Character Deaths

[E.G. Gammon]

Discuss how you see character deaths and how they should be handled. I think that any number of characters in your book can be killed off, even all of them, if it is done for a reason. I intend to kill off a couple characters, but I always do it, so that their death starts something else. It isn't for nothing. All the deaths I write advance the story, and always should, I think. No character should be killed off just for shock value. I think that if there is a good enough reason for it, you could probably kill off every character if you wanted to (would be EXTREME and RISKY, but I'm just saying). Hey, has anyone ever done that? Kill off all their characters at the end of a book? What about characters who were all dead to begin with? I'd just like to start a discussion about this, to get feedback from you fellow writers and readers. How should a character death be handled?

[mdin]

Shakespeare was a big fan of killing everyone off in the end.

[E.G. Gammon]

Oh, cool. I had no idea. (Probably because I never read what was assigned in high school...because THEN, "to read" was work).

[Anatole Ghio]

Hey, has anyone ever done that? Kill off all their characters at the end of a book? What about characters who were all dead to begin with?

Dead at the end: Wild Bunch comes to mind, or Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.

Dead at the begining: Sunset Blvd. is the most famous.

- Anatole

[preyer]

i kill off probably half of my main characters in the end. stephen king does it and tells you he's going to do it... every. single. time.

but i like to refer to movies because more people are apt to see them than read the same book. look at 'the godfather,' 'saving private ryan,' and 'gladiator.' killing off your protagonist is a time honoured way of rounding out a story. arthur and robin hood die, too. so does beowulf, eh? hell, even conan dies in the end. grimm fairy tales were hardly this PC slop we force-feed kids today. nothing wrong with tragedy in a story.

i wonder if there's any real way you can answer this question without a thousand examples. i guess some advice may be to, as always, try to avoid cliches. (i'm always amused at how some generic enemy soldier dies instantly from a tiny bit of schrapenel while the bullet-riddled body of the hero lingers on for six hours until spitting out what wisdom he's got to impart.)

i just try to handle their deaths as appropriately as possible. the last WIP i was working on i got bored and skipped to the very end, titling the chapter 'the deaths.' bear in mind it was planned to be at least a three book project with half of the story taking place in the 16th century. there was, though, an overall pathos to the story, so 'the deaths' come as no great surprise. it was also very appropriate because of the epic approach i took.

my current WIP's original incarnation had the hero die in the end. then i thought, nah, that's not what the book is about once i started writing it. somehow, and probably thankfully so, it turned from this regular story about a man out to destroy technology that hides the truth to the hero really being on a philosophical journey, the rest just being surface bullsiht. ironically, the rethought version is much sadder than had i killed him off, so maybe it's possible that there's an extreme more extreme than death, eh?

another movie that starts off with the hero already dead is 'casper.' kinda a sick idea if you ask me. to a certain extent, 'beetlejuice' and 'ghost.'

[maestrowork]

Always story first.

[katdad]

Since I'm writing a series of Houston-based hardboiled private detective novels, lots of my characters die.

The deaths aren't egregious. They occur as integral to the story.

I have however decided to kill off a secondary character in my 4th novel. The character has become a drag and tends to drain vitality from the story lines.

And I did take revenge of sorts upon a predatory and nasty ex-girlfriend by having her killed off in a particularly embarrassing way.

Deaths are of course a staple of private detective fiction.

In novel #1, a murder occurs before the story begins. A live-in girlfriend is accused of shooting her guy, and my PI must try to discover whether she actually did it. Other deaths occur as the story intensifies.

In novel #2, the beginning is fairly mild, with my PI hired to find a runaway wife and persuade her back home. The story builds with the introduction of a secondary (or tertiary) character, a serial murderer "The Slicer". There is a slow linkage of this plot line with the primary story sequence, ending in tragedy.

Although death is to be expected in a private detective novel, I don't litter the ground with bodies -- I use the murders to drive the plot.

[CACTUSWENDY]

:poke: ......I START WITH A MURDER.....HAVE A COUPLE MORE IN THE MIDDLE...AND FINISH UP WITH A CLOSE CALL........AND LIKE KING....YOU KNOW WHO AND WHY SOMEONE IS DYING....FOR THE MOST PART.....

THE ACTUAL KILLING....IS ONLY GONE INTO IN A SHALLOW WAY...NOT ALOT OF BLOOD AND GUTS.....THE LEADING UP TO IS MORE IMPORTANT...THAN THE ACTUAL DEED.
....................I LOVE YOU GUYS................:snoopy:

PS.....I KNOW MY BOOK WILL NOT DO WELL....NO SEX IN IT......LOL.;)

[katdad]

PS.....I KNOW MY BOOK WILL NOT DO WELL....NO SEX IN IT......LOL.;)

You'll just have to make some additions, then. (ha ha)

But if your book and mine happen to end up next to each other on the shelf, some of the excess raunch from my "infamous" chapter 38 in my novel "Full Circle" will leak over into your book and make it racier, and thereby increase sales.

