The Death Of A Fictional Character

     I’m in a fictional slump just now, so I’ve retreated from writing fiction to thinking about its necessities. My own tales always originate with a character conception. I’ve never been able to craft a story without such a character in mind at the outset. He and his needs and conflicts must come first.

     That key character must be someone plausible enough that were you to meet him, you wouldn’t take him for anything but a human, even if he should turn out to be way, way off the axis of the Bell Curve in some regard. I have to care about that character, as well. No matter what fate awaits him, I want him to live well and be happy… even if I birthed him intending to kill him.

     Just what is it that makes a writer care about one of his characters? A slew of other writers have told me that they agonize over the need to kill a character. I share that with them. I hope I share it with my readers. Apparently, now and then I do. You wouldn’t believe the amount of angry email I’ve received over the “deaths” of several characters.

     I’ve written heroes: Louis Redmond, Armand Morelon, Larry Sokoloff, and others who possess above-average abilities and characters. I killed two of those characters. I’ve also written victims: Christine D’Alessandro, Teresza Chistyakowski, Fountain, and so on. I killed two of those characters, as well. Now and then I’ve wondered which kind of character demise affects the reader more powerfully.

     I suppose it depends on how much appeal the character has for the reader – to which kind of character the reader bonds more readily.

     Some readers look for heroes to admire because they see themselves as heroes, or yearn to become heroes. Some others might sympathize more with victims, out of the sense that their lives and surroundings have treated them badly. The degree to which the reader bonds with a character determines the impact of the character’s death. If the reader bonds with none of your characters – possibly because he’s just looking for a few hours’ diversion from his mundane cares – will their deaths affect him at all?

     I even kill characters in my romances. Three of those four books are responsible for a total of nine character deaths: three heroes, three villains, and three Supporting Cast figures. The bloodshed made my “alpha reader” Amy ask whether I’d decided to take a page from George R. R. Martin.

     What about fictional villains? I’ve killed a few of those. I doubt my readers identified with any of them, but I hope they took satisfaction in their deaths. Nevertheless, I have to admit that killing them off took as much out of me as the deaths of any of my heroes or victims. They, too, were the children of my mind. No storyteller kills his children dispassionately. It boggles my mind that Shakespeare (whoever he was) survived killing so many of his characters, especially the Grand Guignol scene at the end of Hamlet.

     My colleagues in the storytelling trade: Tell us about your “body count.” Tell us which of your characters was hardest to kill, and why. And tell us, if you’ve received relevant feedback from your readers, how they reacted to that litter of corpses. If you’ll pardon the choice of words, it’s vital information!