Do your mourn your characters?

[DaCosta]

So, I have to kill off one of my characters in my current WIP and I really don't want to. She's a great character, caught up in some dire circumstances but she has to go. I'll be writing the scene in a few days and am preparing myself for the emotional rollercoaster already... It got me thinking about how writers go through the gambit of emotions while writing.

It some ways it would be easier to keep her - it's the safe option (plus I could always use her later) but the story demands she's gotta go. The impact of her death has a irreversible effect on another character, pushing him over an emotional precipice.

Do you mourn your characters? I don't mean outright tears, of course, that'd be slightly concerning, but do you miss them? Are you sad to see them go? Have you ever hung onto them when you know they should really go?

 

[Jo Zebedee]

Depends how much I like them. So far, I've been fine with the ones I've killed off (although a father and daughter who died together was pretty upsetting) but the remaining ones in book three of my trilogy I'm very attached to. If any of them buy it, i'll wear black for a week.

 

[Mouse]

Not really... I've had characters that I didn't want to kill, but if they had to die for the story, then they died.

They all go in the end, don't they? When you've finished the story, they're done.

I like tragic anyway - I think it's only my romance where nobody dies at the end of mine!

 

[SevenStars]

In a word, no.

I recently received feedback on some work that validated this point, two characters killed off in it that could have been useful later. My desire to stick with my first plot won out.......turns out it was the right decision! Hard choice to make I agree when you see possibilities for them later, however, if your thoughts are pulling you strongly to the character's demise it might be best to follow your original instinct.

 

[Brian G Turner]

I'm not a very emotional person, but when I think of some of my later plot arcs I find myself welling up.

I find the real difficulty is being able to communicate that to the reader - make them care as much as you do!

 

[thaddeus6th]

No. Death is a fantastic way to define a character. The finality of it comes to us all, and making characters you like immortal and impervious to the woes of the story makes them unrealistic. Story should dictate the fate of characters, not the other way around.

Well, I said 'no'. Mourn would be excessive. There was one in Bane of Souls I considered not killing off. But it fit perfectly, so that character had to die.

 

[psychotick]

Hi,

Yes to an extent. Openly weeping no, but some as in my MC's I really don't want to kill. That's part of the reason for the ending of Dragon.

Christian Aaron Moody the Third had been through so much, he had achieved his singular goal, and he was perfect for the glorious victory death. So I wrote that ending. But then I never used it. It was simply too hard saying goodbye to him. But I couldn't give him the conquering hero returning in triumph having saved the universe either. It didn't feel right. Not when his entire quest had been completed. You see I never wrote him with the quest as having a find his family and then live happily ever after. His quest was simply to find them, period. There was never a single moment in the book that he looked beyond that point. Only to get to that point. And it was also necessary for him to die (sort of) in order to finally show how much he had given to this singular goal in his life.

So in the end I left him in a limbo. Dying in triumph on the bridge of his battleship but could still be saved. The story arc was complete whether he lived or died. I figured it was best to leave it to each reader's imagination as to whether he lived or died.

Plus it led to the possibility of a sequel.

Cheers, Greg.

 

[Stephen Palmer]

Do you mourn your characters? I don't mean outright tears, of course, that'd be slightly concerning, but do you miss them? Are you sad to see them go? Have you ever hung onto them when you know they should really go?

Had to do this a couple of days ago. Had to build up to it!

I've never hung on to characters, but we've all (or most?) of us experienced someone's death and we know what it's like. A character going can be nearly as bad.

 

[TheDustyZebra]

I think you should mourn your characters, because if you don't care that they died, nobody else will, either. But mourning takes many forms, and everybody marks the passing of someone they loved in a different way.

 

[Tecdavid]

Depends on the scenario, I think. Some characters are written for the very purpose of them dying later, so, knowing this, a writer might not feel much of an attachment to them (this might be the reason some generic or overly-inhumane villains are written the way they are; the writer knows they're doomed and so develops only one side to them). If the character is written without the idea they'll die, but they do so later anyway, then yeah, I'd imagine there's more emotions going into the writing then.

 

[Perpetual Man]

No. Let them die, painfully and...

