When should you kill a character?

I've already done a blog post on how not to kill a character. That was focused on one character death I wrote in particular. This one, however, is a more general guideline on when to and when not to send your characters to their grisly ends.

My preferred genres are mystery/thriller and fantasy, both genres that involve a lot of death. In both genres, the writer can remove any character at any time – or at least, find an excuse to do so. So, when should you go ahead with it?

The good reasons

These are the good reasons to write a character death, but that doesn't mean that the character death you write will actually be good. It just means that they are probably necessary to the story.

Reason 1: It is the logical end of that character’s arc. If your character has served his purpose, you can get rid of them. Related to that,

Reason 2: Leaving the character in the story longer would make things too easy for the rest of the cast. Of course you could deactivate a character in other ways (leaving the country, going into a coma, suddenly deciding to be a hermit, going to prison, the possibilities are endless), but death has a finality to it that very few other alternatives have.

Reason 3: To motivate other characters. This is a bit of a cliché at this point, but a character death can motivate others to act. It could be grief, it could be a need for revenge, and it could simply be the loss of attachment. Either way, it can be a great source of motives for other characters.

Reason 4: to further the plot. All you mystery writers know exactly what I’m talking about.

The bad reasons

This is the kind of thing that happens when you take your real world frustrations out on your characters. These are the character deaths that are not necessary to the plot. 

I'm not saying you can't make one of these good. It all depends on execution.

Reason 1: Just for shock value. 

Look, I’ve done this. I’m not saying I’m innocent, I’m saying I’ll not do it again and you shouldn’t either. Besides, if you need to kill a character to generate emotion, your story may be running on fumes in terms of character motivations. Also, if you keep doing this, your readers will grow numb and any serious character deaths that need to land won’t land with them.

Another possible problem with this is, characters have functions. If you get rid of one randomly, other characters will have to cover for them or you’ll have to introduce new characters. That means building their image in the reader's mind, which means more effort and a longer story.

Reason 2: Because you have too many characters and need to reduce the size of your cast herd. Again, I’ve done this as well. First of all, if your character doesn’t need to be there, you shouldn’t have put them in the story in the first place.

You can fix this in a few ways. One is to give your character some function before killing them off, but that, too, has become a bit of a cliché. The second is to economize the number of characters you have, so that none of them are extraneous.

A rule of thumb I like to use is, if you can’t remember the name of the character if you tried, you won’t mind their death at all.

In conclusion,

Think about it before you decide you're done with that character. It's better than rewriting half a book because you realized you're out of characters (I have done that).

Those are my thoughts on the topic, but do tell me what you think in the comments.

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See you next time!