Killing Me Softly: When it's Time to Kill a Character

I never used to kill my characters. How could I? I loved them too much! They were my brain’s babies. Even my villains could be just as easily sent to prison or have their powers taken away or just be plain thwarted. Death seemed so…extreme.

But that was when I was young and naïve. Time passed, and now I’m young and jaded. Now I kill characters all the time. Killing someone can be a great way to advance the plot, trim a bloated character manifest, encourage an emotional connection between two people, or inspire the “All is lost!” moment. It also shows the reader how high the stakes are, and, hopefully, makes them grieve alongside your characters.

So you know that you want to kill one of your characters, but which one? This can be a tricky call. If you kill someone too unimportant, no one will care. You won’t get that emotional impact you were going for. This is fine if you are writing a book with lots of death, as in a war story or an epic fantasy, but in contemporary fiction, this would be a huge mistake. On the other hand, if you kill someone too important, you risk alienating your audience. You can’t, for instance, kill the protagonist, in most cases. Don’t kill the love interest, unless you have a really, really good reason. Don’t kill the littlest cancer patient.

And, above all, don’t kill the villain too soon! So, who can you kill? It has to be a character of enough significance that it’s tragic, and spurs the other characters on, but who is expendible enough that the plot holds together without them. [Spoilers ahead!]

 Think Rue from The Hunger Games, Ray from The Princess and the Frog, Penny from Dr. Horrible’s Sing Along Blog. We never wanted to see these characters die, but ultimately, their deaths were what shaped the ending.

Alright. You’ve decided to kill a character, and you’ve picked the character with just the right amount of that endearing-yet-expendible-lovabilility—now how are you going to get the deed done? Perhaps you have a scenario in mind, some death that is fitting and poetic for the character, like the depressed office drone killed when the copy machine he’s using suddenly shorts out and explodes. Or perhaps you can’t decide. So what goes into a great death?

First, it needs to fit the tone of your book. If you’re writing a fantasy novel about dragon-tamers, don’t have your kindly old sorcerer die of a heart attack; on the other hand, don’t have your suburban middle-school teacher killed by an evil spell (unless there’s a really good reason). There are three kinds of death, and each of these needs to be used where fitting. 

The first is tragic death, what I like to call Win it For Me, Johnny. These deaths are for sympathetic characters, people we will really feel the loss of. These are the tearjerker death scenes. These people should die in relatively tidy, aesthetically romantic ways, and should have time to gasp out a few parting words—for example, “Win it for me, Johnny!”, before succumbing. Examples of these kinds of deaths are tuberculosis, cancer, pnuemonia, sword/laser/spell wounds to the stomach which are not described in much detail. WIFMJ deaths may vary in plot-importance, from being mere plot points, to driving a whole subplot, or the whole book.

The second kind of death is the fitting death, or the Of Course He Went That Way. These can be acts of justice against the villain—for instance, killing him with his own death ray/evil spell—or simply tragic ironies. They can also, if played right, make it seem like the person’s death was somehow justified or cosmically significant; on the flip side, they can be so pointedly ironic that the deaths eems all that much more cruel. These deaths are, by nature, usually absurd. See pretty much every death in the show Pushing Daisies. Bee stings, most animal attacks, being run over by a lawn mower or electrocuted by anything.

The third kind of death is sudden and unexpected—or, Surprise! It’s me, Death! These deaths are shocking and harsh, and are much more likely to happen at the beginning, or before the beginning, of the book. These kinds of deaths include car accident, plane crash, bombing and shooting. They may serve as the catalyst for the whole book, showing how the people left behind reassemble their lives after the loss of someone important, or could be a sudden mid-book shocker that changes the course of the story.

When writing a death, some more things to consider: how much do you know about the kind of death you’re describing? How much do you need to know? Will it be included in the narrative, or will it happen off-page and be revealed through the other characters? Are you going to make any statements about the after life? How do all your different characters respond to grief?

Death in fiction, like in life, is a hard thing to grapple with. If you can handle it right, though, it can help your characters to grow stronger and, ultimately, to defeat the obstacles before them.

Happy Saturday, and good luck murdering those mind-puppets.