Iffix Y. Santaph's Blog, page 6
April 24, 2015
ACQUIRING YOUR LICENSE TO KILL
I am going to let you in on a little secret. I hate killing characters. I do it anyway. It's the nature of life, and the best stories mimic life, no matter how fictional or speculative. But I want to speak about the ramifications of killing characters so that, if you decide that it is appropriate to kill off a character, you can feel confident about doing it right. When you kill off a character, any character, it behooves you to show how the other characters in the story are impacted by the death.
In IMPULSE by Iffix Y Santaph, the central character Jendra Blake lost her mother to a serious illness ten years earlier, and suffering the repercussions of that lost greatly impacts her motivations in the story.
I would like to speak briefly about the “red shirt” trope. (Trekkies will know what I am referring to. In Star Trek: The Original Series, characters with red shirts were thrown onto the team so that there was always someone besides the main characters who could die without greatly impacting the story.) I’m going to plead with you: do not use the “red shirt” philosophy. If a character is in a story for the sole purpose of being killed, it is likely a character that doesn’t belong in the story to begin with.
That being said, any character that you as a writer decide to kill should have as great an impact on your feelings as you hope to achieve from your audience. After all, you created the character to mean something. And as writers, any character we create is a small part of ourselves. We spend time developing who they are. When the time comes to remove them, we ought to feel some small loss even beyond the page. If not, I would suggest we are doing something wrong. And killing for the sake of killing will only disappoint the reader. It sabotages realism. In short, it is a very bad idea. Learn to channel that sadness into your writing and it will have a greater impact on your readers.
I spend a lot of time reading and watching sci-fi as well as writing it, so I will be drawing my references from popular sci-fi for examples in this article. If you return with me to the Star Trek universe, compare what happened to Tasha Yar in Star Trek: The Next Generation. The death was horrible, but the follow-up was incredibly moving. Or take what happened to Doctor Janet Frasier on Stargate SG1, again killed in a horrible way but very respectfully said farewell to. This is the way a character ought to depart from your readers. They will respect you for it.
Use that emotion moving forward. Remember that gut-wrenching feeling you have of loss. Then show your character experiencing the same loss, learning to cope. We as humans go through five stages of grief. This is common to everyone, though it is displayed in different ways. We expect that anyone who experiences loss goes through similar emotions. If they don’t, they are more difficult to relate to. And that is why even Spock shed a tear when his mother died in Star Trek (2009). That single tear – which initially angered a whole lot of geeks - made him easier for the audience as a whole to relate to.
Five Stages of Grief and Characterization
Consider the grieving process as it relates to a story arc.
Denial and Isolation are grouped together as the first step. Denial doesn’t necessarily mean a failed awareness of what has happened. Rather the griever denies himself the right to feel. Everything is meaningless and numb. And naturally, isolation accompanies such feelings. The character should feel as if he is all alone or at odds with those around him.
Anger is the next phase. It’s the breaking point where finally we can no longer deny our feelings and we snap. Allow your character to get angry, perhaps even to do something awful that he shouldn’t have done as a result. Think of Anakin Skywalker killing the entire village of Sand People after discovering his mother's death in Star Wars: Attack of the Clones. To be sure, you don't need to go that extreme. Your character isn't necessarily headed to the dark side because of his loss. But the greater the impact of the loss on the character the greater his anger should be. In a sense, this can mean your character goes off the deep end, perhaps turning on his closest friends. The peculiar thing is that--true to life--in spite of this anger, his real friends won’t give up on him.
The third step is called bargaining. This is when we would do anything just to be with our loved ones for one more day, one more minute. And it leads to thoughts of “what if” and “if only”. Have your character experience and reflect on these emotions. This works even better if the character feels in some way responsible for the loss. Again, this is a nice way to channel into your character. After all, when you’re killing a character that means something to you, you also naturally look for loopholes, ways to avoid killing them. If you voice these thoughts through your character, he will become more real as a result.
Depression is the fourth step. You’re done thinking about “if only” and living with the fact that “what if” is simply impossible. You have lost someone you cared for and there is nothing you can do about it. So you become profoundly saddened. For your character to experience this outright will take your writing to a darker place than you likely ever wanted to go. But that’s okay. It’s real. And what is so beautiful about this part of the story is how your other characters will shine. A recent film that did this quite well was Disney’s movie Big Hero 6(2014). As the main character was experiencing tremendous sadness, his friends rallied around him and helped him get through the pain.
Acceptance is the final step. You finally shake the sadness and continue on with your life. Not that the sadness doesn’t creep up on you from time to time. Years later, we still feel a void in our lives, and that speaks volumes about those we love and our ability to love. But we continue to function in spite of the loss. The pain becomes tolerable.
Perhaps to most effectively pull this off in your fiction, give your character something that they just don’t have while they are grieving, and return it at this point. For example, perhaps it is the character who makes light of everything and just can't seem to smile anymore. And when at last he returns to his old jovial nature, the audience will know he’s back.
To be clear, not every character warrants this sort of funerary treatment. But the more important characters certainly do. If you should decide to do so, you can skip over one or more of these steps simply by transitioning the time within your story. If you follow this basic model, however, you will achieve two effects. Your characters won’t be flat. And those characters that have died will continue to have a meaningful presence in the story. Pull this off and your audience will stick with you, granting you a figurative license to kill.
