Forgive me a little self-indulgence, but we're gonna get into a little bit of "inside baseball" today.
As a (not published) writer, people are always (occasionally...almost never) asking me about certain aspects of the profession (hobby). One of the questions I've received the most (meaning twice rather than just once) is how I feel about killing characters.
If I'm being honest, there is a smidgen of perverse joy that comes from dispatching the hapless fools who had the misfortune of being written by me.
It really can be thrilling to type up a scene where you know a character is going to breathe their last. Do you make it grand and fantastic? Do you make it somber? Is the audience rooting for the brigand to get their comeuppance? There's so much fun to be had in these moments.
There's so much fun to be had that, well, it can be addicting.
When you're writing a death scene, you're doing something on paper that you'll almost certainly never do in real life. (Hopefully) You are deciding when a life ends. You are giving someone their final moments. That sort of power is rather intoxicating, and, as I've already established, it can be really enjoyable.
We're in a golden age, so to speak, of at-risk protagonists. Perhaps now more than ever, you can go into a movie or book genuinely fearing for the lead character's life.
Plot armor is almost a thing of the past.
The progenitor of this movement, undoubtedly, is George R.R. Martin with his novels of knights and kings and sharp chairs. Fans of the Song of Ice and Fire series know that any character can snuff it at any moment. There is no security.
I remember talking to a friend of mine once who read the books before the TV series came out and he relayed to me just how unsettling it was when Ned Stark, the character played by oft-dying Sean Bean on TV, lost his head.
He said that this is a character you follow for almost the duration of a massive novel, and then he's dead. He's just dead.
Ned Stark's death, by all accounts, is one of the more effective deaths in literary fiction just because of how shocking it is.
Unfortunately, I think GRRM has gotten high on his own supply. In the books and the TV show, fans are longing to see more of these unsettling deaths. They want to see characters get killed, and they want to see major characters get killed.
If the primary draw to a story is watching characters die, then you aren't producing much of a story.
(I haven't read GRRM's books, so forgive me for calling him out, but I think his plot and habit of killing characters makes for the most popular example of this principle.)
I troll a few of the popular writing boards online and people are always talking about how to kill characters and how to torture characters. These writers are almost crafting their stories for the sole purpose of killing someone off.
I've killed a couple characters in my day. I've even written a few short stories going in with the knowledge that my protagonists had to die. There's nothing wrong with killing a character, but it can't be the sole driving force of your work.
And if it is, if your whole plan when writing is to kill a character, there had better be a significant reason. How does that death serve the plot?
With Ned Stark's death, it threw the audience off and set up the idea that this was a chaotic world where not even the noblest and most powerful were safe.
That same friend was reading the sixth Harry Potter book, The Half-Blood Prince, when it came out while we were riding in the car together. When it came to the great scene at the end (you know what I mean), his face went slack.
At the time, I had no intention of reading Harry Potter. I have since mended my ways, of course, but back then I just didn't care. So I asked him to tell me what happened, and I was even shocked by it second-hand.
When Snape kills Dumbledore (whoops), it feels like a major world event. Because it is. Up to this point in the Harry Potter series, death had been rare and powerful. The fourth book ended with a death, the fifth book had a few, but it was still rare enough that losing a key player like Dumbledore was astounding.
If you're a Harry Potter reader, you probably remember what that moment felt like to you.
Sure, there were a lot of deaths in the seventh book, but that was still a couple years away at the time. Dumbledore's death was shocking and moving because it stood alone.
Now not every writer has the luxury of writing seven books and then killing off a main character in the sixth. Most writers are lucky to get one book published, let alone a small series.
I won't criticize GRRM for killing Ned Stark, and I can even see reverse importance to killing off so many characters. When nobody is safe, the rare moment when a key player escapes death feels more earned. When we see someone as possessing plot armor, then that escape is almost meaningless. It's a matter-of-fact occurrence.
So I can see that justification. But overall, this idea that character death is the end-all, be-all of story needs to change. Character death can serve the story, and it can certainly help move the story, but it is not the story.
If a character must die, and especially a main character, then their death needs to bear some significance other than death for death's sake.
I'll readily admit that in Call of the Mountains: And Other Tales of the Bizarre, along with my still unpublished novel A Sheriff's Duty, I kill a few people.
In fact, the opening story of Call of the Mountains is all about death. You can read "Blessed are the Dead" here if you want.
I'm not totally averse to character deaths, mind you, even if I was being a little overdramatic about them earlier in this post.
Goodness, the very first scene in A Sheriff's Duty features someone dying a gruesome, horrific death.
And when I was approaching one scene in A Sheriff's Duty where I knew I was going to kill a couple people and cause a lot of destruction, I was almost giddy. I even Tweeted about it.
But that giddiness had more to do, I think, in knowing that I was reaching a hallmark scene. Because I don't throw character deaths around like old people do caramel chews on Halloween, I knew that these deaths were going to signal a major shift in the story.
They were significant.
If you want to kill characters, that's totally fine. I know some people think that this kind of fascination is a sign of a serial killer, but I assure you it isn't. Okay, maybe it can be, but I think I'm fine.
Just make sure that when you kill a character, you are doing it for a good reason, because life is precious and meaningful. If real people matter, then our characters should be treated with the same dignity. Their lives need to be treated with respect and only erased when necessary.
Oh, and if you absolutely must kill a character, leave no evidence.