For me, one of the hardest things to do is kill off a beloved character, but sometimes, there’s just no other choice. Sometimes the plot simply demands it.

This isn’t giving away too much of Tue-Rah Identity Revealed but there is a minor spoiler. Cohsaw dies. He actually dies in the second chapter, and…guess what…he stays dead.

For a lot of readers, this is probably more of a sad event. It’s not that big of a deal. The fact is that they don’t really know him at this point. They’ll get to know him more as the story goes along, but at the point of his death, he’s a casualty of the villains. But for me, killing off Cohsaw was heartbreaking. I sobbed.

See, as a writer, I know everything about Cohsaw. I know that his favorite color is blue. I know that he hates eating carrots and ibza roots, but he does because he believes it makes him stronger. I know he has a crush on Opali, a Machat girl who is three years older than him. And I know that the thing he wants most is to make his dad, one of the most proficient and well known prophets of the Machat, proud. He’s a young man of deep principles and convictions, and his commonsense doesn’t always shine through. When he believes that something needs to be done, he does it.

All of these little things add to his character for me. I know that he has a little scar on the inside of his elbow from when he tried to cut out some of his Machat markings and failed. And the reader is never going to know most of these details.

But I don’t think that that makes the details wasted in any sense. After all, I know these things about him, and, even if I don’t explain them, they’re implied. Little details tend to work their way into a story without the writer even realizing it. They provide information for the overall flavor. They say that only 90 percent of the worldbuilding ever goes through. That may be the case.

The one thing that is true is that when you invest so much in the creation of these characters, their deaths become so much more intense and painful. I wanted to save Cohsaw. I wanted him to be able to have that happy future that I wanted for him. But he never will. He needed to die to move the plot forward. And just because it’s painful doesn’t mean it doesn’t need to happen. So here’s to Cohsaw and all the other beloved characters that writers have to off. It’s one of the hardest things, but may it always improve the story.