We can hope.

[Sandinista]

All of my characters are cats. So i get to kill them quickly and frequently, and still have them around for another five or six lives. How do i handle it? With the same caution as tossing away an empty soda can.

Jokes.

Only kill 'em if it moves the story in a good direction, as many already mentioned.

[Daughter of Faulkner]

"Always story first."

If a death is relevant to the story as a whole then as its author you should know if it works or not.

Keep writing!

[WerenCole]

In terms of characters dying in stories, I have been studying this for a little while in the books I have been reading. In Vonnegut's Galapagos, for instance, he places an asterisk (*) by the name of character's with death impending. . . this is odd, as Vonnegut usually is. . . he lets you know that the person(s) are going to die, even tells you how they are going to die but doesn't get around to actually killing these characters for quite some time. With King, and other writers, they will give a character to love (like in the Dark Tower or Black House) and foreshadow that they have an impending demise, though leave the possibility that maybe, just maybe they can pull through the extraordinary circumstances with their skins still intact, if maybe a little worse for the wear. I personally kill off about half my character's in almost everything I write, and most of the time I don't mean to do it. . . It is not for shock value or for any other mundane reason. . . simply put, for the value of the story, these people just needed to die. . . my own theory is that if all the character's I started with are still alive when the work is completed than my subconcious is for some reason not doing it's job. . .

Weren (my alter ego and favorite character, a man who seems to die a lot in my stories, poor Weren)

Dan

[ElizabethJames]

Our dear wife imagines that one of our main characters is modeled after her. Now that we have killed that character in an automobile accident, there is no end to the grief We are getting.

[Trapped in amber]

I hate killing off characters. It means I can't torture them anymore. But still, sometimes it has to be done. Slowly.

[katiemac]

Killing characters, even the main ones, I think adds levels of realism to the story. As long as, as we've mentioned before, it's a necessary addition.

I've talked about this breifly before. Maybe I enjoy the suspense too much, or maybe I'm just sadistic, but I like not having any idea what's going to happen to the main character. If you're on book one of a series and your main character is the star of every book, then I know -- no matter how much suspense is chocked up in the rest of the book -- the protag is coming out of it okay. Sure, s/he could be mentally damaged, but sometimes it puts a stop to all those "I'm alone in the dark and someone's after me," moments.

The not knowing is a great addition, for me, as to why I read. That being said, one of the best books I have ever read lets you know that all five central characters are going to die on page one. The Virgin Suicides.
In this case, it's the why (which is a valid case in every novel, even those I spoke about that may have lacked suspense) that kept me going.

[James D. Macdonald]

Don't kill anyone the readers don't care about.

[maestrowork]

Don't kill anyone the readers don't care about.

Hmmm, but what if you have to kill someone right off the bat (like in a mystery or a suspense)?

[katiemac]

I think in that case, the readers care because that's what starts the novel.


I took a moment after I read Jim's comment, because I found it such a good one. I have a character who people probably won't care too much about, but he has to die to cause a reaction in the protag. About that, the readers will care. (I hope.)

[maestrowork]

So I guess no appalanch killing a whole villege in Aspen, then... darn!

[Trapped in amber]

Don't kill anyone the readers don't care about.

That's one of the things that, as a reader, can drive me over the edge. I start to twitch. Even if the death is totally justifiable.
And from a writing perspective, torturing a character is so much more fun.

[SRHowen]

In my most recent novel, a character dies--one the readers came to care very much about. Beta readers actually yelled at me :eek: (IN BOLD CAPS) and ranted about his death. And at one point an animal character dies (of course it was inhabited by a human soul) and some readers told me they actually cried.:cry:

My response---YES!!!!:banana:

When you draw out the reader's true emotions, you have done your job well.

Shawn

[Maryn]

I agree, Shawn. Any time I can make a reader cry, I know I did that part well.

Unless they're crying because it's so awful!

Maryn

[maestrowork]

I agree, Shawn. Any time I can make a reader cry, I know I did that part well.

There's a downside to it though. If you're writing a tearjerker... by nature they're manipulative and some readers will resent that. For example, after I read a tearjerker (I won't mention the title -- suffice to say, a character dies so that the readers will cry -- that's the whole point of the plot!), yeah, I got a little choked up, but then I felt very manipulated, and I became resentful of the author. There's nothing wrong with drawing the audience's real emotions... but when all you care about is making the readers cry, I don't think it's a good thing.

[three seven]

I set my stories in a place where people just don't go around killing each other that often, but I'm all for bumping the odd one off here and there. In my current WIP, despite the fact that I don't yet know how the story's going to end, I know from the outset which characters aren't going to make it; however, they all die in such a way that I can drop it in pretty much wherever I feel like it and it'll have the same effect on the story.
On the other hand, though, if someone who's earmarked to survive manages to get themselves into one of those James Bond type situations, there won't be any lengthy explanation of the villainous plot to give them time to plot their escape. So they'd better be careful.

