Only you know the variable, What I suggested was a way to make the selection for yourself. Truly, only you can make the choice.
no i understand, i thank everyone for there input, i know i need to make the choice since it is my story. but i appreaciate all the comments
Totally change the story. Have the king and prince kill each other in such a way they don't even know if they succeeded. They die without the satisfaction of knowing if their plan the kill the other worked. Poison or something. There are no other princes to take the throne. No wife, no daughters. But your MC works his way to be king by winning the people's hearts. YAY!
That reminds me of Dune! ...sorry just finished reading it yesterday so it's still on my mind. I wish I knew the options for what you want to happen in the story depending on who died. Since I know you want a straight answer I would have to say: The king! I think killing the king is the best option because I agree with the above quoted. See I wasn't just having a Dune rant. Or you could kill the Prince and then have the King seek revenge for his sons death, but he goes insane in the process.
Just try to imagine if, while writing the Da Vinci Code, Dan Brown sent out a message to people who had no clue what his book is about, saying, "I'm in the middle of my book, and I have these characters: Silas, Robert Langdon, Leigh Teabanks, and Sophie Neveu. Which one should I kill? Knowing the story, wouldn't that change the whole rest of the story, if he killed Sophie or Robert Langdon instead of Silas? Not knowing the story, you could throw the names in a hat and pull one out. All due respect, but I don't think you want to design your story by random. Story writing isn't a game of Clue, where you can just pull a card, and it was Colonel Mustard in the Library with the Wrench.
With the wrench? Of course! I should have known! (Seriously, though, your entire post was very true. If you have a good idea of what's going to happen in your story and you have defined your characters pretty well, etc, I don't see how you could completely change what major character dies at the beginning without completely changing everything else about your story.)
(Seriously, though, your entire post was very true. If you have a good idea of what's going to happen in your story and you have defined your characters pretty well, etc, I don't see how you could completely change what major character dies at the beginning without completely changing everything else about your story.) I think there's a distinct difference between "major characters" and "main characters" Major Characters - I would define them as being highly influential in events, but at the end of the day they aren't necessary. Think of Boromir. Disposable. Main Characters - These are integral to the story and therefore must survive. Back in the day, I realized that any characters that die in stories are emotionally disposable - the viewer/reader isn't too distraught by the loss. How/why does this happen? Because they are flat characters who you don't empathize with or care about.
I can see, in a murder mystery, creating a character in Chapter 1 (or the Prologue) in order to kill the character in Chapter 1 (or the Prologue.) There, it's for the shock factor and setting up the story, though I think even in that case, it works best when the characters aren't flat and when you do create sympathy for the characters. Some Tess Gerretson novels, for example, open by causing you to really, really like the person, who seems realistic, deep and complex, and who dies at the end of the prologue. On another note, I remember reading "Lord of the Flies" (***spoiler warning***) and being very moved by Piggy's death. In that case, it was a major character, and late in the book. You may have read in an earlier post, my description of my process of writing my (still in progress) novel. I read Stephen King's "On Writing" and wrote about 50-100 pages of utter trash attempting to write the story without creating an outline. I later threw out the bad attempt and switched to doing an outline, and it was much better. In the "trash draft," I actually created a couple characters on the fly, realized I didn't like them and that they were flat, and just randomly killed them a chapter later. When I went back to square one, I eliminated those characters completely. They died an even worse death (better death for my story): I wrote them out of the story completely. Of course, there are characters of varying importance, from the main protagonist and antagonist, right down to the waitress who said, "You want fries with that," and never appeared again in the story. If the character isn't important, who cares if you kill him or her? Why even post a question about it -- just do it! Waitress, busboy, the king, the prince, the court jester, the bus driver, the guy with the duck suit and green sneakers. Of course, without having read the OP's story, we have no idea how important or unimportant these characters are, so my suggestion is, don't kill the king or prince, kill the guy with the duck suit and green sneakers. Or Mrs. Peacock with the Knife in the Study. Charlie
Fair enough. That being said, though, the point that I was trying to make is that if you have major characters (not main characters, but major characters), they should be important enough to the story that you shouldn't be able to continue in exactly the same way if you kill Character A instead of Character B or vice versa. For instance, in Star Wars, (SPOILER WARNING if you've never seen Star Wars somehow) Chewbacca and Obi Wan are major or fairly major characters, but they couldn't have simply inserted Chewbacca and had him die instead of Obi Wan because that would change tons of things as the story progressed.
my advice is to never kill off a character unless you have a specific and very good reason. it should never be a one or the other deal, or "hm, this would be a good time to kill someone, who should it be?" if you can't decide which one to kill, i'd suggest neither. unless you know there are reasons for either character's death to be necessary, but if you're having trouble deciding, that's obviously not the case. think about how each of the deaths would affect the direction of story and the characters in the story, and which result serves your purposes better. how i decide to kill characters, their deaths usually have an incredbily strong impact on the entire story. at times i think, this character(s) needs a dynamic change in order to reach the end of the story, and sometimes the death of a major character, or even main character, will do just that. sometimes i wonder what would happen if a main character (a person i had once thought was essential to the entire story) had survived. but i always come to the conclusion that their death served a greater purpose than their life. there's also when one of my characters has passed some sort of point of no return, that the only possible thing left is death. or they've just served their usefulness and now i can turn their death into a major plot point.
The deaths in Harry Potter were very emotional for some people. They were also necessary, though, for the story. George Martin is well known for killing likeable main characters. That is to say, you might read thirty chapters from character X's point of view, get emotionally attached, then he/she dies. He gradually introduces new characters to take up the story, or he gives familiar characters their own chapters. Those characters are just as important and influencial as the old veterans who have been around since the beginning. More importantly, they also work their way into the hearts of readers. Villains become heroes with a shift in perspective (cause it's all in where you're standing in his world) and you really have no idea who will live and who will die in the end. He even included a true prophesy that was thwarted by a very minor character, who only survived for a few chapters. People either love it or hate it, but George Martin is very popular for this. The uncertainty is really a breath of fresh air in a stale genre (fantasy). Killing a character just for shock value seems utterly pointless to me, but a well thought-out story that involves shocking deaths and tragedies can be very gripping.
Exactly... I think any character important enough to care whether your killed or not (as opposed to the one-line character, who could be anyone) would be important enough that the impact on your plot means, the plot itself would drive the killing. You can't just kill any major character and mix and match which one you kill, or you've got a different story. The story should drive it all, IMO. And if you somehow manage to defy all I've said and you do find yourself in an ambiguous spot where you can kill a character and you have a choice, only you can decide. It's your story! If I haven't read your story, how can I know whether you should kill the Prince or the King? Eeney, meeney, miney, moe... I would think that it's very rare that the choice between killing two major characters would have no effect on the rest of the story. I can imagine such a thing occurring, but then, the choice would be arbitrary by the author. I don't know, hypothetically, two boys about to fall off a cliff, the mother can only save one, Steve or Joe, and the entire rest of the story is identical except you keep saying, "Steve lived" or you keep saying "Joe lived." But when the choice is arbitrary and doesn't affect the story... again, who cares? If it has no effect on your story, and you can kill the Prince or you can kill the King, who cares whether you kill the Prince or kill the King? Your story remains the same, and I imagine, the King and the Prince can't have very much to do with the story, if you could pick which one to kill and it won't effect the events that follow!
I think it's a complete lack of communication as to how the plot is being constructed. At this point, I know there's a king and a prince... I don't even know if it's a comedy, a horror, a fantasy, a fairy tale, an emotional drama, a political thriller, a historic novel set in the 12th century or a futuristic novel set on another planet!
