Death of characters occurs in literature all the time. It’s part of life and the human condition, both of which inform everything we write and everything we and other readers read. But when a major character or a loved one of a major character dies, your remaining characters have to deal with it in a compelling and realistic way.
The first thing to consider about killing off an important character is why. Just as every other aspect of your story does, a death in your story has to earn its place in the story. Dealing with it on the page cannot be only about the death. It also can’t be a convenient device to move the plot. It must serve the story and inform character growth and arc. If you kill a character, there will be fallout. There’s a wide range of potential reactions to a major event like a death, and your character’s particular reaction should show something deep and important about her. Emotional devastation. Anger. Desperation. Despair. Guilt. Vengeance. Combinations of all of the above. You must show the reaction falling within a recognizable range of emotion or explain (really well!) why it doesn’t.
What happens if your audience doesn’t connect with the emotions following a character death or worse, feels you’ve glossed over the experience? Well, consider the hullaballoo in many corners of the internet regarding (SPOILER ALERT) the How I Met Your Mother TV series finale. If you’re not familiar with it, you can read insightful posts from Chuck Wendig here and from Jenny Crusie here. To paraphrase Mr. Wendig , one of the more fitting title for the nine-year long series would have been How I Used Your Mother’s Corpse As a Stepstool. Yeah, that’s not a very happy viewer, and he was far from the only one. In a fit of similar disgust, several years ago I put down (actually electronically deleted) a book after reading the first chapter, in which the protagonist experienced emotional and sexual attraction to the man who murdered her beloved father and brother, an event that supposedly devastated her entire world. The explanation? Well, he was sexy. It’s fair to argue that I didn’t get past the first chapter so don’t know whether there was an explanation later in the book, but the attraction was happening in the now of chapter one. I didn’t buy the premise, couldn’t get past the ick factor, and refused to spend another minute of my life reading on in the hopes of making sense of it.
Killing off a major character or loved one of a main character is a big decision. In the earliest conceptual outline of my current WIP, one of my main characters was going to die in the course of the story. At the risk of revealing a big spoiler, let’s just say that in the course of writing the first draft, I realized the story I was writing was just not that story, which would have necessarily dealt with the grief and devastation and the long road to healing from it, which the remaining characters would have had to face as a result of it. That’s not to say I haven’t killed off major characters in the past or that I won’t do it in the future. But each time, it has to be absolutely crucial to the story, worth the page count and emotional investment. And you have to write your remaining characters’ reactions to it in a realistic and respectful way.
Have you ever killed off a major character in one of your stories? What stories have you read/watched that handled the subject well?
Eight Ladies Writing 
I’m planning to. I’m not there yet. But there’s just no way around it. The character needs to go.
It’s crucial for the plot and the story.
So thank you for this one. It’s not a part that I’m looking forward to writing, and I’m still playing around a bit with how to actually do it. Should I be quick and merciful (accident/murder) or should I drag it out (illness)? I don’t know yet. Both alternatives have their own pros and cons, and would provide aspects that would have to be dealt with in the rest of the story.
It’s like one of those books that kids color the printed drawings in. The outline is there and will not change, but I’m not sure what colors to fill in yet. Sorrow is mellow and blue and vengeance and anger is fierce red.
Yes, sometimes a character has to die. You’re right – it’s not easy to do! We get attached to our characters, and it’s emotional for us as their creators to let them go.
Once you’ve written through more of the story, the most appropriate death will probably be easier to determine. Good luck!
I was going to say I was very lucky that my plots don’t tend that way . . . but then I remembered that I have killed a character in several versions, but it’s only a clinical death each time.
I don’t know. People don’t seem to mind if the bad guy bites the dust in fantasy/epic type novels. But, in a typical romance, it’d be kind of odd if the bad boss who has been keeping the two lovers apart is, say, pecked to death by white doves or something.
What I hate, hate, hate is if you make me love the character, and then you sacrifice him or her on the altar of art. Or worse, do it for no real reason in particular.