Anyway, thinking about it, I'm not sure that you can kill a character without it having some influence on the story. If a character's important enough to kill, they must have a bearing on the plot - and if not, they shouldn't be there in the first place.

Of course, my other WIP is about a prolific serial killer, and most of the characters in that are created purely for the purposes of being killed. Which, as Katdad suggested, can be a great form of therapy.

http://www.geocities.com/thingumybobwotsit/behead.gif

[Sarita]

I have a really hard time killing characters, because I tend to get attached. Even the really, really evil ones, on some level, they feel like family.

[SRHowen]

I hadn't even intended to kill off either character until the moment came. In my WIP I still debate if the one should die. My intention is not to make readers cry, but it is to make them feel something, otherwise what is the point of writing?

Shawn

[NicoleJLeBoeuf]

There's a downside to it though. If you're writing a tearjerker... by nature they're manipulative and some readers will resent that. For example, after I read a tearjerker (I won't mention the title -- suffice to say, a character dies so that the readers will cry -- that's the whole point of the plot!), yeah, I got a little choked up, but then I felt very manipulated, and I became resentful of the author.That's exactly how I felt after watching Matrix: Revolutions. I was a freakin' Niagra Falls but boy, was I angry. I remember turning to my husband, pointing to my puffy, red eyes, and saying, "See this? The writers did not earn this!"Anyway, thinking about it, I'm not sure that you can kill a character without it having some influence on the story. If a character's important enough to kill, they must have a bearing on the plot - and if not, they shouldn't be there in the first place.That must be the corollary to Uncle Jim's rule of "don't kill off a character the reader doesn't care about."

[three seven]

That must be the corollary to Uncle Jim's rule of "don't kill off a character the reader doesn't care about."
Uncle Jim was killed with a Corolla? Sorry, you'll have to speak up, my eyesight's not that good. http://www.geocities.com/thingumybobwotsit/dizzy2.gif

[NicoleJLeBoeuf]

Uncle Jim was killed with a Corolla? Sorry, you'll have to speak up, my eyesight's not that good. http://www.geocities.com/thingumybobwotsit/dizzy2.gifYes. Uncle Jim did it. In the conservatory. With a Toyota.

[three seven]

He did? Stop him, he's getting away! -----> http://www.geocities.com/thingumybobwotsit/unclejim.gif

[Anatole Ghio]

There's a downside to it though. If you're writing a tearjerker... by nature they're manipulative and some readers will resent that... There's nothing wrong with drawing the audience's real emotions... but when all you care about is making the readers cry, I don't think it's a good thing.

This is a good point. Sentimentality, by definition, is a cheap emotion, unearned by the writer as it often relies upon stock situations and characters to achieve an easy payoff... that's why it feels manipulative, it pushes buttons that are easy to push.

On the other hand, when an emotion has been built up organically in the writing and stems from real character, the effect is much stronger and FEELS more real.

I watched a film the other night, Tokyo Story, by the director Ozu. I had no idea it was a tragedy, and the first hour of the film gave no hint of the ending; instead, Ozu meticulously detailed the relationships between the characters, using the form of a gentle comedy of manners. I was a little bored, actually, because the director refrained from exploiting any of the scenes to build tension, instead utilizing a form of naturalism.

When the tragedy finally occured, its effect on me was all the greater because of the realism from earlier in the piece. I was in tears for the whole last half hour. This wouldn't have had the same effect upon me if the situation had seemed contrived, forced or easy. Sometimes as writers, refraining from an easy payoff gives a larger return later in the piece.

As far as being affected by the killing of your own characters, Neil Gaiman had a story in his Sandman comic book (like issue #3 or 4) called Mayflies, where a demented villan goes into a diner and systematically kills off every person inside, one at a time, over the course of a long evening, simply to entertain himself. During the course of the story, Gaimen shows us the hopes and aspirations of all the characters so that when the story is over, we are horrified by the deaths because our identification is so strong with them.

In fact, Gaimen felt the same way when he was done. By writing about all these characters in such detail, he became attached himself and said he would never do a scene like that again, its effect was so strong on him afterwards.

- Anatole

[maestrowork]

On the other hand, when an emotion has been built up organically in the writing and stems from real character, the effect is much stronger and FEELS more real.

I watched a film the other night, Tokyo Story, by the director Ozu. I had no idea it was a tragedy, and the first hour of the film gave no hint of the ending; instead, Ozu meticulously detailed the relationships between the characters,

This is very interesting. There's certainly, I think, a difference between Asian and western storytelling. I think Asian stories (books or films) tend to build up slowly, letting you get familiar with the characters... that makes the ending so intense and emotionally gripping. But a lot of times it's so slow at the beginning most American audience would fall asleep.

Meanwhile, western novels prefer a quick start, sometimes even open with a bang. I've heard many authors and agents tell me -- you must hook the readers immediately, and you need to get to <insert plot twist> quickly.

Watch the Japanese or Korean version of The Ring, then watch the American version. You will notice the difference.

