Killing Fictional Characters

Writers like to joke about threatening to write their enemies into their books so that they can give them a slow, painful death. It’s as therapeutic as playing a violent video game or hitting a punching bag to blow off steam. But the purpose of killing characters isn’t to fulfill homicidal tendencies in a consequence-free environment. In fact, killing off characters can be a very difficult decision as I learned while writing my fifth book. Here are some thoughts on killing fictional characters.

Learning the power of death

When you start writing from a young age, you use it to work out your questions and confusion about the world. I’ve always dwelled on the darker aspects of life. So, death often popped up as a theme in my early work. Those stories that I wrote down in notebooks, never intending to be read by more than a handful of people, if at all, allowed me to play in those dark themes and learn to put myself in the head space of the story rather than my real life.

Writing dark stories made me feel powerful. I loved killing off main characters in order to saturate the story with drama and sadness. These stories taught me how to manipulate the emotions of my audience – and myself. You’re directing a multitude of moving parts in your head and then trying to translate this complex machine in print, making sure to capture both the physical and emotional senses. It was morbid but fun.

Killing fictional children

Fast forward 20 years, and I’m now a middle grade novelist. Death is not prevalent in middle grade stories. So, it wasn’t that I shied away from killing characters once I began writing novels. The stories just didn’t call for anyone to die… until my fifth book.

When outlining this book, the second in a trilogy, the idea came to me to kill off one of my prominent side characters, a nine-year-old girl. I didn’t do it to be morbid or to try teach my young readers a lesson about death. I did it to serve the larger story that I was telling.

The challenge alone was exciting. This would be my first real character death that didn’t stem from teen angst or trying to make a horror story more chilling. So, I dove into the first draft, focusing on the meat of the story rather than my big twist.

Then, when it came time for the death, I hesitated. Playing God in a fictional world wasn’t as fun as it used to be. When you’ve matured into adulthood, have lived through your share of loss, and understand the gravity of what it means to die at any age, especially so young, it’s not territory that you enter into lightly.

It took a lot of courage to write this sequence. Afterwards, I felt terrible. I had killed a young, likable character, not even in a gruesome or chilling way. It was just a series of preventable events that ended in tragedy. I never questioned if it was the right thing to do. But it brought up a lot of emotions from some recent losses that I had been through and how incorporating it into my story affected not only the novel but my emotions as well.  In the end, it was a very cathartic experience, ripping the bandage off so to speak.

Killing to serve a purpose

There’s no one to answer to when drafting a story. So, it’s difficult to know if every character death is justified. But not every character death has to be so emotional.

Like I said, I killed off my character for a reason. And there always is a reason to kill off a character. Maybe you need a nameless victim, or even an army of nameless victims, for your medieval war novel or murder mystery. You might need a character death to kick off the events of your story. The point of a story may be that a character is dying and needs to have one final adventure or simply to say goodbye.

Even for my genre, death in middle grade fiction is not unheard of. Bridge to Terabithia, Charlotte’s Web, and Where the Red Fern Grows are three classic examples of books with devastating endings. But they’re all necessary deaths not meant to traumatize a kid but to include them in the knowledge that all living things die, and here are some of examples of the many ways it can happen, fair or not, planned or unexpected, peaceful or violent.

Intentionally horrific deaths

Stories that contain gruesome deaths counteract my claim that fictional deaths should be treated with sensitivity. If you don’t take your fictional world seriously, neither will your readers. Some readers are looking to be horrified. I’m even one of those readers on occasion. You don’t pick up a classic Stephen King novel without the understanding that all bets are off. He is going to describe each death in painstaking detail, and even the most minor characters are going to get a name and/or a backstory before they meet their inevitable demise. Horror is the bad car accident scene of the literary world. You’re traumatized but fascinated.

The same goes for war stories, though they get a pass for trying to maintain authenticity towards their setting, era, or situation. In these instances, it’s insensitive not to play up the gruesomeness of the genre in order to help the reader to understand the circumstances and to respect it and its characters. That’s going to mean some tough emotional moments for you as the writer. But if you’re not feeling the emotions of the characters, you’re not diving deep enough.

Reading to understand

When we seek out fictional stories, either as writers or readers, there is a sense of security in being able to experience even the most tragic and horrific stories with the safety net of being able to put it down whenever we want or need to. That may come off as insensitive to the real life situations that these stories are based on. But since we can only live one life with the limited opportunities that that life affords, storytelling gives us a glimpse of multiple lives that we will never lead and situations that we will never experience firsthand.

In this same way, no two deaths are alike. Each one, from the angsty fanfiction that we write in our teenage years, to the mature, painful character deaths that we suffer through later in life, they all serve a purpose. Some just serve a larger purpose than others. But all teach us something and help us to work out our own views, fears, and embrace of death. That’s one of the biggest human life lessons worth telling.

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