What do you think? Which books/movies/TV shows have handled character deaths well? Which handled them poorly?
In IMPULSE by Iffix Y Santaph, the central character Jendra Blake lost her mother to a serious illness ten years earlier, and suffering the repercussions of that lost greatly impacts her motivations in the story.
I would like to speak briefly about the “red shirt” trope. (Trekkies will know what I am referring to. In Star Trek: The Original Series, characters with red shirts were thrown onto the team so that there was always someone besides the main characters who could die without greatly impacting the story.) I’m going to plead with you: do not use the “red shirt” philosophy. If a character is in a story for the sole purpose of being killed, it is likely a character that doesn’t belong in the story to begin with.
That being said, any character that you as a writer decide to kill should have as great an impact on your feelings as you hope to achieve from your audience. After all, you created the character to mean something. And as writers, any character we create is a small part of ourselves. We spend time developing who they are. When the time comes to remove them, we ought to feel some small loss even beyond the page. If not, I would suggest we are doing something wrong. And killing for the sake of killing will only disappoint the reader. It sabotages realism. In short, it is a very bad idea. Learn to channel that sadness into your writing and it will have a greater impact on your readers.
I spend a lot of time reading and watching sci-fi as well as writing it, so I will be drawing my references from popular sci-fi for examples in this article. If you return with me to the Star Trek universe, compare what happened to Tasha Yar in Star Trek: The Next Generation. The death was horrible, but the follow-up was incredibly moving. Or take what happened to Doctor Janet Frasier on Stargate SG1, again killed in a horrible way but very respectfully said farewell to. This is the way a character ought to depart from your readers. They will respect you for it.
Use that emotion moving forward. Remember that gut-wrenching feeling you have of loss. Then show your character experiencing the same loss, learning to cope. We as humans go through five stages of grief. This is common to everyone, though it is displayed in different ways. We expect that anyone who experiences loss goes through similar emotions. If they don’t, they are more difficult to relate to. And that is why even Spock shed a tear when his mother died in Star Trek (2009). That single tear – which initially angered a whole lot of geeks - made him easier for the audience as a whole to relate to.
Five Stages of Grief and Characterization
Consider the grieving process as it relates to a story arc.
Denial and Isolation are grouped together as the first step. Denial doesn’t necessarily mean a failed awareness of what has happened. Rather the griever denies himself the right to feel. Everything is meaningless and numb. And naturally, isolation accompanies such feelings. The character should feel as if he is all alone or at odds with those around him.
Anger is the next phase. It’s the breaking point where finally we can no longer deny our feelings and we snap. Allow your character to get angry, perhaps even to do something awful that he shouldn’t have done as a result. Think of Anakin Skywalker killing the entire village of Sand People after discovering his mother's death in Star Wars: Attack of the Clones. To be sure, you don't need to go that extreme. Your character isn't necessarily headed to the dark side because of his loss. But the greater the impact of the loss on the character the greater his anger should be. In a sense, this can mean your character goes off the deep end, perhaps turning on his closest friends. The peculiar thing is that--true to life--in spite of this anger, his real friends won’t give up on him.
The third step is called bargaining. This is when we would do anything just to be with our loved ones for one more day, one more minute. And it leads to thoughts of “what if” and “if only”. Have your character experience and reflect on these emotions. This works even better if the character feels in some way responsible for the loss. Again, this is a nice way to channel into your character. After all, when you’re killing a character that means something to you, you also naturally look for loopholes, ways to avoid killing them. If you voice these thoughts through your character, he will become more real as a result.
Depression is the fourth step. You’re done thinking about “if only” and living with the fact that “what if” is simply impossible. You have lost someone you cared for and there is nothing you can do about it. So you become profoundly saddened. For your character to experience this outright will take your writing to a darker place than you likely ever wanted to go. But that’s okay. It’s real. And what is so beautiful about this part of the story is how your other characters will shine. A recent film that did this quite well was Disney’s movie Big Hero 6(2014). As the main character was experiencing tremendous sadness, his friends rallied around him and helped him get through the pain.
Acceptance is the final step. You finally shake the sadness and continue on with your life. Not that the sadness doesn’t creep up on you from time to time. Years later, we still feel a void in our lives, and that speaks volumes about those we love and our ability to love. But we continue to function in spite of the loss. The pain becomes tolerable.
Perhaps to most effectively pull this off in your fiction, give your character something that they just don’t have while they are grieving, and return it at this point. For example, perhaps it is the character who makes light of everything and just can't seem to smile anymore. And when at last he returns to his old jovial nature, the audience will know he’s back.
To be clear, not every character warrants this sort of funerary treatment. But the more important characters certainly do. If you should decide to do so, you can skip over one or more of these steps simply by transitioning the time within your story. If you follow this basic model, however, you will achieve two effects. Your characters won’t be flat. And those characters that have died will continue to have a meaningful presence in the story. Pull this off and your audience will stick with you, granting you a figurative license to kill.
What do you think? Which books/movies/TV shows have handled character deaths well? Which handled them poorly?