Watch the Chinese version of The Eye, then when Tom Cruise's version comes out, watch it again.

There's a Japanese novel and film that I adore, The Love Letter, which starts rather slow, but you get to know the characters very well. The ending isn't really a resolution, but rather a revelation, but the emotional impact is potent. I love that book and the movie. But a story like that would probably never make it in the US.

That's why I was surprised how the US audience and critics embraced Lost In Translation. You can tell that Sofia Coppola had a profound Asian influence when she wrote and made that film. The film is very slow, mostly character studies, and the ending was more a revelation than any type of resolution. But it's very affecting. I love that film, but some of my American friends said, "WTF is this? It's so boring... nothing happens! How can it be nominated for an Oscar?"

I mean, I just got a rejection for a short story. While the editor praised the story for being very well written, his gripe was that the ending was more of a revelation than a resolution.... I guess in a way, I still, sometimes, write Asian-style stories... where the revelation of human nature is more important than the resolution of a problem. Oh well...

[fallenangelwriter]

Character deaths are essential. at least in fantasy, i can't think of very many books in which no one dies. i'm not counting villains here. someone the readers identify with must die. It establishes that the world is a dangerous place, that the forces of evil are not powerless, that the world has real consequences. It makes the protagonists survivial, if there is one, more special.

IN my current WIP, i kill the majority of the characters. this is a tragedy, a story about the end of an era and a power struggle, and between the two nearly everyone ends up being killed off. however, each character's death is carefully given meaning, and the surviving characters always learn something from it. at the end, the five surviving people have grown and changed, and they are better people for it, the one thing which keps it from being a totla loss. five survivors out of seventeen majors characters, but there is no wasted life. the protagonist dies, but in so doing makes the world a better place, and becomes a christ figure. there are two characters who die truly pointless deaths, who accomplish nothing through them, and that is the point- they are people who took the wrong turn, through away tehir lives, didn't make anmything of themselves. they deaths are tragic, but required.

that said, that WIP is the most death-riddled story i have ever written. I have a number of others plotted out, and they are much lighter on deaths.

[azbikergirl]

I kill one of my minor-ish characters near the end of my novel, not because I want the reader to grieve, but because I want the reader to feel for the characters who are devastated by their loss. The characters realize that the stakes are high, indeed, and one in particular comes to a T intersection at this point. The choices he makes are critical.

[Ivonia]

I had to kill off the hero's sister early on. It really sucked because she dies in battle similiar to Pearl Harbor (but imagine it in space), and this is what draws the hero into the war (so it was a key plot point, however sucky it may have been to have it happen).

However, I make up for that by giving the bad guys their come-uppance at the end, also by the hero no less (sounds Star Wars-ish, but trust me, it'll definitely be different in concept execution hehe). Everything that happens in my story will happen for a reason, even if the hero/readers may not neccessarily understand it right away (I'm deliberately leaving some things open, although I do end the story enough that readers can be satisfied with it). They just have to trust me with it :)

[black winged fighter]

Killing a character - especially a character that many care about - can add great emotion and momentum to the story. BUT don't kill a character without a very good reason. It will cheapen the blow of the death if there is no reason for it, and it will leave the reader feeling dissatisfied.
I think that the death of a character can add realism to a story and a sense of motivation.
Done with true attention to detail and timing, a character death can leave the reader in tears, but still leave them willing to keep turning the pages.
There in lies the difficulty.

[NicoleJLeBoeuf]

As far as being affected by the killing of your own characters, Neil Gaiman had a story in his Sandman comic book (like issue #3 or 4) called Mayflies, where a demented villan goes into a diner and systematically kills off every person inside, one at a time, over the course of a long evening, simply to entertain himself. During the course of the story, Gaimen shows us the hopes and aspirations of all the characters so that when the story is over, we are horrified by the deaths because our identification is so strong with them.

In fact, Gaimen felt the same way when he was done. By writing about all these characters in such detail, he became attached himself and said he would never do a scene like that again, its effect was so strong on him afterwards.Gorgeous example - that was a brutal, funny, traumatic and slapstick story, all at once. (Was it really called "Mayflies"? I seem to remember "24 Hours".)

One might call the technique (that of giving every character a poignant backstory, in order to elicit sympathy for their murders) a gimmick, I suppose, but only at the expense of any usefulness the term "gimmick" had.

Something else Gaiman did throughout Sandman was bring back dead characters in the memories of those who loved them, sometimes many issues later. You don't even get the consolation of writing them off as cast extras (albeit well-developed ones). Take one of the characters killed in that diner - I forget her name, sadly, but it was the lesbian who'd just had a fight with her girlfriend. Her death hurts badly enough, but the real punch-to-the-gut comes later when her girlfriend becomes a main character in a later story, and you get to see the hole left in her life.

[Lenora Rose]

Character deaths are essential. at least in fantasy, i can't think of very many books in which no one dies. i'm not counting villains here. someone the readers identify with must die. It establishes that the world is a dangerous place, that the forces of evil are not powerless, that the world has real consequences. It makes the protagonists survivial, if there is one, more special.