I think killing beloved characters may be part of the whole, “you must raise the stakes” and “you must make your characters die a (psychic or otherwise) death.” Death seems to have become kind of a cartoon. I think the Victorians saw a lot more of death, so they treated it differently in fiction. For us, death is not as common, and often extremely sanitized, so we often make death into some sort of a metaphor.
At the bottom of things, though, death is someone who was once there, and is now not there. It’s a hole in one’s life that must be skirted or one will fall in and possibly drown in the tears at the bottom.
I think I prefer my fictional deaths to be backstory.
I reserve the right to change my mind, though. Each story demands something different, and maybe a death is the best thing.
Michaeline said: “Each story demands something different…” Exactly. The hard part is usually figuring which thing this particular story needs, which things we just want to have, and which pieces are ‘vestigial tails’ from previous visions of our story.
In this WIP, while I got rid of the on-page death of a main character, I did add a backstory death of one protagonist’s father. That was a case of wondering, what does this guy do in this story? Why doesn’t he say anything when his wife is being a jerk to his grown children? Has he no spine? And then I realized that his emotional absence was really an absolute absence, and his untimely death motivates his widow, who is that protagonist’s antagonist, so it’s actually at the root of that character’s motivation. That backstory death is absolutely necessary to the now of the story.
I’m so glad you decided not to have the character in your WIP die. The three mains have to make it through to the end and be there for each other as they deal with the hands they’ve been dealt. I used to read an author and she started killing off character AFTER they had started their redemption. I’m okay if an author kills the bad guy, but not once she has made me care and start to root for them. I no longer read her stories because of that.
I’ve heard authors argue that they’ve killed off characters who seem to have earned a different ending or HEA because that’s how life works. My rebuttal would be that journalists have to record life as it happens, novelists have to make life happen in the way that best serves the story. I’m with you – if I’d have read the character death as you described it, I would have put down that book and walked away.
Character death is always one of those things that is going to be difficult, no matter how much we plan or practice it. Great post 🙂
In Buffy, one of my favorite TV shows ever, Joss Whedon kills off both Joyce, Buffy’s mother, and Miss Calender, Giles’s love interest. Both were shocking deaths, and both were catalysts for how the other characters moved forward, or didn’t. Whedon said he didn’t want his actors to get complacent about their jobs, but he was joking; it was to stir up the other characters and create new places for them to go. Person of Interest, Jenny’s favorite show, just killed off Carter, which also launches the other characters in new directions. So the death of a major character can really affect the storytelling in good ways. It’s just hard to see characters we’ve come to love die.
Those are great examples of using the death of a character to augment the storytelling. The Buffy episode with the mother’s death was one of my all-time favorite TV show episodes from a story-telling perspective. The writers were true to the characters and to the finality of death, even in that fantasy world where were are so many undead beings. And the choice to have no background music to influence audience emotion underscored the stark shock and emptiness Buffy (and the viewers) felt. That was perfection.
I won’t read a book where a character is killed off (that’s just my personal taste, not judging anybody here), and if the author does kill one off in a book where I’m not expecting it, I’m done. This is a little funny because I read a lot of cozy mysteries, and each one begins with a murder. But the person murdered darn well better not be someone I’ve come to know and like.
In fact, I had been reading the Coffeehouse Mysteries by Cleo Coyle earlier this year, and I was soooo excited. I am a complete coffee nut, coffee is practically my reason for living. So to find a whole series of Cozys that I haven’t read, that are about COFFEE, I was prepared to shell out the $80 to get the whole 13-book series on Kindle. –MAJOR SPOILERS NOW– Until I read the second book. In it, the heroine meets her true soul mate, the love of her life, Mr. Right. At the end of the book, he is killed saving her life. I felt completely betrayed by the author. I’m not kidding, my feelings were actually hurt that she could be so cruel. On top of the betrayal, (to your point about the other characters reactions, Nancy) the heroine basically says, “easy come, easy go.” Needless to say, I deleted the books I had purchased from my Kindle and have removed her name from my to-buy authors list.