To kill, or not to kill…
Should I kill off the reader’s favourite character? That’s the choice many writers must make.
As you may know, my latest fantasy manuscript is away from home, undergoing a professional assessment. I *might* have let slip that it’s quite a dark tale, with swords, sorcery, and even sex. Yes. I’m getting braver in my writing. Lots of dark.
But in such a world, where evil forces are threatening all the characters I love, I want the danger to be real.
My story is not cozy.
There isn’t going to be a happy ending for everyone. And while I’m not in the GOT* habit of randomly killing off characters to amp up the dramatic tension between honour and power, or between love and ambition (I’ve never got over the death of Ned Stark, have you?), I’m also not a fan of unrealistic survival. It kind of annoys me when a character gets so beaten up that they’d be a mass of broken bones, and then suddenly leaps up to stab their attacker in the throat. What? That should only happen in action movies.
That means that some of my lovely, lovely characters are going to face some nasty times. Characters who have been with me for years, inside my internal landscape.
This problem came starkly to mind when my manuscript assessor — whose feedback and opinion I strongly value — sent me a quick email just after the assessment had begun:
“Beginning — I love (name of character). They’re going to be one of my favourites …..”
A few chapters later:
“OH NO! HOW COULD YOU?!”
Immediately I began that writerly panic: have I done the wrong thing? Can I save that fictional person? I quickly researched ‘death of major character’, to see how the bookish world reacts to such things. It looks to be quite difficult to kill off a recurring, major character – – readers in general don’t like it — But — no, the plot won’t work without this crucial death. So that one stays dead. Sorry.
A fellow writer is also facing the same issue. Their Beta reader sent back Book 3 with a note:
DO NOT KILL HIM IN BOOK 4! I’ll never forgive you if you do.
Hmm, the character arc could really end with his death, but maybe having invested readers is not such a bad thing. My friend saved the guy, and, to tell the truth, I’m also glad that there could be more stories about him.
Famous Character Deaths
It’s possibly because we don’t do it that often (apart from in GOT*) that killing off a character is so controversial. All readers probably started on some version of ‘The Hero’s/Heroine’s Story’, in which the main character faces multiple obstacles but comes home safely. That’s an ancient archetype, one that affirms human survival in a perilous world. So killing off the main protagonist is still a kind of perverse twist. That doesn’t stop it happening.
Think of Stephen King’s Misery, for example. Wow, that’s dire. And Arthur Conan Doyle wanted desperately to kill off Sherlock Holmes at the Reichenbach Falls, making a neat ending. However, readers demanded a resurrection, and I guess Conan Doyle was happy enough to continue earning Holmesian income, even if he was fed up with the detective who gathered it in.
Agatha Christie killed off Poirot in Curtain: Poirot’s Final Case (1975), but as she died only six months later, before the book hit the shelves, she wasn’t faced with the same sort of backlash that Conan Doyle endured.
What Do You Think?
I’d love to know where you — writers and readers — stand on this. How OK is it to kill of characters? You’re probably going to say ‘It depends’. Please tell me what it depends on, for you.
Happy reading!
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*GOT In the Game of Thrones universe, famously, nobody is safe. It’s all about the story, not the characters.
James Hibberd of Entertainment Weekly noted that:
This is probably the first time a U.S. drama series has ever killed off its main character in the first season as part of its master creative plan … it’s just … not done. You don’t cast a star, put him on bus stops and magazine ads marketing the show, get viewers all invested in his story, and then dump him nine episodes later just because it arguably makes the story a bit more interesting.