More honestly yes, to a degree. If you have created a character that is needed to die, and you invest time and effort into making them sympathetic, so the reader feels it when they die, you should too. I seem to be able to disconnect when the moment is needed, but I feel something missing when I start writing later.

My last WiP that I should go back to had a major change for one of the main characters, and it was almost as though she died when the change happened. In some ways that hurt more than killing her.

Thinking about it, it seems as though I 'change' the characters a lot rather than killing them. Perhaps the most important, closest character is the Perpetual Man (no surprise really), and although he lives a life of change and reinvention, I recently wrote perhaps the most important part of his story, the key moment in his long, long life.

It is not really a change, neither is it a death but writing that moment, knowing it was the payoff to all he was about and how it all fit together was like locking everything into place. 'This is the end.'

That really hurt writing it, knowing that once written I had effectively tied the knot and his destiny was locked to what it should have been.

 

[chrispenycate]

Why would it be excessive to cry openly? Plenty of people cry in front of the TV screen when a fictitious character is eliminated, or merely mistreated, and they haven't invested anything like the energy or empathy that an author does routinely, for each and every major player creates. I can even get emotional about villains, or, in fact villages, but the latter's just resenting the effort required to worldbuild something to tear down, incinerate, destroy; but if you haven't built up a bond with the region equivalent to that of the protagonist how do you expect your audience to associate with the loss? And I've known people totally devastated by the loss of a building, belongings – you need to project this to the readers (something I'm not particularly gifted in), interiorising before projecting.

Irrational? Certainly. But I have a tendency toward over-rationalisation, which needs compensating for.

 

[monsterchic]

Depends on how attached I get to them while writing. If I honestly couldn't care less, then it's fine. But if I care and can identify with said character, I'll be upset if they die.

 

[thaddeus6th]

Tecdavid, that's an interesting perspective. I've got a few characters that will be bumped off, and I want to make them as likeable as possible precisely so people get affected when they end up dead.

 

[Tecdavid]

Tecdavid, that's an interesting perspective. I've got a few characters that will be bumped off, and I want to make them as likeable as possible precisely so people get affected when they end up dead.

Oh, I didn't mean to imply that the characters wouldn't inspire sadness in the reader for dying -- in fact, aren't most major character deaths supposed to achieve just that? -- but rather that the writer might not feel so bad about it themselves, if they know that's the characters' fate from the get-go.

 

[AnyaKimlin]

I've cried over the death of characters. One character I tried desperately to save but he was determined to take that bullet.

There was a scene I wrote with one of my most charismatic characters - he was critical and I thought he was going to die on me. It took me a week to write the next few words (turned out he survived).

I don't write characters I don't have a connection with on some level. My current story I wrote a policewoman on a doorstep. I don't even have her real name as my main character calls her PC Bulldog but I'd be gutted if she died later.

 

[Jester85]

One character I tried desperately to save but he was determined to take that bullet.

I really didn't want to part with one character even though I felt like the story was just flowing organically toward his death. I came up with these contrived ways of sparing him until I realized I was hurting the story by forcing it to go in an unnatural direction.

 

[Boneman]

Yes. If I mourn for them, I hope my readers will, too. And the effect that death will have on my other characters can be sooo enabling. Here's what Harlen Coben's narrator and MC said in 'Tell No One' about the death of his wife and Father (btw, the film is ten times better than the book!)

Here is the truth about tragedy: It's good for the soul. The fact is, I'm a better person because of the deaths. If every cloud has a silver lining, this one is admittedly pretty flimsy. But there it is. That doesn't mean it's worth it or an even trade or anything like that, but I know I'm a better man than I used to be. I have a finer sense of what's important. I have a keener understanding of people's pain.

 

[DaCosta]

I had to kill off an MC's family recently and found it incredibly difficult to write. I just didn't want to get in too close, as though my subconscious could shirk around it. Even though it's not real, when you spend so long with a character, it can feel real.

Needless to say, the character in question died last night and it felt pretty good. It worked. The story demanded it and now I have the fallout to deal with = makes for some delicious writing.

 

[ZombieWife]

I mourn them in some way when they die.

Then I go back and have to revise and it's like, "SURPRISE! I'm BACK!"

And after 5-6 times of that, it gets kind of traumatic.