Death

Perhaps the most powerful thing in life is death. It is the most extreme thing that can happen to a person. It is irreversible. It truly is the end. As such, it makes sense that it is common fodder for writing.

Death is a universal experience in that everybody knows and understands it. Death is also a deeply personal experience; the power of an individual's death depends on the closeness one had to the deceased. This is what makes death a difficult subject. Death in general is merely a concept. Joseph Stalin is attributed with the saying, "A single death is a tragedy; a million deaths is a statistic." The only way to make death powerful is to kill somebody that the audience is close to.

The other problem with death is that it is so extreme. Although there are storytelling techniques that can subvert the finality of death, they either involve ridiculously circuitous plots or a fantasy world where either science or magic can bring people back. In this extremeness, death becomes easy. To make a character die becomes a quick way of getting them out of the picture. On top of that, one of the top two worst ways to end a story is to have everybody die (the other one is to make it all a dream). Making death cheap makes it meaningless.

One of my writing teachers told my class to avoid having characters die or writing about death. The idea was that although death is the most extreme thing that can happen to us, it is much more moving to see a person live and struggle through that life.

I do agree with my teachers on that idea. I don't think that we should avoid writing about death like the plague, but we should think twice before heading in that direction. Why are we writing about it? Is it for ourselves or is it for other people? Is it because it's easy or because it's necessary? If you have a legitimate reason for writing about death, then do it. If not, then maybe what needs to die is your story.