Death and the Writer

I’ve been thinking about killing people.

In books. Killing characters, great and small. First, why kill a character? Is it something as mechanical as “because the plot needed someone to die there?” Why kill aparticularcharacter, then? What does it do for the story? For the other characters in the story?Yeah,this is where I get a little woo-woo and fuzzy, because I’m a write-by-the-seat-of-my-pants kind of girl, and often I don’t know why I kill someone off until I finish the work.And even when...