Category: killing characters

Double, double toil and trouble

On April 19, 2012, Chloral Florderoy wrote, An author told me once that there comes a point in the writing process when the characters start talking to you. I mean, you know what they would do/say in a situation because you’ve spent a long time with them and you feel as though you know them. Does this mean that it’s hard when it comes time to write their deaths? How have you dealt with making bad things happen to your characters, or is it fun for you?

Every writer is different. My characters don’t talk to me unless I start the conversation, generally on paper. I may interview them to find out what they’d do in a particular situation. Otherwise it’s rare for one of them to chime in when I’m out and about in the world.

But recently a friend described a close friend of hers, someone I know a little, and his flaws sounded like one of my character’s flaws. That was a nice moment, when my character came to life in life.

As for making bad things happen, depends on the character. If it’s my main and I love her, then it’s hard. If she suffers, I suffer. And a particularly bad kind of pain is the self-inflicted kind. If my character behaves foolishly or inappropriately or hurts someone because of her faults and suffers the consequences, and she knows she’s to blame, then ouch! I squirm and writhe along with her. In Fairest, for example, Aza’s desire to be beautiful gets her into trouble over and over again.

There’s nothing wrong with feeling for our characters. If our emotions are engaged, the reader’s likely will be too.

When I killed Ella’s mother in Ella Enchanted I used some of my own feelings from when my mother died, which had happened about six years before I started writing the book. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that. My writing was more authentic, and my grief for my mother no less real. If you’ve never lost someone you love, you can remember the loss of a pet or even a beloved object. It’s not the same of course, but you can still use the sadness.

On the other hand, killing a bad character is fun. In Fairest again, I enjoyed doing Skulni in. In The Two Princesses of Bamarre, knocking Vollys off was a pleasure too. She has redeeming qualities but she’s evil and I reveled in ending her in a melodramatic way. I didn’t kill Hattie in Ella Enchanted, but it was a delight to make trouble for her. She’s so self-satisfied that I always wanted to take her down a peg or two.

But killing is only an extreme case of getting our characters into trouble, which we have to do constantly. At the beginning we may not know them well enough to predict what they’ll say, do, and feel, so we have to throw them into situations, and initially we have to dream up responses for them, responses that are expressed in the ordinary way, through action, thoughts, feelings, dialogue, and occasionally setting. Each response narrows the possibilities for the next situation. A character who jumps whenever he hears a loud noise probably won’t be calm in the face of a snarling Rottweiler, possibly not even in the face of a snarling toy poodle.

But anxiety isn’t enough to make a complex character. Maybe as soon as the dog showdown is over, our character texts twelve of his closest friends. We’ve learned something else. And suppose he apologizes to the dog’s owner for being snarled at and rushes to the pet food store to buy a treat for the dog. Put all this together, and pretty soon your characters will be talking to you, too, and going with you when you walk your own dog.

Suppose we toss Jack into a new environment. He’s into fencing, so at the start of our story his supportive parents enroll him in a fencing club.

Some people and characters are fine with strangers. They know just how to fit in. They put others at ease. But we want to make trouble for Jack, so we start developing his character in a direction that will make this new situation torture for him.

We can make him shyer and more solitary than a turtle. But that’s not the only option. He can be socially awkward. He speaks too loud. He assumes that everybody shares his sense of humor. What else? As a prompt, think of five other ways that Jack can fail in a new social situation. Use one (or more) in a story.

Suppose we want to write an interior kind of story. Everything is fine in Jack’s life. He doesn’t have to go to fencing club. His family is wonderful; he has friends; his studies interest him. But we need a story and we want it to be Jack’s struggle with his inner demons. What can they be?

Well, let’s give him some faults. Maybe he’s a tad paranoid. He’s suspicious of his good fortune. There’s a worm in the apple of his life, and he’s going to find it, by gum! His friends and family, at first amused by his mistrust, begin to be annoyed, then angry.

Or he’s easily bored and deliberately sets out to shake things up, with unfortunate results.

I recently read William Styron’s Darkness Visible, his short and interesting memoir of his depression (high school and up). Styron’s descent into madness (his term) hit him hardest just as he was collecting a literary award, when everything was going splendidly.

So, as the next prompt, think of five more ways that a character with a great life can fall apart. Make a story out of one or more of them.

I’ll end by stating the obvious: Even if it’s hard to bring misery down on our complex, interesting, beloved characters, the solution is neither to spare them nor to make them not complex and not interesting.

Here are two more prompts:

∙ Marie is helping her best friend Peony get ready for a little party. Four friends are coming over. One is a boy Peony likes. Nothing has ever happened between them but she has hopes. The two girls are baking a cake for the occasion. Marie has only the best of intentions but she keeps creating disasters. Write the scene. Continue onto the arrival of the boy, and keep the trouble coming.

∙ In Perrault’s version of “Cinderella,” Cinderella forgives her stepsisters, and they marry lords. Rewrite the ending, and punish them. Be harsh.

Have fun, and save what you write!

Death and Dying

On April 16, 2010, Ezmirelda wrote, How do you kill a character you’ve become attached to? If the plot needs for a certain character to die how do you do it? Have you ever done it before?

I’ve killed characters, but not many.  The mother dies early on in Ella Enchanted and in The Princess Test, and Dave’s father dies at the beginning of Dave at Night.  A few characters bite the dust in The Two Princesses of Bamarre, but I won’t say which ones for those who haven’t read the book.  I’ve even knocked off a few fairies, tra la, in the Disney Fairies series.

