Killing Your Characters
It's hard to think of an author who doesn't kill someone at sometime, fictionally of course (unless you're writing for a very young audience), then again, the excellent The Very Best of Friends (illustrated by the extraordinary Julie Vivas) springs to mind. So the rest of us are pretty much serial offenders in the accidental death/murder department.
Killing characters is one way of building emotional depth in a narrative as many a TV Soapie attests. But killing a fairly anonymous side character is very different to killing one who's been around for hundreds of pages (or months of viewing) and the reader/viewer has built a relationship with. It's also different when you're the creator of that character and you happen to love them very much.
I've instigated the demise of characters in all my nine books, but the character I've just killed (half-way through Angel Blessed Book 5 in the five book Angel Caste series) was close to my heart. He was engaging, loveable, imperfect, important, and I'd know his end since I started the series in late 2011.
Knowing his ultimate fate made it no easier to write it however. His death was harrowing, both in the narrative and to write, but it was necessary for a number of reasons. It triggered a second harrowing event integral to the series, but in terms of Deep Fantasy, the genre I write, he needed to die to move the male protagonist to the next psychological life stage.
While the doomed character lived, the male protagonist had no reason to change. The death also pushed the female protagonist further along the psychological path of healing she had turned down.
It can be tempting to kill characters off willy-nilly when things seem to be lagging and a little excitement is needed. Or to kill them off without fully thinking through the consequences. I had intended to have Snowhawk (gay male character in Heart Hunter) die in a tragic accident, then a beta reader pointed out how common the deaths of gay characters were in novels, as if being gay would ultimately be punished.
Snowhawk survived and I think I achieved a more powerful story by allowing him to do so, and that is the best test of who lives and who dies in a narrative sense.
Killing characters is one way of building emotional depth in a narrative as many a TV Soapie attests. But killing a fairly anonymous side character is very different to killing one who's been around for hundreds of pages (or months of viewing) and the reader/viewer has built a relationship with. It's also different when you're the creator of that character and you happen to love them very much.
I've instigated the demise of characters in all my nine books, but the character I've just killed (half-way through Angel Blessed Book 5 in the five book Angel Caste series) was close to my heart. He was engaging, loveable, imperfect, important, and I'd know his end since I started the series in late 2011.
Knowing his ultimate fate made it no easier to write it however. His death was harrowing, both in the narrative and to write, but it was necessary for a number of reasons. It triggered a second harrowing event integral to the series, but in terms of Deep Fantasy, the genre I write, he needed to die to move the male protagonist to the next psychological life stage.
While the doomed character lived, the male protagonist had no reason to change. The death also pushed the female protagonist further along the psychological path of healing she had turned down.
It can be tempting to kill characters off willy-nilly when things seem to be lagging and a little excitement is needed. Or to kill them off without fully thinking through the consequences. I had intended to have Snowhawk (gay male character in Heart Hunter) die in a tragic accident, then a beta reader pointed out how common the deaths of gay characters were in novels, as if being gay would ultimately be punished.
Snowhawk survived and I think I achieved a more powerful story by allowing him to do so, and that is the best test of who lives and who dies in a narrative sense.
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