Death isn’t so bad in Fiction
Warning: Contains spoilers for the Lion King
Note: It was originally written for the Medium Writing Challenge as a ‘Death’ piece, but it was published after the deadline. The points expressed in this article still apply as writing advice.
Developing your characters is like raising a farm. You saw them being born, you fed them with a lot of nutrients and witness their transformation to become their authentic selves. But when their time comes, you would have no choice than to end their life as a means to provide more food to the world.
Death is a very natural thing; it influences people. It allows their loved ones to move on and by learning from the deceased one, they would end up becoming much stronger.
That is why the hardest part of writing stories is about having to kill off the characters after knowing them for so long.
Characters in stories have to be as relatable to the reader as it reflects parts of your own personal experience, like alters in your system with different characteristics to yours. You could have a lot of them in your tale to press forward with its important theme.
But then there will be a moment where death comes knocking at the door, casting winds of change, ready for one of your characters to meet their end. This would occur in a challenge to for them to overcome their fears and help others to survive and grow from their experience. That moment should be a game changer.
But death isn’t always guaranteed to happen your story. In real life, it could be years — decades even — until another one of your friends or relatives succumbs to their death. It is indeed a painful, and sometimes tragic, event that requires enough time to mourn afterwards, remembering the memories that you have shared with that person.
Death can also be unpredictable and could arrive just around the corner; that can happen within the few decades, it could even happen when you least expect it. But when it comes to stories, they would often arrive over the course of the year or less when death in reality isn’t the most likely scenario to develop that quickly.
Is Death a good thing to consider in your story?
Death isn’t a terrible thing to write; it’s actually a powerful tool. If a character is no longer relevant to your story, then you may feel they would much better to be forgotten or instead to drive the plot, when a lot of time should be spent on developing on a major cast of characters. Therefore, you may consider ceasing a character’s life at a dramatic moment.
But the stronger or more relatable the characters you kill off, the more impact it would have on your story.
Readers would feel the pain of loss when that happens. It should happen the same for your characters as not only readers would feel their pains too, but they would also use it to further develop their own personal experiences.
One common mistake of writing a character’s death is when you prepared it without thinking the consequences of it. Killing off the main character is a common tactic for shows that would often lead to complacency. You probably think of one famous example of how it ended pretty badly (Spoiler: Transformers the Movie).
Main or supporting characters can be killed off if they were to be written in correctly, as they would create for the most impact in the story, albeit controversial. It’s also incredibly hard as placing them in very dangerous scenarios may lead to their miraculous survival (hence ‘plot armor’), and killing them off without a dignified narrative surrounding it could lead to pressure from the readers and end up demanding for a resurrection.
Yes, resurrection is a cliche and has been overplayed too much across stories. It can happen when writers decide to kill off a character with little purpose or build up, before they would receive backlash. It can be written marvellously, which is a lesson from me for another time. Though if you resurrect a character because it’s too painful to lose in your story or you gave in to the backlash, then death would lose meaning and impact in your future works. Because of all this, fans of stories would often hope for their favourite character to be resurrected if they get killed during a story.
When Death Comes…
If you’re ready to kill off your character, you don’t just write it, be prepared for it.
When outlining or planning your novel, and you have a character death pencilled in, then you would usually need to create a buildup to that event and the aftermath of it.
The target character would need to spend time with the character(s), teaching them snippets of their themes, which may not be taken straight away. They could instead do actions which shy away from the theme at hand or lack understandings of it at hand. It’s more complex than that, for there are many ways in which the target can contribute to the story in an emotional or meaningful way.
Then, when the target dies in a scene, allow the affected characters to mourn. It’s natural for them to not ignore the death and cry over their loved one, for it allows them to reflect on their relationship with the target. Also allow them to seek ways to get around the problem for a better solution towards the goal, lest using the targeted character’s death as a means to learn more on the theme and work harder towards it.
Lion King is a classic example. Simba spent the early part of the film with his father Mufasa, learning from him about the importance of life and the responsibilities of managing it. Simba then learns that he is next on line to become the lion king, so it boosted his confidence. However, as he gets tricked in by the likes of Scar and his mooks, he gets into danger, leading his father to step in and save his life twice. But then he got betrayed by Scar, leading to his death and one of the saddest scenes in the history of animated films.
The aftermath of that led to Simba thinking it’s all his fault (thanks to Scar’s manipulation) and fled off to the wastelands. He experienced a lot of depression and guilt and even opened himself to be pecked by vultures. Then he visits Timon and Pumbaa to live a different life in the rich jungles, washing away his pain with bug feasts. But then he finds out that without his father, his home gets close to desolation by Scar and the hyenas. He then realises about the importance of protecting the kingdom, deciding to take on them and save the lands.
The point with this example is that Simba grew with this father but took his advice for granted. But when he died during the stampede, he mourned over his death and tried to move on, but then he would realise about his important part in the circle of life and grew stronger because of it.
Death can work in Novels
For the most part, choosing to kill a character isn’t important to pull off. Death and Romance are not the only options for an emotional narrative, for there are other ways to express emotional narrative towards the reader. Things like family bonds and kindness, for instance, can also evoke this feeling, amongst other means for a strong tearjerker.
But killing off characters and leaving them as dead is often a sign of strong writing, for it would lead to heavy character development, allowing other characters to learn and grow into more relatable characters. The dynamics are great, but can take a lot of practice to pull off.
A poorly written death in a story is often when there is a lack of buildups towards it, regardless of a lack of mourning and a decision to resurrect the affected character. It usually happens if they get killed off to just further the plot or make drastic changes to the story, which can turn rather controversial in the long run.
Therefore, it’s better to let characters breathe and live to tell their tales. But if you do decide to write a death in, make sure it’s well buried in a meaningful and dignified way.