Friday 5 October 2018

How not to write a character death

Once upon a time, one of my characters died. Then me, the rest of the cast, and everyone else promptly forgot about him.
Let's back up a bit, and start from the beginning. I was writing the first draft of the novel I am working on at the moment. The character - let's call him Jack for now - was one of the main characters' inner circle. He died heroically, trying to hold off the enemy in the midst of a chaotic battle.
One would logically expect that the death of Jack would have an effect on the story. There would be grief, maybe anger, maybe feelings of guilt, inadequacy, etc. from his friends if not anyone else.
That didn't happen. Before I knew it, I had moved on with the next three or four chapters. I felt nothing, and neither did the rest of the cast. Why did this happen?
There are several reasons that I have identified since, and I will list them here one by one.

  1. Lack of relationships: Jack is a secondary level character. He had friends, yes, but the closest meaningful relationship he had with a viewpoint character was as a friend of a friend.
  2. His personality (or lack thereof): I designed his character, of course. I knew his name and what he looked like. Beyond that, I didn't pay much attention to him - I thought he would grow, organically, and be the character he was meant to be. That didn't happen, because...
  3. Invisibility: Jack simply wasn't saying anything, or doing anything - he was just there in the background. He was simply a prop. He rarely had to say anything, because he was in the presence of characters with more developed personalities, and I knew exactly how they would respond to a situation. So, he faded into oblivion long before he actually died, provided that a reader would have noticed his existence in the first place.

Now you are probably wondering why I bothered to kill off such a peripheral character. The answer is, I had too many characters in hand and I needed to reduce their number. On top of that I needed a character death at that point, since the main cast had been operating in a situation with a high mortality rate with no casualties. So, who was better suited to the situation than poor Jack? He wouldn't be a loss to the team.
That was the problem. You see, the team lost absolutely nothing by his death. There was only one character who would have lost something, but he was in a lot of problems of his own, and though he ought to have reacted to this a bit more, well, he didn't. I forgot all about it.
So, the moral of the story - develop your characters before you kill them if you want an emotional reaction (as in, in advance, not half a chapter ahead before their death). Mooks and random characters that die do not need this Also, don't randomly pick and character and kill them off just because you're feeling mean (I did this on a spectacular scale before. I might right about it later).
I hope this is a useful guide in how not to kill a character, and I hope you would avoid making the same mistakes that I made.
If you're wondering what has happened to Jack since, he's doing fine in the current version of the novel. He has a backstory now, and a personality, and most of the main cast are really his friends. I haven't reached the point where he died yet, but I doubt I'd thrust him in the line of fire so easily again. There is one thing I know, though - if he dies now, I'll definitely feel it, and so will the rest of the cast.
Until next time!

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