You mean like, over the course of the finished book? Or gotten rid of before finishing so that anyone who didn't read it as a WIP wouldn't know they were ever there?
As for the latter, I don't think I've ever completely gotten rid of a character that I started out with. I've scaled some of them back a lot from their original versions, though. I had a great time getting rid of the antagonist in From Blood to Roses, Senator Brock McLennan. I had him poisoned, kidnapped, then shot in the head by one of my MC's, after which both MC's had a joyous sexual encounter next to his dead body. That scene was an absolute blast to write. Dude totally had it coming though, I swear! The only other time I've ever killed off a character was back in my fanfic days. In my MOST LAUDED FANFIC EVER (it has received nearly 1,000 Kudos on AO3), I was trying to get a character on the show who was kind of a dick to an emotionally vulnerable state so his walls could come crumbing down, comfort sex would ensue, yadda yadda yadda. I had introduced his grandparents (original characters not from the show) early on in the story, and one day a bolt of inspiration struck me. I stood up and screamed "I'm gonna kill his grandfather!" and then proceeded to do exactly that. Everyone cried and then then hot sexytimes were had. Apparently I have some sort of morbid death/sex fixation.
I've done a lot of recycling were I get rid of a character but then make a new character from their ashes! Concern.jpg Repent your sins!
I had the "hero" of my story die at the climax of act one. When I say "hero", I mean that he fulfilled the archetype more than anyone else. So, basically, I had a big problem. I was planning my story, got to the end of act one, then I realized that my characters could've resolved the story at that point. If they had managed to get away, then they would have regrouped and been able to just barely kill the main antagonist (At least, they logically could've. Seriously, these characters powers were accidentally made to defeat opponents much stronger then them if they just coordinate properly.). But, I didn't want to end the story there. I had themes I wanted to explore and viewpoints I wanted to convey. The solution? There're two characters that are arguably the most important to the main cast; the "hero", and the youngest member, a girl who only stays with the group because she sees them as family. If the "hero" dies (He's the leader, by the way), the group loses their moral and flees. If the girl dies, they all get pissed and rage out and fight back, probably winning the fight with a couple more characters dying. So I killed off the leader. I put him in a situation where he has to fight him off alone to protect two other characters. He dies because, despite being the most skilled fighter as well as being somewhat OP when compared to the rest of the group, he alone is no match for the antagonist. While he does manage to give his enemy a massive wound that comes into play in each subsequent encounter with this villain, he dies. The team scatters and I get to write more story while comfortably pacing out my sub-plots, character developments, and messages! (By the way, there is a version of the story where the girl dies, but the team has to flee anyways. This version, however, was never planned further than that idea) Oh, a bit of a side-note: The antagonist knew that, if he were to take on the whole crew as they were, they had a shot at killing him. So, he engineered a situation where the group were forced to separate and he could kill off the leader, the "hero", without taking any major risks. So, this isn't, like, a fluke that this happened, it was intentionally done by the villain. There's also another character in a different story; this time with things like robots and cyborgs. This one's actually pretty short and sweet in terms of explanation. I created this robot antagonist. He's huge and can regenerate indefinitely. Yes, indefinitely. This robot is functionally immortal as long as his power supply keeps working. Long story short, I made an OP villain. So, functionally immortal enemy, how do the protagonists kill it? There's this one other character, she is a cyborg. She has the ability to short-circuit the giant robot, effectively killing it. The draw is, this will short-circuit her whole body. She'll die and there's no way to circumvent this. She decides that giving her life to stop the monster is a fair trade. The protagonist crew gets her close enough to do this and she kills the robot while also sacrificing herself. So, yeah. One because the story would've ended too soon otherwise. Another one because I accidentally made a damn-near immortal villain that I just loved too much to do away with.
There's plenty of characters I've gotten rid of, though very few have been abandoned completely. Often times, a completely new character comes from the idea I originally had. Honestly, my two main characters pretty much switched personalities. Other characters originally had a much more page time, but that has changed due to their presence not working with the plot I want to tell.
Ooooh so many characters.... so little time.... But more seriously I’ll restrict myself to main or major characters since killing off unnamed chars is just not really much fun. One of my major characters got hanged in gaol after loosing his mind. Quite emotional and all since he was the father figure and mentor of my MC and perhaps 9ne of my better characters according to my feedback. Anyway. I had to get rid of him because of the plot. If he had stayed then most of my plot would make no sense since he would have been able to resolve most of it due to this knowledge of related events and concerning characters. I’ve had a few scenes characters die, but those were simply not as... fulfilling?
In earlier drafts, I had a character called Luke. Ultimately, I didn't need him in the book at all, so he just got deleted. Not even a death scene. I felt so sad and so sorry about this that I wrote a completely unrelated death scene for him that's not part of the book at all, and there I let him confess his love to my female MC, who could never love him back (because plot). I also have a character called Hayley. I tried to kill her over multiple drafts, so I've written her death scene a few times. She insists on resurrecting. She was supposed to be an "extra" of little significance, there only to fill the scene and make it interesting while the main character went on his way. Well, she's not dead at all. Currently she's a major POV character in my book It's rather frustrating. There's another character I really killed that came in line with the plot, and is very much part of the book - it was simply what was natural. It was a suicide and when I came to write it, it was completely unplanned. I just felt that's what he'd do. I was shocked by my own decision for several days and enquired after my alpha reader if she thought it was the right decision. I even made bullet point plans to see where the story would go if he didn't die. Ultimately, I didn't see where he really fit in after that point and he was more like an extra I had to take care of with no natural role in the plot. His death also gave power to my main character's subsequent decisions and set him on a totally different path. Letting the character live would have meant trying to resolve his guilt, which was what spurred him on to killing himself, and at that point in the book there's no room for that anymore as it was the final third of the plot. Doing it would have meant taking focus away from the actual main character and that simply wasn't the right place in the book to do that. So... I wrote it, killed the character off. I still can't quite believe I did that. I'd never intended for him to die. Then I killed a second one in the same book, at the very end. You can guess who the necessary victim might be for the ending of a book. I hadn't exactly planned on killing him either and all the way through the book I was still hoping there might be a way of redeeming him, letting him live. Ultimately, his death was necessary for my MC's character arc, I feel, and the way my character truly filled his role over the course of the novel meant there really wasn't any other way. He was always a grey character and very human, and it was only towards the end, step by step, you came to saw how truly evil he actually was and none of the humanity in him could have saved him, because he wouldn't have made the right choices. So there was no other way. I don't exactly feel sadness for this one, as ultimately I saw no other possibility for him. I'd wanted him redeemed - even in death, I'd have liked that - but it didn't happen.
