Killing Characters
So, you think you’re ready to pull the trigger? You’ve been wanting to kill a character in your story, but you’re just not sure how. Don’t leave your readers feeling ho-hum about one of the most important scenes of your novel. Read this post to learn how to kill—and kill with impact.
Why Kill Your Characters?
Why can’t everyone just live happily ever after? Well, that might work for some stories, but let’s be real—sometimes a character death is just what the narrative needs. Sometimes a LOT of character death is just what a narrative needs. But before you pull the trigger (ha), you should know why your character is dying.
If you know why you’re killing your character, it helps set up the appropriate foreshadowing, character reactions, and plot consequences in your story (more on those later). If you have a lot of character deaths, varying why for each helps to balance the narrative and avoid reader fatigue. As you consider these reasons, note that there can be more than one why for killing a character.
So what are some reasons you might kill off your characters?
Advance the plot – The murder of a priestess opens the door to a hoard of demons that attack the castle. The assassination of a political figure kickstarts a world war. Character death can be a straightforward way to move your plot along. There’s a reason that some writers give the off-the-wall advice “Don’t know what to do? Kill a character!” (not me, I don’t give that advice).
Fulfill the doomed character’s personal goal – Did the mad scientist set off his doomsday machine before succumbing to his injuries? Did a father see his kids to safety, even if it meant sacrificing himself? These deaths show the motivations and priorities of your characters. What are they willing to die for?
Motivate other characters – The loss of their beloved mentor spurs your protagonist to finally accept the call of adventure. The death of the main character’s wife kickstarts a spiral of villainy. The death of an ex-assassin’s new puppy makes them go on a murderous spree of vengeance. Whatever the result, a character’s death can be a powerful motivating force for your characters.
Repay a character for their actions – this reason is usually used with evil or annoying characters, but can sometimes work well when employing redemptive death (more on that later). This character got what they had coming to them. Did they swindle a children’s charity out of millions? Maybe they deserved to fall down an elevator shaft. Did they bully a disabled kid? Maybe the slasher killer gets them in a dark classroom. Did they commit genocide and oppress millions of people? Sacrificing their life so the heroes can save the day is the least they can do.
Emphasize themes – Consider how your characters deaths tie into the larger themes of your book. A woman dying in childbirth can bring home the tragedy of life without choice in a book with feminist themes. The unexpected and gruesome death of an ally can reinforce themes of helplessness in the face of overwhelming forces like nature, war, or eldritch gods. Your reader may catch the intended significance of a character right away or come to realize it as you reveal more of the story.
Create realism in the world – Not shying from the prevalence of death can reinforce to the reader that this is a book grounded in the realism of the human condition. In elementary school, everyone read a book where the dog dies. Educators consider it a coming-of-age rite to bring the horror and inevitability of death to their students. Grimdark fantasy writers delight in doing something similar in their worlds.
Types of Character Death
Now that you’ve decided why to kill your character, it’s time to think about the effect you want that character’s death to have on the reader. Not every death needs to be a tear-jerker.
Tragic Death
But let’s start with the tear-jerkers anyway. A tragic death is the most likely to leave your readers sobbing. There is nothing happy here. The character promised hope to the reader but only delivered despair. Readers may feel as if the death was unfair or unnecessary in the moment, but it can help build your plot. There are a few ways to accomplish this:
The character doesn’t deserve death – a truly innocent character or a character who did everything right, just to find themselves on the wrong side of the world’s cruelty.
The character left some goal unfulfilled – Did they want to see an ocean? Start a bakery? Become a knight? What did they want to accomplish, and now they never will? By leaving a character’s plans unfinished, you create an empty sense of loss.
The death is meaningless – I know this seems to go a little contrary to my advice above about why’s, but I don’t mean that the death is meaningless to the characters or reader. I mean the death is meaningless to the world or plot. The death doesn’t spur some great rebellion. No one is held accountable. No one pays attention. The killer may not even know who they killed. But the emotional impact on survivors is felt by the reader.
A tragic death doesn’t need all of these elements, but a mixture of some of them can make for an effective tragic ending.
Examples
Ned Stark (Game of Thrones)
Beth (Little Women)
Rue (Hunger Games)
Heroic Death
A heroic death is a final act of courage and sacrifice for the greater good. This death leaves your readers devastated, but also with a sense of hope. The feelings in heroic death scenes are bittersweet, as these characters are often beloved. Readers never want to see the heroic character die, but they’ll understand why it was necessary. So how do you create a heroic end?
