Things You Want LESS Of In Books

I'd like less "sassy protagonists without a filter" please
Like I love snark as much as anyone else but it irritates me when they just blindly mouth off to anyone they interact with ever without considering consequences (such as leaders or strangers with power or authority figures in general). Give me a sassy protagonist who still knows when to keep their mouth shut.

I feel like Percy Jackson did this well, Percy was always snarky but kept his mouth shut in intense situations and the snark was more-or-less his internal monologue.

I'd really like to see less of the 'deaths=good writing' trope. I mean I get that in an epic fantasy battle people should die, but as long as the entire cast doesn't come out completely unscathed, I think it's fine.

I'd really like to see less of the 'deaths=good writing' trope…

Oh my god, yes! Thank you! I'm someone who doesn't like a lot of character deaths very much so as I'm sure you can imagine, I despise this trope. Like yeah, sometimes character deaths are kinda inevitable in certain situations but not everyone has to die. There's other ways to write your characters out of a story, I'm just saying.

I ended up changing one character who was supposed to die into surviving, but with a badly injured leg, and getting unofficially adopted by his mentor and her girlfriend and I like this ending much better for him.

Haha yeah I've done stuff like that too. I had a character who was slated to die, but then I gave him a backstory which altered the entire ending of the story. Technically, I could still kill him off, but the story is more interesting if I keep him alive.
I have another character who should have been sentenced to death for committing treason. Originally that was supposed to make him a hero, but I feel like that wasn't entirely realistic. I couldn't bring myself to kill him though because I've had him for so long, so instead he just gets exiled.

I think that I only kill off one or two important characters (except in one story where almost everyone bits it, but that's an outlier) per story, and honestly it's so easy to find other ways to keep them alive instead.

I'm trying to decide how to go about killing characters off in my story. On the one hand, I feel like someone needs to die, because otherwise, there don't really seem to be stakes. On the other hand, I'm not so sure about that. I realized which character would need to die, and it makes me really sad just thinking about it.

Is there any sort of fate worse than death that you can have looming over everything?
I know that for a lot of my characters dying wouldn't be as bad as, say, the rebellion failing.

Also more minor stakes throughout the story that build up to a bigger stake is always good!

Well, that's the thing. This individual dying would really hurt the protagonist, who has already lost a lot of people. And honestly it would be terrible for everyone, as this character plays a big brother role. And the only things worse than death for that character are losing his siblings, which isn't an option, and the ultimate loss of the team of protagonists, which also isn't an option. I'm also thinking of having him die in a way which reveals a lot about his character and another character, so perhaps it is necessary.

T R U T H!!!

And when characters do fuck up, it ends up perfectly for them which… no??? It doesn't??

And when characters do fuck up, it ends up perfectly for them which… no??? It doesn't??

My character fucks up and it ends up with him almost dying.

The whole 'no adults/parents' thing.
I admit I do that myself, but

1. Most of my casts are young adults or teenagers, I think the oldest major protagonist is 28, so there's still adults.
2. In the dystopian stories, it's to highlight the fact that life expectancy isn't a big thing and that the villain took out her parents' old allies Stalin-style.

One focuses on teenagers and a big part of the main character's issues is that her dad died when she was young and that her mom is kinda distant, so her mom isn't a major player. Her aunt is a reoccuring one, though, and her friend's moms are reoccuring as well.
The other has characters in college so they don't see their families much, and 3 of them are estranged, so there's that.
One is a story about 3 kids who grew up on the street and their time as assassins, so no parents there.
In Twyllo, most of the parents are dead, because of the aforementioned Stalin-y stuff, but Jon still has a strong parental role model in his uncle.
Ehre actually does have a live parent, she's a major character, and Lysander is essentially pseudo-adopted by his mentor and her girlfriend by the end.
The fae stuff has Lucas and Aspen as the son/father relationship, and Iam is struggling with the death of his mom, Juniper, especially after things she had buried come to light.
Creston is an chaotic anarchy, so yeah. No parents.

In Smile Pretty, Kill Beautifull, the entire plot is a woman taking kids off the streets and training them to be undercover spies and seductive assassins.

Oh I love those kind of books!!

I have a few 16 year olds, but they're sides. We have the overeager dork, the super shy medic, the one who has the mentality of a 21 year old because her life is horrible, and the sweet but easily manipulated youngest sister.