I disagree - on the one hand, it's true there are very few books where nobody dies, and it IS a powerful tool when done right, but I think too many deaths can rob death of its actual power. I actively dislike books where people die too often*, even if each one is meaningful (Or pointedly pointless).

Maybe I've been burned by too many "Best friend dies" pathos moves (The manipulation mentioned above). But it's also far, far FAR too common to have someone who either worked for the villain and changed sides, or betrayed the hero then regretted it (And killed themselves to redeem their action) to get killed off, so they don't have to face the consequences of their shifting loyalties. It's become automatic.

There are so many other things that are worse, so many kinds of emotional scars that can be nastier, and the fun of those is that the person then has to figure out how to live with them.


*George R.R. Martin might be the exception. But very few other writers, in fact none that I can think of, are George R.R. Martin and have his way with making it work.

[katdad]

In my private detective novel Sudden Storm, one fairly important character dies, and the death is devastating to my protagonist, because he had made it his goal to ensure this character's progress. The readers also (hopefully) feel the grief, not just because the character was symphathetic, but that the death affects so many of the other characters, as would any violent death.

Is this manipulative? Perhaps. But in a larger sense, ALL fiction is manipulative. The author is trying to effect an emotion or reaction from the readers.

I think the distinction is whether this manipulation is done skillfully and the event is integrated into the story so that it does not appear egregious.

[debraji]

I once was about to kill off a character when he stopped me and said, "Wait a minute. You can't kill me now--I'm too important to the story." And, dammit, he was right. Plus, such an eloquent fellow deserved to live. I held off a number of chapters and killed him at the near the climax of the book instead.

[Uncle Nicky]

I feel there are several reasons for killing off charactars in my books.
Some die so that the main character can experience the pain of the loss of loved ones, find ways to go on with life and move forward with their own lives.
Some villians do horrible things and always seem to be one step ahead of being cought. I hope to pull the reader into the scene and provide them with the feeling of satisfaction and relieve the frustration they feel. I give them the opportunity to be the one to get even. It feels so good to live in the scene and be the one to rid the world of the villian.
To me it's all about reaching in and touching the reader's emotions, be them pain or pleasure. Our job as a writer is to satisfy our readers deepest feelings and keep them coming back for our futrure books.
NIck Merolesi

[katdad]

I once was about to kill off a character when he stopped me and said, "Wait a minute. You can't kill me now--I'm too important to the story." And, dammit, he was right. Plus, such an eloquent fellow deserved to live. I held off a number of chapters and killed him at the near the climax of the book instead.
Hopefully you accentuated the gruesomeness of his death as retribution for his pertinence.

[debraji]

Hopefully you accentuated the gruesomeness of his death as retribution for his pertinence.

Absolutely. Since he'd stuck around for most of the book, the heroine cared about him more, and his death was a Big Deal. Nasty, and very public.

But hey, I figured if characters were talking back to me, at least I could listen. He was arrogant, but he made sense.

[PattiTheWicked]

I've got to ask this: Does anyone else find themselves startled by a death of their own characters?

To explain somewhat -- my characters tend to lead me. While I usually have a vague idea of where the story is going to end up, usually the characters kind of do their own thing, and often I'm not sure that their thing is going to be beyond the next couple of pages or so. In one of my manuscripts, which I am currently trying to pimp to agents and publishers, I genuinely DIDN'T see it coming that a character was going to be killed when it happened. I knew that she needed to be dead at a certain point in the story, because her death is integral to things that happen later, but I simply didn't realize the HOW, WHO or WHERE until it happened.

And then, it all just kind of poured out of me, I'm sitting there with tears rolling down my cheeks, thinking, "Oh, my God, I've just killed Catharine!" Afterwards, I honestly had to go lie down for a while, because I was exhausted by the suddeness of the entire process. I swear, I never saw it coming ahead of time.

Then again, I have a character in another ms who absolutely refused to die, no matter what I did to her. I nicknamed her Kenny.

[debraji]

My husband once interrupted me when I was in the middle of killing off a beloved character. I was on the edge of tears and was quite nasty to him. My husband accepted my explanation with a look of bewilderment.

He also gets nervous when I say that the character told me something....

[Maryn]

I disagree - on the one hand, it's true there are very few books where nobody dies, and it IS a powerful tool when done right, but I think too many deaths can rob death of its actual power. I actively dislike books where people die too often*, even if each one is meaningful (Or pointedly pointless)...

[other text deleted to get back to the footnote]

*George R.R. Martin might be the exception. But very few other writers, in fact none that I can think of, are George R.R. Martin and have his way with making it work.

I think this is possible only because Martin works with utterly daunting numbers of characters. I've never counted, but there must be hundreds the reader knows by name and dozens we know much better. If I hadn't had other people at hand who could help me with my "Who's this guy, again?" questions, I might never have made it through.