Focusing on major characters excluding villains, I have a few planned. One of the key early characters in the story is killed by one of the major villains suddenly. I intend to kill them for two reasons- as part of the plot surrounding the villain, and for the sake of the plotline of one of my MCs who is close to this character. One of my MCs is already (un)dead. Their tragic death scene will appear as backstory for the character. It's obviously an important moment for the character. Later on, a character who has been close to one of my MCs for a very long time ends up on the opposite side of a major conflict. To make things worse for the MC, they find out this fact only after this other character uses the MC's confidence to arrange an attack against the protagonists in a shocking betrayal. The two characters come to blows, the MC is not ready to kill the other, but the other is so they gain the advantage. One of the other MCs kills the other character to save the MC.
I've killed important characters before, both friends/allies and opponents/enemies of the protagonist. If it advances the story in a meaningful way, and the death happens in a way that makes sense, then why not? I've also written off characters entirely, so they would not even appear in a story. It happens when I write something, add an appearance (or a few appearances), and I'm not happy with where it is going. I just completely review the value of the character and their role in the story. Sometimes I change the character, sometimes I change the story around them, and sometimes I just scrap the thing entirely.
I killed off a character that I had developed from a scoundrelly pirate to a very strong friend and rescuer of the hero group. I basically came to truly love this guy, as did the group and all the readers. So in the end, he kills a villain in a knife fight, who desperately needed killing, but he himself was mortally wounded, a sucking chest wound, and gets to thank the group for being the friends he had never before them had, wondering what we will find on "the other side" or if there is an "other side". Then he lifts his companion's hand away for the wound to let himself slowly sink into oblivion, after putting his son in charge of seeing them to the border. Another character, I got rid of by letting him stay in his hometown to take care of his mother, while his sister and the group press on. Reason? I was never really satisfied that I developed him as a character in E&D, just always a tag-along to his sister, who was the heroine. I just let him go away. However, he is a major figure in the sequel, set ten years on, and developing nicely.
Usually I have to combine characters because I make too many and they do similar chores. In my WIP two characters show up at the end who are similar in tone to a character at the start of the novel. I might have to cut them simply because they are distracting the two main characters from having their showdown. They've kind of hijacked the ending.
I've never complete gotten rid of a character in the process of writing a story. Like others here have said, some characters I originally created just get scaled back. There were some times when a character was removed from the story in a logical way, but they still fulfilled their purpose. Then, of course, all the characters who have been killed off. But since I haven't finished a story yet, it's hard for me to give a definitive answer. I know that, if I have a character leave the story or get killed, it's for a good reason. None of it is pointless.
Gosh reading that brief description has me pulling a sad face. I think if I'd read the actual thing, it'd make me cry! I already wish you hadn't killed him and I've never read your book!
Well, not really ...their personal histories won't mean anything to anybody who hasn't read the story. But I find it hard to kill off characters, because even if they're not nice people (and three of the four I killed were definitely not) they are still people. And I made them all into actual characters with complex personalities—even the minor ones. That makes it hard. It's like the difference between killing a bunch of people by dropping a bomb on them from the air, and killing them in hand-to-hand combat, or by poisoning, or some other more personal method of dispatch. You get to watch them die, and you know that they are lost to the world afterwards. Sometimes not much of a loss, but still ...I don't like being the judge.
Actually, my eyes still get damp when I reread that chapter. He was a strong character and his death unexpected... even to me, when I wrote the chapter. He took over and described it to me.
Are you talking about getting rid of on a whim, because they weren't working / you grew tired of them? Or as part of the plot? If it's the former, then they should never have been there in the first place, and should have been omitted, not killed off.
If Hayley has become an important character in your book and you cannot find a reason to kill her off, then you probably should not kill her. I would not even consider killing off side characters if their deaths do not advance the story. Any death of a character important to the story should cause a change to the plot in some way. In any case, you can still kill her but she has to cause an impact to the story. Maybe Hayley could become one of your main-side characters and you do not kill her... or can pull of a tragedy type conclusion or falling action where she actually ends up dying even though she is an important character who seemed as if she cannot die. Though this sounds like critiquing, I do not intend to make that way. I want to show you and others what my point-of-view is on the deaths of characters in my stories.
Cuervo Jones: You might have survived Cleveland. You might have escaped from New York. But this is L.A., vato. And you're about to find out that this f***ing city can kill anybody! TBH it is only worth killing off a character if it furthers the plot or adds to character growth/development.
Those are pretty broad rationale though. There a lot of ways to further the plot or add to character growth/development.
Of course, but what Cave Troll is saying is that when it comes to killing a character off, it should advance the story instead of just being there to be there...if that makes sense.
