Character Deaths

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

EGGammon said:

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?

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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

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.'

Always story first.

I am dying, Houston, dying

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.

......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................

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

Sex in the book

CACTUSWENDY said:

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

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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.

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.

I agree with Maestrowork

"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!

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

Oy

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.

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

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.

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

James D. Macdonald said:

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

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

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.)

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

James D. Macdonald said:

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

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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.

In my most recent novel, a character dies--one the readers came to care very much about. Beta readers actually yelled at me (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.

My response---YES!!!!

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

Shawn

Maryn said:

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

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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.

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.

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.