Maryn, nearing the mid-point of the 3rd one

[Julie Worth]

I held off a number of chapters and killed him near the climax of the book instead.

I’ve written two novels where I kill everyone in the last chapter or two. Everyone in the whole world. That’s the good thing about SF—it’s so easy to tidy up with an apocalyptic finish. And it can be beautiful as well as malignant. Picture those silent explosions of the Doomsday machine in Dr. Strangelove, with Kate Smith singing "We'll meet again, don’t know where, don’t know when.”

[jdkiggins]

I began my novel with the death of a character the reader didn't get to know until after her death. There was a reason for beginning with a death, and I carried that reason through the entire novel.

Of course, I can't tell you the reason and I can't tell you if I let my lead characters live. If I told you, I'd have to kill you.

Uncle Jim has a very good point when he states "don't kill anyone the readers don't care about".

Deaths can be handle many ways, and it's obvious that many writers kill off characters for different reasons. I do think there needs to be a reason for the death of a character. They shouldn't be killed off randomly without the reader caring who they were and why they died.

[zornhau]

One of my pet peeves is the Dark Lord's Warrior Sidekick figure who the hero invairably cuts his way to, then spares, near the start of the story. A typical example is Guy of Gisborn in the film Robin Hood Prince of Thieves. Robin slaughters the henchmen, but then spares Sir Guy.

So, in my WIP, I had great fun setting up a confrontation between the Hero and the Dark Lord's Eldest Son who fancies himself a warrior. A kurtzhau, a zornort and a mittelhau later, and Eldest Son is so much tinned meat.

In general, the my novel is scattered with the bodies of likable - as in fully developed and involved enough for the death to impact on the survivors - characters.

[fallenangelwriter]

I find it interesting that so many people talk of being surprised by thier characters deaths.

the deaths just sort of come to me in a vision long before i get ot them.

actually, there are a few characters who were designed to die. everything about them was extrapolated back form thier deaths.

[jdkiggins]

I'm never startled by the death of my characters. When I kill a character, it's premeditated and for a very good reason. :) I don't always plot the entire book, but I do have a character list and order of death.

[Elincoln]

So far, I've only killed off around three individuals (I'm not counting the mass murders in one of my short story series. That project's been shelfed). The first two start off book one of the trilogy, and the reader only knows that they were murdered and their infant daughter had survived. It's their death that causes trouble in one of the main character's plans and also causes him to be "less than nice" to their daughter, whom he raises.

Funny thing was, when I wrote book one, I knew this particular character would be killed off later. My first thought was "Good, he's a cranky old man." I finished book one and during the middle of book two, I hadn't the heart to keep him cranky. I made him apologize to the young girl (who is the central character), and had them come a bit closer before his own murder. Then at the end of book two was his death scene.

I balled writing it. Especially since the girl has to find him and listen to his last words before he dies. Yeah I know it sounds like a tearjerking, but it's essential to the series because this is when she grows stronger as a character and as a person. This also gives her a backbone and start making her own decisions about her destiny.

I felt so bad for her (and for the characters I killed), I'm having them come back to her in her dreams (or in moments when she's near death herself.) Mind you, this is in the next trilogy.

Just goes to show...if you believe in the afterlife, your characters never really die, they just get a new wardrobe.

-Elaine

[sgtsdaughter]

i'm all for killing off characters. but only axe one if the story calls for it. don't try and make a death happen--let the characters talk to you, tell you what they want . . . but then there is always the issue that you get so damned attached to a character that you cry as you kill him or her off.

[alaskamatt17]

I've murdered several main characters in both the books I've written so far. In one of them I even killed the only character who had been in the story from the beginning. In the second one, the characters I killed all seemed to be important leaders of one faction or another, whose removal was necessary to build the turmoil that was spreading over the whole world.

[Alphabeter]

I hate killing off characters. It means I can't torture them anymore. But still, sometimes it has to be done. Slowly.

Bring out your Red Shirts. Bring out your Red Shirts! :bell:

[Paolo]

There is lots of death in my book. It's a science fiction novel about inter-species warfare, so the death in it is quite common and often impersonal. I only killed off three of the characters that might be considered major.

I did find it hard to end their lives after building them up. It was especially hard to kill the charismatic leader of the revolution. Flawed and harsh and full of contradiction as she was, I was really involved with her emotionally. Without suggesting that any violent death is morally right, I did give her a "good death". She left with drama and self-sacrafice and her passing made a huge impact on the rest of the characters, both good and bad. Her death provided the plot with: a moral transition, tragedy and a chance for vendetta. It had to be done.

Ok, I won't describe the demise of the other characters becasue I've already given away too much. If I get rescued from the TOR slush pile, I'll post as many spoilers as it takes....

[Sharon Mock]

I just unexpectedly killed off another minor character today. And I still think this story doesn't have much death in it!

[Paolo]

I just unexpectedly killed off another minor character today. And I still think this story doesn't have much death in it!

What kinda' death we talkin' 'bout here?

