Character's death

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How to make a character's death matter
by sleepdeprived

Every time I write a new story, I decide my main character's journey; what they'll encounter, who they'll encounter, and in the end if they've changed at all from the beginning. For this particular question I feel that not only does your main character count, but all the characters that you plan to have an everlasting effect on your story count, too.

Killing off characters is important. Realistically, death is dreary and depressing, and overall leaves many of us broken inside. To really grab those emotions from your readers and to push them to the surface, you need to build up their emotional connection to the character you're planning to kill off. Let the readers grow with the character, watch them evolve, and when you believe the time is right, kill them off in a way that makes their death significant.

When I say you need to build their emotional connection to said character, or characters, I mean that I want you to transform your character's weak persona into something strong; make them go out in a bang! Give them something to root for, like an underdog that may be a villain whose last attempt at killing the hero backfires. Make the readers pity the villain because he never won. Have the villain breathe his last breath of emotion by having the wounded hero huddled next to the villain as they cried together. Evoke that emotion from your readers, slowly draw it out throughout the story.

Building up that suspense, the tragedy of the character could either make or break your character's death and your overall story arc.

Another example would be from one of my stories titled Infelicitous. A Finnick Odair fanfiction, the main character a young woman named Greyson Hunter who comes off as quiet and isolated from the tyrannical society of Panem. She meets Finnick Odair, a very social and popular Victor of the Hunger Games tributes. As the characters slowly fall in love, they decide to join the rebellion while acting undercover in the Quarter Quell arena. Greyson is friends with Johanna Mason, a Victor known for her ruthlessness and cursing. Johanna is the one who set Greyson up to meet Finnick at the beginning. As Greyson grows as a person and finds herself evolving into a more powerful player in the rebellion, she finds herself along with Katniss Everdeen leading a revolution alongside the people she loves.

Throughout the story, we read as Greyson reacts to losing people in the past and present. Her reaction to certain things evokes emotion and the way I word things and build up the suspense to a person Greyson knows and loves death has an impact on the reader's emotions.

Here is a sample of a chapter where I build up suspense before a character is killed:

It was silent for a few minutes, until Katniss and Pollux started to wake up everyone who wasn't awake already. People yawned and stretched, moving their limbs and standing up. Greyson was back on her feet beside Finnick and more alert than before, which she was grateful for. For some reason something told her not to leave his side.

And she was right to do so, because something wasn't right. Looking at Katniss, she knew the girl could hear it too. Like smoke steaming from a train or an angry cat, a hissing noise filled the background noises that the group made as they adjusted their weapons and equipment. Katniss shushed everyone, her body tense.

Greyson's heart slammed against the inside of her chest as she forced herself to strain her ears and listen. It was a noise the sound a snake would make to threaten somebody, but with it was the formula of words sewn into the sound, echoing throughout the tunnel. Her hands clenched around her bow as she heard them repeat the mantra over and over again like it was the only thing on their mind; programmed into them.

"Katniss. Greyson."

They had found them. That was it. They must have found Boggs' remains and noticed that they had found their way underground. There was no more sleeping, no more peaceful thoughts, only ones of wanting to survive. Greyson felt herself being cast into the arena for the very first time again, all the way through to the finale. Only this time, she had so much more to lose.

End of example.

I don't want to spoil who dies in my book, but their death transforms Greyson into a shell of a person. It is not only the death of a character that impacts the reader and the plot of a story but how it is done.

The character I kill off doesn't have a major part in the book but is still significant enough that people will miss them. That doesn't mean that the character you want to kill off has to be a secondary character, sometimes it could be the main character. Killing off characters can be for many purposes and most writers do it to add meaning to their stories, to evoke that heart clenching emotion of grief. In the actual The Hunger Games trilogy I can name a handful of characters that Suzanne Collins has killed off throughout the books; particularly the last one. Some of the deaths shocked the readers and left us heartbroken and I think the element of surprise also plays a large role in killing a character.

Now that we have a foundation of how to build up character deaths, nobody ever talks about the aftermath of killing off a character and how it affects a story. I have read so many books where characters have died and read how the living characters grieved in their own way. Every character is different. For example, going back back to our hero and villain, the hero who still lives has to now deal with the loss of a foe. Perhaps they have to deal with seeing the place where the villain died every morning. And without a villain, there is no hero – right? So we can assume for metaphorical purposes that the hero is unemployed and doing mediocre barista jobs and not the thing they love doing the most. That could take an emotional toll on someone. I like to think realistically in these situations because death has such an impact on people and can be a heavy topic to talk and write about for some of us. I like asking the questions: what would be the aftermath of your character's death? Who would be changed by this? How would the story go on? Or would it end there?

Make your readers feel the hardships that your character goes through before dying, make them want to scream at the computer/phone screen for dying – or in some cases, cheer. It all depends on how you present your story, after all you are the writer, so make them count. And as always, make them feel something they wouldn't have thought they'd ever feel. Make them want to reread your book not because of that one particular death – because some character deaths are not significant to the story and that's okay! But have them wanting to reread your book because of the impact it leaves on them. The provocation of emotion in a story is a powerful thing that we writers sometimes forget we can control.

So now that you're all equipped with some knowledge on character death, start forming a plan on what to write next or if you think you're all set and ready, go ahead and start writing!

So now that you're all equipped with some knowledge on character death, start forming a plan on what to write next or if you think you're all set and ready, go ahead and start writing!

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Have you ever had to kill off one of your characters? How did you feel about that?

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