The character embraces their demise – Whether they choose to walk into death’s arms or simply don’t fight it when it arrives, the character must be seen to welcome the end. This comforts the readers and lets them know the character is at peace with their decision.
Their death helps the heroes in some way – The monster is distracted enough for the heroes to escape and fight another day. The villain’s doomsday device implodes because they stayed behind to hold the switch. If the sacrifice doesn’t accomplish anything, then the readers will feel it was meaningless.
Their death inspires other characters – Depending on where in the story your heroic death occurs, it can have a huge effect on the plot or merely on the characters’ outlook as they face the world beyond the narrative. Either way, the emotional impact should be profound.
Examples
Boromir (Lord of the Rings)
Tony Stark (Avengers)
Luke Skywalker (Star Wars)
Satisfying Death
Not every death needs to be poignant or upsetting. Sometimes a character’s death makes the audience laugh or cheer. These are the satisfying deaths, the ones the audience roots for, makes memes about, and lauds for years to come. Usually, they involve the hero killing the villain, or in the case of horror novels, the villain killing an annoying character. How do you make your deaths satisfying?
Make us want them dead – This death needs to feel deserved. Are they cruel to those around them? Do they cause the heroes great harm? However you do it, make sure this isn’t someone we’re going to miss.
Kill them in a unique or meaningful way – Eaten alive by the angry god they sought to summon. Poisoned at their coronation banquet. Shot with an arrow on the camp archery grounds. Don’t just kill them, make it memorable.
Examples
The Governor (The Walking Dead)
Lewis Dodgson (Jurassic Park)
Micah (Paranormal Activity)
Conflicted Death
Death is complicated, and that’s true in life as well as fiction. Some deaths won’t fit neatly into the previous categories, and these are called conflicted deaths. There are layers of meaning and moral complexity. Often these deaths involve dark motivations like revenge, blackmail or brutal survival decisions. In some cases, an irredeemable character sacrifices themselves. But is it enough? The end result fills the audience with mixed emotions and reddit threads with debates.
Examples
Joker (Batman)
Jack (The Shining)
Ben Solo (Star Wars)
Writing a Compelling Death
Now that we’ve discussed why you should kill your characters and types of character deaths, lets look at how to kill your characters for maximum impact.
Establish an Emotional Connection
The best way to make readers care about your character’s death? Make them care about your character. Invest time in crafting characters with relatable traits and flaws. Give your characters goals and dreams and regrets. Give them a reason to keep living—then cut their life short.
Foreshadow
Death can come as a shock in the moment, but when a reader looks back, it should feel inevitable. For example, Iron Man’s death in Endgame was an emotional moment a decade in the making, but when you look back at the MCU, you can see the seeds of it laid from the first Avengers. Tony is a notoriously selfish man at the outset. Captain America even says, “You're not the guy to make the sacrifice play, to lay down on a wire and let the other guy crawl over you.” In subsequent movies, we see Tony grow and take on more and more responsibility for his past actions and the welfare of those around him. The only way to create a truly satisfying end to his character arc was for Tony to sacrifice himself to save everyone.
Don’t Focus on the Death
“Don’t show the death, show the child’s shoe.”
While this adage doesn’t have a clear source (and trust me, I’ve looked), it is good advice. Pages of physical description don’t hold the weight of emotion. This is the time to bring out your themes by choosing salient details to bring into focus. Think about your motifs and how you can use them to paint the whole picture with a single brush stroke.
Make it Matter
Killing a character for shock value alone is the fastest way to exhaust your readers. When every character readers get attached to meets an untimely end, they learn not to get attached at all. Find a way that a death can affect the wider story or characters. The character death should move the plot along, instigate a change in the main character, or force surviving characters to come to grips with their own mortality. The greatest way to show the impact of a character’s death is to demonstrate the change it brings in other characters.
Don’t Overdo the Grief
“When you describe the miserable and unfortunate, and want to make the reader to feel pity, try to be somewhat colder—that seems to give a kind of background to another’s grief, against which it stands out more clearly. Whereas in your story the characters cry and you sigh. Yes, be more cold.” – Anton Chekov
It can be tempting to spend pages showing the grief and mourning of your characters. That can seem like the right way to convey the enormity of their emotions. However, in practice this just isn’t the case. Pages of sorrow drag your pacing to a standstill, often in the middle of the story where the action should be most intense. Your characters shouldn’t have time to wallow. The pain of having to continue on, even when wracked with grief, is a pain unto itself.
Now go forth! And commit (fictional) murder! And if you need guidance on who, what, where, when, and how to kill your characters, book a coaching session with a Tomeworks editor!