One of the coolest things of being a writer is having a character completely at your control. You feel amazingly powerful and great when you can just kill someone off if they displease you. It’s incredibly fun to reduce brilliant characters to gibbering messes, and, by extension, doing the same to your readers.
Unfortunately, a bad thing happening to a character does not necessarily mean that the reader will feel for him. That is the hard part, where you actually have to make your readers love the character before you make them feel like a pool of Jell-o. When you’re going along, having loads of fun killing your characters, it can be a real shock that you actually have to make them likable first. Why make them likable when they’re dying in the next chapter?
Because if you want your readers to be emotionally crushed when a character dies, like Suzanne Collins does and Eoin Colfer does on occasion and Tolkien does and C.S. Lewis does and Cornelia Funke does and [enter great author's name here] does, then you’ve got to like the character first.
I could name untold amounts of spoilers from each of these books where someone dies that we all love. Cornelia Funke’s ending to Inkdeath, especially, is a beautiful example. If we hadn’t seen that character moving through the story beforehand, seen all his endearing qualities, we wouldn’t be quite so heartbroken at his death later on.
The same is true for Suzanne Collins. She manages to make a sad ending out of anything– and somehow you can still call it happy because the overarching evil has been destroyed. She kills beloved characters that are beloved because the main character thinks they’re beloved– which is one of the big points I want to talk about.
Making your characters lovable is a process; first you need to get your readers to like the main character. If you’re writing the story in first person, it’s easy if you get an engaging, funny, unique narrating voice. This is definitely not the place for showcasing your vocabulary. If you’re going through third person, it’s slightly more difficult because it doesn’t feel as though the characters are speaking directly to the readers. Nevertheless, a third person limited omniscient storytelling style can be very effective here as well. Along with the storytelling style, you need to make sure the character has likable traits, and make sure they’re visible. The latter part is of unquestionable importance.
Your main character is likable by now. Assuming you aren’t planning on killing your main character, things should progress to the next step, which is to make sure your main character likes someone.
If your readers like your main character, they will have esteem for his or her choices in friends– therefore, if you make sure your main character likes someone, the readers will most likely like that person as well. This person is an ideal person to kill now, but the closer to your protagonist the death is, the more likely your readers will hate you for it. A lot of authors just go this far with character deaths, such as Suzanne Collins in Mockingjay or Dumas in the Three Musketeers. This is by far the most shocking kind of death you can have, and unfortunately if you don’t have a good ending to wrap it up, you will lose a lot of readers. Dumas did it correctly and was able to make a happy ending out of a sad one. Collins did it wrong and was able to make a sad ending out of a happy one. When this type of death happens near the beginning of the movie, it’s a great sort of inciting incident, and the end can still be happy. For example, the Lion King, where Mufasa dies. This sends little Simba out on his own into a state of happy apathy– Hakuna Matata– until someone comes to bring him back to his world. It’s brilliantly done.
Another thing you can do is have a main character and another character who is pretty despicable throughout the book, but gradually comes into the protagonist’s friendship. In Kenneth Oppel’s Airborn there was a death like this. In Jonathon Stroud’s Bartimaeus Trilogy, there was a death like this– and since the side character had only been really honorable in the last few chapters, it’s especially crushing– but great when added to the overall ending. Another great one is Boromir’s death in Lord of the Rings. Just moments before, the guy was trying to forcibly take the One Ring from Frodo’s possession– then he dies protecting Frodo’s best friends from orcs. We don’t really have a chance to like him until the very end, when he’s acting honorably to atone for his mistakes.
So let’s say you aren’t planning on killing your main character or your main character’s best friend. The next thing to do is have your main character’s best friend like someone.
It’s really complicated, I know, but this is actually how Cornelia Funke did it in the Inkworld trilogy, and those books have inspired much of this post.
Your main character has a best friend, who has another person he or she really likes, be it a mentor or an acquaintance. The main character doesn’t necessarily have to like this person, actually. If that person dies, the protagonist doesn’t need to be directly effected, but the sadness travels through the best friend into the protagonist– you feel for the best friend because his best friend died. This is the way to kill off a supporting character when you don’t want to kill off the one supporting character who would give a happy ending to your book. If your character has a love interest, and the love interest dies, the character will most likely go insane– and that makes for a very bad ending. Unless of course your main character was the center of a love triangle. In that case, he or she would just say “Well, that solves that problem”, and go marry the other side of the triangle. I would hate to read or write that ending.
Anyway, my point was that if you kill the love interest, your chances of making a good ending have gone down by half. If you kill the love interest’s best friend, that leaves the path open for a happy ending with the slight tinge of regret for the other character’s life.
Step one: make your main character likable. Step two: make your main character’s best friend likable by making him or her liked by the main character. Step three (optional): make your main character’s best friend’s best friend likable by following step two twice.
I wish I had known this before the start of August.