Getting very serious – briefly – people I love have died, real people.  I’m sure many of you have lost loved ones too.  My father died when I was thirty-eight, my mother when I was thirty-nine.  Their deaths were a long time ago; I’m sixty-two now.  But I still miss them and think of them often.  A situation arises, and I imagine what my father would make of it.  In a group of people, it often seems to me I’m observing through my mother’s eyes.  Sometimes I picture their astonishment at the technological miracles that have come along since their deaths.  The frustration of course is that I can guess what they might say and do; I make them characters in my internal narrative, but I can never be sure if I’m correct.  Their absence in flesh and blood will remain sad forever.

If you’re feeling pain at the prospect of killing a character you love, I hope you’ll take comfort.  When characters die, they’re not fully dead.  I – or you – can bring the dead back to life in imagination.  I can make up a new flashback or write out future scenes as if the character hadn’t died.  Take Ella’s mother, for example, I could write her first meeting with Ella’s father, Sir Peter.  Maybe she’s heard rumors about him.  People say he’s dangerous, so she’s curious.  Before the ball where he is to be, she dresses with particular care, to Mandy’s dismay.  They dance, and she finds the courage to flirt.  She tells him about her day, her family, secrets she’s kept for years.  His eyes never leave her face.  He smiles and compliments her.  She hasn’t lost her sense of humor, so she tells herself that this is ridiculous and happening too quickly.  Alarms are going off, but she’s taken in anyway.  If I like, I can write what she says and how he answers.

Or I can jump ahead and bring the mother back for Ella’s wedding.  The reader can see her joy at her daughter happiness.  And so on.

You honor your beloved dead character by making the reader love him too.  Don’t hold back on giving him qualities you adore, and go easy on the faults.  In Dave at Night, I made Dave’s father pretty saintly, so the reader would feel Dave’s grief.  You can make the character’s faults endearing ones.  Even a villain can be lovable if you make the reader understand the villainy and see where it comes from.  It is fine to do in a character for plot reasons, but make the death resonate if this is an important character.  What we don’t want to do is rush the death to reduce our own pain.  Death is an occasion for wallowing.

You can soothe your pain by keeping the dead character in the reader’s memory.  I hate when an author forgets to do this.  The character dies; the story is sad for ten pages, and then the character is hardly mentioned again.  The consequence is that the living characters who appear to have forgotten the dead one come off as unfeeling.  I’ve seen this in thrillers.  In the first chapter the hero’s wife is killed.  He sets off to avenge her death, which is the whole reason for the book, but the adventure takes over and he stops thinking of her.  And I think, How crummy is this!  If you go the other way and have the character remembered, whoever is doing the remembering becomes more sympathetic, generally a benefit.

The treatment of a character’s death is masterful in A Bridge to Terabithia by Katherine Paterson.  I read it a long time ago, so I just read a plot summary and almost cried.  If you haven’t read the book, it is marvelous.

Guilt often accompanies death.  For example, the sole survivor of a car crash is likely to be burdened with guilt, even if he wasn’t driving.  He may play out in his mind many scenarios that don’t end in an accident.  If I’d done this, said that, he may think, we wouldn’t even have gotten in the car.  If I hadn’t turned on the radio…  If I had stopped her from answering her cell phone…  When you build in guilt, you make the death more believable.

I’ve been a little prescriptive in saying how to treat a death.  Each story is different, and you may need to handle it differently.  You may have a main character who can’t deal with sadness and deliberately buries the feelings.  Disconnection from feeling may keep the dead character in mind as effectively as wallowing.  Oh, we think as we read, he’s being callous because he’s in pain.  Why pain?  Oh, yes, because Juliette died.

Or you may find another approach that works.

Another option, naturally, is not to kill off the character.  You may be able to get rid of him without an actual death.  Sometimes a character has to die.  You feel it as you’re writing.  But sometimes there are other options.  He can move away.  He and your main character can argue irreconcilably and separate forever.  He can live, but he’s in a coma and no one knows if he’ll ever recover.  It’s worth thinking about why you want to kill him and why you’re hesitating.  If you let him live, you can bring him back into the story later on.

Ever, my Mesopotamian fantasy, could have been a tragedy.  Initially, I thought it would be, but I couldn’t go that way, so I steered the story in another direction.  Tragedy was too bleak for my temperament.  Someday this may change.

As for how my characters have died, I’ve used disease, incineration, a fall, disbelief (in the case of one of the Never fairies), battle, even overeating, and maybe I’m leaving out a few.  No murder and no humans killing humans even in battle.  In fact, I haven’t staged any battles between peoples, only people against monsters.  So far I haven’t had the stomach for it, but that may change, too.

I haven’t treated any of the deaths clinically, but there are resources that can help you get inside dying.  For one of my books, won’t say which, I needed to know about poisons and their effects, and I found plenty online.  Just now I googled “how to write a death scene,” and many entries popped up.  I also found a book series called Howdunit, which is for mystery writers but which would probably have other writing uses.

Here are three deadly prompts:

•    Your main character’s best friend died of a rare cancer a year ago.  Write notes about the impact this might be having on her.  Write a scene showing these effects.  Write a session between her and a grief counselor.

•    Think about killing off a character in a story you’re working on.  Consider which character might die and what the consequences would be for your story.  Write notes about this.  Write the death scene.  (You don’t have to really use it.)

•    This may not be to everyone’s taste – this entire post may not be – but for the lighter side of death, write from the vantage point of a happy arch villain who is joyously plotting a murder.  Get inside her, the more gruesome you can be, the better.  Make the character she is planning to kill a great humanitarian whose death will be an enormous loss for all mankind.

Have fun, and save what you write!