The wonderful folks here at
Fantasy Book Critic asked if I’d be willing to do a guest post about writing. We bounced a few ideas back and forth, but the one that seemed to fit best was a piece on killing characters. After all, in my superheroes-vs-zombies series,
Ex-Heroes, I wiped out over two-thirds of the world’s population (shameless plug—book three,
Ex-Communication, just went on sale last week). If I killed off almost six billion people, well, I must have some small idea what I’m doing.
Granted, to some folks, killing characters is no big deal. I’ve seen writers brag about how “
no one is safe” in their stories. All too often in the real world, death is a random, unexpected thing, so killing off characters at random must bring my work closer to real life, right? And since art imitates life, well, that’s just further proof I’m doing the right thing. Random death = real life, real life = art. Makes sense, yes?
Here’s the thing, though. I’m not a biographer or a historian. I don’t write real life, I write fiction. Made up stories. And while real life can be messy and have no structure, fiction—no matter how reality-based it may be—needs to have an actual plan behind it. It can look like there’s no structure, but the events in a good story need to be happening for a reason. If I’m just randomly killing off characters left and right, I can’t have much of a plot, can I? Death in fiction—and this is just my own opinion of course, not some law of prose to be revered and taught—needs to serve a purpose. One way or another, it needs to be moving things forward, not slowing them down. It should be helping to establish the tone, advancing the plot, or affecting a character’s story (beyond, of course, the poor character whose story just came to an end).
If a death in my book doesn’t do any of these things, well... what was the point of it? And if it doesn’t have a point, why am I wasting words on it?
Of course, I’m kind of dancing around the obvious, aren’t I? If I’m going to kill a character in a story and really have it mean something, there’s one key element I need, isn’t there? A character.
Browse any news feed and you’ll see at least half a dozen reports of death—natural, accidental, or deliberate. Death is all around us, but we barely ever react to it because we don’t connect to it. It’s happening to people we don’t know, and that lessens the impact of it.
Killing off cardboard cutouts is fine to drive a story’s body count, but it won’t drive a plot or motivate anyone on a personal level. If I want a character’s death to affect the reader in some way, then that character needs to be fleshed out. They need to be believable. They need to be relatable to the reader. They need to be likeable, in one way or another. I’m not saying they need to be a saint or a supermodel or anything, but there needs to be a reason we want to keep following this character or it’s not going to matter that we can’t follow them anymore.
Do any of you remember
Braveheart? Some of the posters had a tagline—
Every man dies, not every man truly lives. It sounds a little cheesy, but believe it or not, that’s the secret with killing characters. Massacring dozens of them doesn’t mean anything. What strikes a reader, what sticks with them, is when a character comes to life. When a collection of words comes out of the writer’s head and onto the page (or a Kindle screen) and somehow turns into a person that the reader can believe in and identify with, that’s an amazing moment.
That’s when you can kill them. And then it’ll really hurt.