Was it a spectacular death or did the character slip away quietly? What kind of repercussion did the death have? Did the character die by the hand of another or by his/her own action?

You're teasing us here........

[arrowqueen]

I gave one of mine leprosy - and bumped off another with poisonous toadstools, under cover of a smallpox epidemic. That's the joy of writing historical novels - one has so much more choice!

[Sharon Mock]

What kinda' death we talkin' 'bout here?

Was it a spectacular death or did the character slip away quietly? What kind of repercussion did the death have? Did the character die by the hand of another or by his/her own action?

You're teasing us here........
Type of death: Noble but ultimately futile self-sacrifice, forcing both a secondary character and a minor character to come to fresh realizations about the situation they're involved in. (Not that there's a lot of room to develop that, since we're in the climax.)

Method of death: Fireman's axe to skull, followed by (implied) trampling by mob he was trying to stop.

It's funny -- this guy doesn't even have a name and he's managed to become one of the most interesting people in the book. I was a little reluctant at first to kill him off, but this lets him go from background character to hero, so it's all good.

[Paolo]

Type of death: Noble but ultimately futile self-sacrifice, forcing both a secondary character and a minor character to come to fresh realizations about the situation they're involved in.

If the death has no meaning , then the life told through the story has no meaning. The characters I'm dealing with have purpose, whether they realize it or not. Can't that be said about any life we dust up out of our imagination?

Sounds to me like you're letting the meaning play out. Cool.

[Fractured_Chaos]

Oh, cool. I had no idea. (Probably because I never read what was assigned in high school...because THEN, "to read" was work).

Hamlet. Everyone of importance dies in the end.

If you don't feel like reading it, rent the Mel Gibson version of it. It's quite good.

[jules]

I sometimes worry about the deaths in one of my novels. The book is divided into 4 parts.

In the first part there are a few deaths, mainly the bad guys' mercenaries and a few innocent bystanders they take with them. Only one major character (killed in hand-to-hand combat with the hero), whose death causes the events of part 2.

In part 2, things start to get nasty. The 2nd bad guy is after revenge, and does lots of unpleasant things, resulting in a few deaths, including his own, and the hero's wife's, which is important motivation for the ending...

In part 3 it is revealed that 2nd bad guy was acting on instructions from 1st bad guy, 1st bad guy mounts a revolution and hero & company fight their way out to go into exile. A few bad guys die, nobody major.

In part 4 hero abandons what is left of his life to lead an army back. Revenge and justice are the only things that matter to him now. They fight a war to regain control, and in the end hero chases 1st bad guy as he tries to run away, and ends up killing both bad guy and himself.

As you can see, all 4 of the most important characters in this story die. Of course there are plenty of characters who don't, many of whom are almost as important, but still it seems like a lot.

Any comments?

[LightShadow]

I killed one of my lead characters in my book at the end, but it was the only way she could achieve what she desired...true peace. And, that is what led to the other characters understanding what the entire story was truly about. Not that I'm saying start killing your characters. I'm just saying that sometimes its an integral part of the plot.

[TwentyFour]

Thelma and Louise died...it had to be to make the story end in the right direction.

[NightWynde]

Since I write horror, death is the name of the game. For the most part I try to keep the deaths relevant, but I'll still write what is known as a "zombie food" piece for stress relief.

Oddly enough, even though I know that this genre is riddled with corpses, for the most part I'm surprised when a specific character dies. I've also been surprised when it turns out someone that was supposed to be dead is still alive. This has happened twice.
One time the character introduced himself as "already being dead" but it turned out he only wished he were dead. In the same piece this guy up and vanished. There was blood all over the last place he'd been seen (a hospital bed), broken glass, smeared footprints, everything to indicate he was deceased, but it turned out he was a werewolf who had gone into hiding. Oy!

[Varthikes]

To me, any character is fairgame for death. It doesn't matter if I like the character or not. The simple fact is that people/creatures die--that's life. For that reason, I get kind of annoyed when people say they hate a particular book/movie/TV show because the writers killed off their favorite character.


I spent several years writing (and still not done with it) this one series of short stories. Over the years, I came to care about those characters, but that doesn't stop me from killing off three of the seven original main characters--one of which was the character I used to project my views into the stories.

[TesubCalle]

I routinely kill characters in the stories I write.

When it comes to fanfiction, however, I tend not to kill characters that don't belong to me. They're not mine, and I don't feel right terminating them.

Oh, I'll put them through hell and back, and then some...but I can't bring myself to off them completely. My own characters are a different story. I've had people tell me I've made them cry or that what I did was very sad when I've killed minor, one-shot characters. I didn't think people would be so connected to minor, incidental folks like that. (It's not that I'm heartless; it just surprises me that people react like that to characters that aren't big players.)

[gp101]

Any character that gets killed in my stories has done something that invites the death. Whether it's a baddie that does so much harm, he gets hunted down, or a "good guy" that attracts the baddie into an act of murder, the death is a progression in my plots, built upon previous actions.

