Still, I'm somewhat up on the first draft which made 90k for the entire thing!I remember when I first read the trilogy by that guy with 4 names who used his first 3 initials and his last name and when in the second book Boromir died. Gandalf's death didn't affect me as much. I also remember how I felt when I read The Dragonlance Trilogy and one of the characters died in the second book.
What I want to know is, how does it affect you as a reader and an author when a character you care about has died?
As a writer--I've spent days--weeks sometimes trying to figure out a way for a character not to die and felt sick when I killed them off. LOL
If it moves the story and is needed for the plot--then you write it.
Shawn
Anyone who's read my first 13 knows that my current project opens with the news of a death. In this case, it isn't a major character, and we never get to know him directly. However, he was the friend of a major character, and that makes it rather painful.
(On a personal level, both my grandmother and my great-grandmother died recently, so I'm generally a little sensitive about the subject. What's going on in my life affects what I read and write.)
And on and on. This, to me, is part of what makes a story good. If you can't stop thinking about the story after you've finished reading it, the writer did a good job. If I'd written it, I would've done it different, and the story would probably not have been as good.
People die in my stories too. Almost invariably. It sucks, because I get to like them as I write them. And then I kill them. It's sadistic, really. But sometimes, it just needs to be done.
O well.
Death is an important event in life, one of the defining events of life.
Stories are about people, so people in stories sometimes die. Even when that death doesn't happen in the story itself, it still affects the characters.
As both a reader and a writer, I accept the eventual death of all characters (that are not explicitly immortal) as a given. How they die matters a lot, whether they die in the course of the events described in the story is nearly irrelevant, except insofar as it affects how they die. And by "how", I mean the characters' reasons for confronting death and their responses to it, not the proximate causes of death.
As a reader, the event of a character's death doesn't affect me per se, I was already aware that the character was going to die. As a writer it is more difficult, because that character's death must affect all my other characters to some degree, and the story events after that character's death have to take that event into account.
One interesting thing I've discovered as a reader is that the really important effects don't depend on the character dying at all, only on the character confronting death, facing a situation that the character does not expect to survive.
As a writer, I don't think I've ever felt bad about killing a character. I've killed a lot of characters before, and they were sometimes characters I really cared about and liked, but it's never bothered me. I get more of a sadistic pleasure out of it really, which probably says something about my personality that I don't want to know. Writer's sadism: it's what keeps it interesting.
I think it is the circumstances by which the character dies that affect the reader, as well as the death itself. Sturm put his life in danger to protect other people. He died heroically, but his death was also somewhat unnecessary. That is what made it so memorable to the reader. It has been over 15 years since I read that story and it is one of my most memorable moments in fantasy literature.
It is not only how the reader feels about the character who dies, but also how important he is to the other main characters. How far reaching is this death going to be? Is everyone in the story going to feel the loss? I think that is what was portrayed in the Dragonlance series.
Now the Dragonlance series is by no means the greatest example of terrific writing, but some of my most fond memories are regarding that series. I think it is because of the memorable characters in that story. When one of them dies, or gets killed you felt it as a reader. The greater the attachment--the deeper the emotion of loss. I hated to see him die, but because of his sacrifice, he turned the tide of the war and strengthened the characters tied to him.
I think that if done right, the death of a main character can be a great impact to your story, and connect your readers with the remaining characters all the more.
LDS
Now THAT made me mad. When the first one died I thought it was rather gutsy, truth be told, but then more began to die. And more. And more. Soon there was nobody left alive that I liked (except John Snow and his one sister....A...something...can't remember). But their points of view came up so seldom that I stopped reading.
So that was an extreme example. I wouldn't do that. I didn't care much that Sturm died in the Dargonlance seires, although to be perfectly fair and honest, I did not find the series to be fully engaging. There were parts I liked, parts I didn't like (isn't that the series with the seeing eye tiger...I want one of those!), but overall I filed it as one more fantasy series.
Be careful when you kill characters. It's ok, realistic, and prfoundly emotional if someone we have come to care about dies in a book. Just don't kill off your main protagonist, if we have no one to empathize with then why are we reading?
And another thing I've found...you never know who the reader will actually care about when they die. I created a one chapter throw away character for my novel. He appears for the first time in chapter six, has a few things to say from his point of view that are important and can't be learned any other way, then dies at the end. My reader was so upset. He wanted to know if I could bring him back to life or maybe just write a nother story about him. I was going...WHAT? this guy is a hired hit man! <sigh>
That's all I have to say about death right now.
