anderson 
Does it need to be a death that doesn’t leave the other characters with worries, concerns, or angst? Does it need to be plausible?
‘Cause eaten by a tiger at a zoo sounds exciting.
Ooh, that does sound exciting. But do you think the zoo people would be pissed, like “That’s clearly not possible! We have myriad safety procedures to prevent such accidents from happening and therefore we resent the mere suggestion that this is a possible scenario!” (Damn, those zoo people are long-winded and full of legal terminology.)
Definitely.
What’s the back-story? You can be cryptic if you don’t want to give anything away. I’ll do my best to make their demise as wicked as possible 😉
, Mikey ….I mean Mike …I mean Angry Yoda
Yo,
I’m combining what you sent me on twitter and what I’ve read here to answer this.
Anything, really would work for this, as long as it’s slightly out of character.
Of course, it could be blatantly obvious that the death was no accident. Something for the readers who’ve grown attached to the character to hunger for in the next installment. Who did it and how are they gonna get what’s coming to them?
I know I’m philosophising much more than you’d like, but, as creative as I can be with anything, it has to make some sense to me or it’s just a laundry list of causes of death. Shooting, stabbing, car runs of the road, poisoning by various means, torture, ritual mutilation, dehydration, cancer… blah, blah, blah. As a side note, Bret Easton Ellis said, when questioned about the excessive violence in “American Psycho” that he wrote the story first, then he wrote all the violence and “excessive” scenes by combing through actual police reports. Every single thing Patrick Bateman did in that book, as fucked up as it was, actually happened. That gives you pause… or, at least it did me, since I actually read the book and, although I recognized a lot of the behaviour and crimes from some fairly famous serial killers, I’d never read about it in such disturbing detail. And that book was all about lists. Everything from what the characters wore to where they went and what he did was lists and lists and lists of cold detail. Great book, and actually funny, if you can see past the gruesome parts, but I digress…
Angry Yoda (Pardon any typos)
I won’t lie, when I saw the title, I thought you were asking me to be your clutch or necklace. Now that I know the truth, the best way to kill someone (not from personal experience) is to take them hiking and accidentally shove them off a high ledge/cliff. Then it would look like an accident.