Death of a Character

So, I read The Mists of Avalon again. I read it several times when I was in high school and I loved it. When I found out The Forest House was out, I read that, too. I love Marion Zimmer Bradley.

That said, now that I am reading her again (thanks to my husband who has recently gone on Amazon and bought me all of the Avalon novels) I am stunned by the overwhelming sadness of her work. I finished Mists and Forest House. In both novels, several of her characters die. In Forest House, both of her main characters die and it is not a pretty death.

I've done a lot of writing. In all that time, I've only had one character die. And, when I realized that they were going to die, I cried. I then dried my tears and finished writing it. Still, even now, it's hard for me to read. How hard must it have been for Bradley to know that her characters were not going to make it beyond the end of the novel? I wonder if she cried when she wrote it.

Anyway, I'm two novels into the saga. I have several more to go. I'm wondering if I am going to feel this back-breaking sadness in all the rest of her novels. I don't remember feeling this way when I read her the first time. I wonder if it's because I am older and I have been in love and married and given birth that I'm now able to see the desperate sadness that she wove into her tales. I wonder if my writing has changed to reflect how I have changed over the years.

I don't know. I do know that I've finished writing one novel and I finished Draft Two of the second one. I'm letting it sit until November, when I will start working on Draft Three which I intend to be my final draft. I have a short story with one of the same characters and that is actually the story where my only character has died. Maybe when I am done with Novel Two, I will go back and rework that short story into a novel and see where that takes me. Although, I don't know how I will deal with writing Corinna's death all over again. I guess I'll just cry and get over it.