Killing Your Main Character - When Can You Do It?

The usual procedure is to establish one or two main characters and those characters must not be killed before the climax, because:

A. They drive the whole story, the plot would be like a "car without an engine" without them

B. Too much reading/writing work has gone into them, so the writer as well as the reader are too invested emotionally to give them up

C. Writers are not used to killing their protagonists. You don't do this. Just like making a dirty joke at your mom's birthday table, you just don't do it. Norms are norms.

D. It's too much work to re-structure the whole story; and it's pretty much a given the story would need a ton of re-structuring (maybe new goals for the other charaters, a new narrative focus, an unobstrusive shift and new focus for the plot, building up new main characters, etc, etc...)

So killing your protagonist is not only a lot of heartache, it's also a lot of work, because it means totally shifting dynamics. But if it hurts, that means you have probably created a really good character (or you are just too lazy to deal with all of the additional work, haha). A really good character you just killed yourself. Feels like murdering your favorite kitty, doesn't it?

IMO, killing protagonists and favorites is especially effective on TV shows, where the audience has been knowing them for a long time - for too long maybe, and it's time to shock the audience and subsequently introduce one or several new elements/situations. So the move is essentially useful in two ways. A lot of new toys to play with for the screenwriters.

While writing this post, I have to think of "Dexter" and "Breaking Bad", but maybe that's only because these are the only two shows I have watched recently. In "Breaking Bad", the "Gus Frings" character has a pretty prominent role, but I also think that this character doesn't work at all and once they kill him, the show becomes a lot better again.

Of course, when they shoot Hank a couple of episodes before the end, that's a big shocker too, because it's unexpected. Had they shot him in the last episode, it wouldn't have been half as exciting, because it would have been a lot more predictable (great sell-out of characters, just moments before the shop closes).

Generally, I'm all for the unconventional and more creative way: So kill whomever you want to, surprise your reader, stay fresh and dynamic - but kill them very, very artfully!

Any thoughts on this topic?

rwm4768 said:

You do it when it's right for the story. It's up to you to figure out when that is.

Helpful, right?

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Maybe not helpful, but true.

CaroGirl said:

TV is a completely different medium from novels. If you want to discover how other writers have handled a similar situation, stop watching TV and start reading books.

How does it work in BOOKS? Which books have you read that have killed off the main character and when in the novel did the author do it? Why did he do it, and did it work for the story?

For example, in The Lovely Bones the author kills off her main character at the beginning of the book, but that's because she spends the rest of the novel as a ghost, observing how her death affects those she loved. Does it work? Depends on who you ask.

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It would be interesting to investigate WHY TV is different from novels.

My first thought is that on TV, every episode works for itself and not everybody watches every single episode (what about the people who do though?). With books, every reader reads the entire thing.

The example with the ghost is obviously not relevant, because the character you describe still exists later on in the story, she is just "transformed" for our purposes. She is killed only in a biological/medical way, but not in a narrative way. Same thing goes for any vampires, zombies, etc.. mentioned.