Death
Have you ever noticed how many stories involve the death of characters, or even just the threat of character death, as an integral part of the story? How many young heroes are thrown into conflict by the murders of loved ones? How many warriors make the ultimate sacrifice so others may go on? How many horror monsters drag children into the darkness and consume them?
Did you think of Luke Skywalker’s aunt and uncle dying? Of Boromir giving his life to defend the hobbits? Of Pennywise luring a young boy into a sewer? It’s entirely likely you did. It’s also likely you thought of completely different examples.
It’s morbid to think about, perhaps, but the spectre of death lurks between the pages of many a book. Arguably, the majority of them. Even stories that on the surface level should feature little darkness or danger can surprise us with an emotional gut punch and the sudden death of a beloved character. I’ve met a lot of people who still vividly remember how they felt reading The Bridge to Terabithia as children. Even The Simpsons, of all things, isn’t immune to suddenly killing off a character permanently and with no warning - remember Maude? Even my own stories frequently feature death as a significant element.
Death is everywhere in our stories. Which, when you think about it, isn’t that surprising. Not only is it a very severe threat with which to raise the stakes of the story, it is also one of the very few universal experiences: nothing is forever. All things must die.
That being said though, with how prevalent death can be in storytelling, it can be surprisingly easy to write it very badly. Death might be everywhere, but it is always significant. It always matters to someone. The death of a character of any degree of importance in a story is something that should be felt. It should resonate with characters and audience both and it should have repercussions that are felt after the fact.
Not to harp on about Star Wars too much, but it has always irritated me that Luke’s aunt and uncle dying early into of A New Hope was barely a bother to him, while Obi-Wan’s death had a huge and lasting impact on him. Even with the implications of more recent additions to the canon to consider, the death of a man that he barely knew apparently mattered more to him than the deaths of the people who raised him.
I think that this is a prime example of a good story handling character death badly. We as the audience might have little reason to care about their demise - we’ve barely known them and they die off-screen. But it definitely should matter to Luke. It feels less like a very significant event in-universe and more like George Lucas needed to get the stuffy parental figures out the way so Luke could go on his hero’s journey. One of the biggest mistakes a writer can make when handling character death is not having their characters react appropriately to that death in-universe. It might be a plot-device to us as writers, but to the character it should be a very significant occurrence. Death is a big deal.
It’s not that different from killing characters purely for shock value, which is another practice I don’t necessarily agree with. Shock value only goes so far in a story. It can’t carry a narrative and the more you try it, the more the effect is diluted. It’s fine for a character's death to be surprising and shocking but, if that’s all it is, you’ve sacrificed more than you’ve gained by killing that character off. The death still needs to have larger ramifications for the story. The death of the character needs to be worth losing the potential impact that character could have if still a part of the story.
Of course, I’m not saying don’t kill off your characters. That would be hypocritical of me, to say the least. The first thing I did in Domino is remove a large chunk of a city from the equation. What I’m saying is that character death has to mean something both for the audience and for the characters that survive and continue carrying the story forwards.
I think some examples of stories that use death extremely well are Pact (which I recently reviewed), Space Boy, Game of Thrones and The Last of Us. These series are all quite different from each other - different genres, mediums, formats, target audiences and tones. Something they have in common though is that the major deaths in these series all carry narrative weight throughout the rest of the story.
Pact and The Last of US (both the game and TV versions) do something similar mechanically, although the narrative impact is not the same. A character death from the earliest parts of the story carries significance to the plot the entire way through. In the case of Pact, Blake’s grandmother appears alive in only a single chapter. However, her machinations are felt throughout the entirety of the plot. In fact, much of the plot is derived from her schemes in life and her plans for after her demise. In The Last of Us, Joel’s entire character arc is informed by the death of his daughter in the prologue of the game and the first episode of the TV show. Similarly, much of Ellie’s arc is also derived from the death of Riley. These are all characters with very little in the way of actual physical appearances in the story, but whose deaths hold narrative impact through the entire plot. If these characters’ deaths are so felt in their stories, there is no reason major character deaths should not be - and, for the most part, this is true in these works.
The A Song of Ice and Fire series and, by extension, Game of Thrones are infamous for killing off major characters constantly and affording them little in the way of the typical plot armour. People die all over the place in Westeros and Essos. But the deaths of important narrative figures are always felt beyond the moments they occur. The death of Ned Stark represents a paradigm shift in-universe as well as reframes expectation to the audience and creates a sense of dread that persists throughout the rest of the story. It shows us that nobody is safe. The deaths of Joffrey, Catelyn Stark and the Three-Eyed Raven have long-reaching consequences that last right through Game of Thrones - and likely through the books too. Even when these deaths don’t seem immediately related to where things are, they are dominoes whose fall herald important changes in the world and the story. Even when death is a frequent occurrence in the plot, it is treated with significance by the characters it should be significant to and, usually, the the wider narrative.
Space Boy isn’t a story with a lot of death. It’s got, to an extent, a lighter tone and is aimed primarily at a younger audience. But even in this story death is present and significant. Amy is haunted by the death of Sato. This is due not only to the shock of it, but to how much fear Sato inspired in her in life and the fact her sudden death didn’t allow her proper closure. She has a lot of complicated feelings around the subject and those feelings follow her. Oliver’s entire personality is informed by death. He made every effort to bury his emotions along with the population of the Arno. His fear of connecting to people is informed by his deep sadness and sense of loss.
These are just a few ways stories have managed character death well and there’s plenty of others beyond them. The point isn’t that there are specific ways that you should handle character death, it’s that such an event should matter. Even if it means little to the plot itself, it should have a strong impact on the characters with connections to the deceased - good and bad. Killing characters off just for the shock value and then never properly addressing it again feels cheap and it’s a waste of a character’s narrative potential. That’s a big part of why I’m not particularly fond of the advice to kill a character off if you find yourself stuck. I’m glad it is a refrain that has become less common, because I feel like it encourages shock value death instead of death with consequence and meaning. At the very least, it trivialises it for the writer and I think that’s not the best mindset to have about events which should be a big deal in-universe.
Again, that’s not to say you shouldn’t kill your characters off. If it makes sense for the story you want to tell, you definitely should. You can narratively murder millions of your darlings if you choose, as brutally and unjustly as you please. Just make sure that the characters who survive your slaughterhouse respond to the experience properly and in ways that continue to be felt throughout the story.