I hate it when a major character in a story just dies for no apparent good reason after he's made it halfway through the book. I read a story once where a major character (the MC's friend or girlfriend or something) found out she had a disease half-way thru the book, and died... it was used mainly to show how the MC reacted and to conflict him in regards to his goal. Absolutely horrible! I couldn't read anymore. It was as bad as a Deus Ex Machina for me. If that character had been killed off because of something she had done (whether a good deed or a bad one), and then the author used the death to show said reaction from the MC, it would have been a much more satisfying read. And I might have actually finished the book. But the out-of-the-blue death is too soap opera for me. Like the "disease of the week" type of story featured in some MOW's.

[janetbellinger]

One of my main characters dies. I didn't plan it that way but in the original version the heroine's dog gets killed but I couldn't stand to have that happen so I killed off Maggie instead. I sound terrible, don't I? But it works I think because Emily has always been jealous and resentful of her and now has to work through her guilt. It happens at the climax.

[KTC]

In the manuscript I just finished, I killed off a whole family but one. It was fun. It's a whackjob story. They died by suicide, household accident, cancer, etc. I think quirky stories work well when people are dying. It's fun to bring the reader on an up-down roller coaster ride.

I had a full novel critiqued in my critique group. I thought it was this great coming of age novel. Boy, was I wrong. The 8 ladies in the group kept complaining that I was making them cry. Three of my characters died...one a main character. My narrator's father died of cancer. His best friend later committed suicide. And another friend dies in their adulthood...which is how I slipped into the story. I thought it was an upbeat tale of how these friends made it through a tulmultuous punk rock youth. I really thought it was a feel good. Unfortunately, they kept crying. So, I eventually scrapped it.

I guess you have to be careful that you don't alienate the reader by killing off characters. Lesson learned. But I still love doing it.

[FloVoyager]

In the book I'm trying to get an agent to take an interest in now, the main character dies in the end. In fact, the whole point of the story is to explain what happened to him and how his death affected one person in particular.

[UrsulaV]

Writing a webcomic, I get Insto-Feedback when I do something the readers love or hate or both.

At one point, I had a character so minor I hesitate to call it a character--a winged messenger rat. This metaphorical pigeon showed up to deliver a message, flew away, and the next time you see it, it's dangling dead by the tail from the hands of an unpleasant semi-villain.

I thought nothing of this. The rat was on-screen for maybe ten panels, total. It might as well have been wearing a teeny little red shirt.

But Jesus, to listen to some of the readers, you'd thought I'd snuffed the heroine! There was wailing and gnashing of teeth. (I blame the fact that it was a very cute rat.) I chalked some of this up to the inherent melodrama of the internet, mind you, but still, much more response than I had expected in my wildest dreams! I was gettin' a significant number of e-mails about this rat!

So I went onto the forum and said "Gee, I had no idea that you guys were so attached to the rat! I can't say I wouldn't kill it again, but I didn't realize people would care so much!"

And oddly enough, I got VERY positive response to that--most of the readers said "Good, yes, don't let fear of how the audience will take it stop you from killing a character that needs to die." And then went back to bemoaning the Death of Flaprat, and worrying about who--now that I had proved myself to have the capacity for murder--would be next.

So I think what I learned from that is to always be willing to kill your characters, but don't be surprised if there's a response.

[blackbird]

I've come to believe strongly in what I call the "Christ Syndrome," which means some character is going to have to be sacrificed in order to help the other characters move on in some way, or to arrive at some sort of resolution. I realize I've done this in my past two novels, and even the next one that I am planning is perpetuated by a death (only in this case it is a major death that occurs before the first chapter). I realize it's getting to be a pattern and probably one I need to break soon, lest it become predictable (or fodder for some freshman college research paper:) ).

[ChaosTitan]

I'm not afraid to kill off a character (major or minor) if it serves the story. I don't get up in arms when reading a novel that kills off a MC if it serves the story and it makes sense. If a book or movie series or TV show decides to kill off a beloved character? Fine, just have it serve the story. TV is rife with examples of bad ways to kill off a character (killing for the sake of killing, rather than letting the death mean something).

I love it when a movie/book/show makes me cry. It is good art that elicits an emotional response, and I don't cry easily. It's an even greater feat, I think, as an artist, to make another person cry.

Lots of characters die at the end of one of my novels. But they all serve the story. These characters are "at war" with each other, on two sides of an argument, and they all have rather bleak futures. Their actions pave the way for the survivors (including the MC) to thrive, but many of my book's most important characters die. My beta yelled at me for making her cry so hard, and then applauded me for doing it.

If a death is important, don't shy away from it. But do make it meaningful, or your audience will hunt you down. ;)

[Soccer Mom]

Well, add me to the list of killer writers. (heh, pun) I write in the mystery genre, so my books don't start until somebody dies. More people die along the way.

But I always know when a character is going to die. I write better when I divorce myself a little from the emotion. Otherwise I get too maudlin.

[TwentyFour]

Soccer Mom...that is cold and callous! LOL I like it!