As an 'action' style story, my current WIP has quite a high body count. I'm about 80k words into this draft of it, and I've lost count.
Of the 'developed' characters (i.e., those that the reader has had a change to get to know) I've killed off 2 "good guys" (one of which was a frequent POV character) and 3 "evil henchmen".
There's at least one more of each to go before the end. Probably more because there are two battle scenes left to write which I haven't decided on the exact outcomes of yet.
Do you think this is too much? Or should I just stick it out?
Has anybody read Barclay's Chronicle's of the Raven? That's one series that always jumps into my mind when I think of this topic.
Since I'm knee-deep in writing such a thing, I want to throw out to this forum how I feel as an author writing such a thing. And what I feel is...well, I've come to the conclusion that it doesn't much matter. What *does* matter is how my reader (someday readers?) feel...and that, of course, depends on how I, as a writer, inject this event into my story.
My main goal at the moment is to "hook" the death into the story of my main character.
American novelist Henry James once wrote/pondered: "What is character but the determination of incident? And what is incident but the illumination of character?"
I like this. So I guess my answer & opinion to your posted question is - if you're going to have a death in your novel, it ought to serve as an illustration of your main characters; who they really are...what they really feel, etc.
How they react to (or even maybe how they in some way brought about) this event should in some way reveal the truth of their character.
James also wrote that a writer illuminates his/her main characters by every character in that person's circle, and by every interaction between them.
Every incident in a novel should be connected. Every happening shapes the main character(s) - for good or bad.
Hook the death of this character into the protagonist's story - *reveal* more of the protagonist's character through this death - and you'll be giving your readers an illuminating read, no matter *how* they feel about the death of said character.
I agree the replacement was a bit pathetic, but I guess they needed an actor for the second movie.
LDS
quote:
What is character but the determination of incident? And what is incident but the illumination of character?
Hmmm... incident, in the case of one of the deaths in my story at least, is something more than this. It is a way of shaping the protagonist, moving him toward an eventual outcome of the story that he wouldn't otherwise have been capable of achieving. I think the same should be true of important events in all good stories.
OK; so that's one death that is crucial to the story. They story cannot really be told without it. Another could be left out, but you are right -- showing how my character deals with having to watch a friend die is quite illuminating. And if it isn't illuminating enough to justify the scene, then I'll make it more so in the next revision!
Yeah, I should probably not spend so much time worrying about it. I am telling my story right.
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80K words sounds like it could be near the end as long as there is at least one good guy to pull us through, you should be fine. I think it might not be how many likeable people you kill off, but how many people that I like remain alive in the story?
80k is somewhere between a third and half way through. My original aim point was a trilogy of books between 90k and 110k, but everything's falling a bit short of that, so it'll probably end up as a bigger single volume Still, I'm somewhat up on the first draft which made 90k for the entire thing!
There's plenty of interesting people left alive at this point. Some of them'll even survive till the end...
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You think that nobody's safe and that if he's killed off Tom, Rob and Bob, there's no reason why he won't kill off Jim too. And if you can achieve that kind of reaction from your readers then you know you're doing something right.
That was one of the things I hoped for, certainly
I've noticed there's a line past which instead of being afraid for the lives of the characters I care about, I'm annoyed at the melodrama the author seems to be placing into the book. I don't know where that point is, though.
[This message has been edited by Christine (edited March 19, 2004).]
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You think that nobody's safe and that if he's killed off Tom, Rob and Bob, there's no reason why he won't kill off Jim too. And if you can achieve that kind of reaction from your readers then you know you're doing something right.
Let your characters live or die on their own merits. Smite them dead or save them Deus Ex, and you've got cheap melodrama.
There are books in which it is obvious from the start that no character is in danger. These do not make me feel anything.
Therea re books in which the author seems to be trying to hard to get me to understand that his characters will die (ie kills them all off). This causes me to feel frustration and disdain for the author, but rarely anything for the remaining heroes.
Then there are books that, as Survivor poitned out, have the characters live or die on their own merits. Well, now, that will get me to feel something. The trouble with this is what do you mean by "their own merits?" I mean that a seasoned adventureer will probably not fall victim to a booby trap...that's kind of a silly way t9 go and he's probably too smart for that. I mean that an assassination better be a realistic and necessary aspect of your story. But also I mean that if a swordsman falls in battle, no matter how good he is, I can understand and feel the effect.
Death has to have purpose. Kill as many people as you want and as long as each and every one made sense at the time, no matter how sad, I'll stick with you.