Has death been done to death?

It seems like a lot of people here talk about killing off characters. I will admit, I kill characters. I don't know what it is, sometimes I just have to do it. But it's been done a million times. Too much? Just wondering what you guys think. Has death been done to death? And if so, do you keep it out of your story? Would a story without dying characters stand out more?

 

Yes, there seems to be a growing preference for killing off characters. For me, frequent characters deaths are a sign of writer's inability to handle their role in the story in a proper way. Sure, it's fine to kill off characters if the plot demands so. If you're writing a novel involving a lot of fight/wars and conflicts, it's normal that characters die, but doing it all the time could turn the reader off.
I killed a couple of minor, less important characters, but if their deaths are to be meaningful, it's best to avoid killing them too frequently. As a reader, I would ultimately stop carrying for characters if they are being killed to easily and too frequently.

I also think that killing a character is the less creative way of getting rid of them. Instead of killing off an important character to exclude him from the plot, why not use something different? Why not disgrace him, sent him to exile, make him incapacitated, or whatever you think of?
That would add a bit more variation to the story.

 

I once did a story where if someone died, they'd go to Heaven, but in Heaven you could still die, and if you did, you'd go back to Earth. On Earth there was a mysterious population explosion, and it turned out there was a war going on in Heaven, so literally everyone in that story died multiple times. So, no, I don't think killing characters is too much or cliche or even attempt to keep it out of my stories. And, no, I don't think not having a dying character really makes it stand out more, because there are also still literally tonnes of books that don't kill anyone in them. Just, as @Reollun said, be creative with it, try to make the death actually mean something, and don't just have it there because everyone else is doing it. Also, don't not kill people just because everyone else is killing them. I guess do what's best by your story rather than following whatever trend is going on.

 

Am I feeling that both of you are referring to genre of things like Game of Thrones? I agree that in stories like that, Death seems to come about a little too often. At the rate they go, any society would crumble in a generation or two.

Some genres make it unavoidable. It’s often used to show the gravity of a situation. If a giant shark was bothering a Massachusetts town, but nobody dies, Jaws wouldn’t be as menacing. Even if only one person died, it just wouldn’t be engaging and I wouldn’t feel nervous for the guys on the boat hunting it.

I do enjoy when characters are allowed to live and just be written out of the plot though, it just seems more realistic to our modern experience. Stephen King I think tends to end too many characters by simply killing them off. The Stand comes to mind (even though I love that story.)

 

I can see how you might think it's overdone thanks to things like GoT and every imitator its produced. I don't really kill characters off, but that's because I like my characters to do what they do best -- be interesting and drive the plot.

 

To some extent yes. But I've also read a ton historical fiction with plenty of character deaths. I'm aware of how brutal history was, but sometimes I feel characters deaths are way over the top.

Yes, I agree. I enjoy when characters simply lose relevance. It's way more realistic than some spectacular death.

 

I've got mixed feeling on this. On the one hand, untimely death in pre-modern societies was extremely common. I mean, plague could kill up to 80% of an urbanized population, though close to 20% in rural areas. In very many wars, the explicit goal was ethnic cleansing/genocide, and even when this wasn't the end-goal, citizens would still often be razed (killing up to 75%+ of the population) to make a point. Just duels in early 19th ce Europe killed 1/3 of nobles.

One thing that bothers me on the other hand, though, is that many deaths in fiction either carry too much weight, or not enough. But the thing that bothers me most is when authors kill off numerous characters, and half of them miraculously survive, to return in later chapters/books/episodes. It cheapens the death and the emotions and growth the characters experienced in response to the death. The worst offenders are deus-ex-machina revivals, where a character is just author-magicked back to life for the sake of the plot or to appease readers.

As I'm writing this, I'm remembering a show I've been watching with my girlfriend. At one point, an evil character (and the protagonist's lover) finds redemption he's been searching for over the course of several seasons, and sacrifices himself so that his friends may live. Good ending, right? Well, the director brought him back in the Same. Exact. Episode. The protagonist doesn't even have time to grieve for her lost love- he literally magically comes back from the dead several hours after dying. His explanation: "Yeah, Zeus liked me, so he sent me back."

That was probably the worst character revival I've ever seen. Nothing leads up to the revival. Nothing follows from it. He's just magically back like he never died at all.

 

God, that show is a bit of a guilty pleasure of mine but even I couldn't excuse that one. Oof. Talk about an I Got Better.

Anyway.

I think it's very story-dependent. Some settings and tones are highly fitting for tons of death, some would be broken by a single death. You just have to be self-aware with it. I've always been a bit of a gorehound and I love killing characters, but as I grew I realized that if you kill everyone, it's going to stop mattering. And the important thing - I think - is for it to either matter, or for the fact that it doesn't matter to matter. It's as much the reactions of other characters as anything. Does anyone in-universe care about this death? If not, then what's the narrative point of it? And if people do care, do they only care because you needed to give them some motivation (see: dead wife and kid), or because you've built up a real relationship between these characters?

I'm torn on a character death in the novel I may do for nano at the moment. He's a relatively minor character - I'd call him tertiary, because he's primarily a friend of a secondary character. I've pushed giving him more screentime, but he and his death are really only linked to the development of that secondary character. Now, I want that dev for the secondary character, but I can't expect the reader to care that much about the tertiary character's death. The mc isn't even hit that hard by it. So I'm mostly banking on the reader feeling bad for the secondary character, which is almost definitely something I would advise someone else against doing. It seems pretty unintuitive. But I don't know - we'll see how well I can wrangle it.

Another example I've talked about before is a character I've got with regenerative powers that make him basically invulnerable. He dies all the time ... but he gets better. I wanted to explicitly look at how character deaths are treated and how they work - I mean, for the mc, the first few times he 'dies' in front of her it is pretty traumatic, but it just becomes part of their routine. I guess I'm trying to be meta He comes from a project where I specifically kept myself in line when it came to killing characters off, especially when it comes to protagonists killing other characters. I took the controversial stance of 'killing people is bad' on this one and challenged myself and the character to find ways of dealing with the bad guys in ways other than killing them, even though it is basically always within their ability. I think it's worth looking at how you can generate conflict and tension when death is simply off the table. With the regenerating character it's literal - everyone knows he's going to be fine, so how do I make you feel genuinely afraid or worried for his well-being? I think it makes the few deaths that I do allow really mean more, because they are, off the top of my head, moral event horizons or horrible accidents.

Honestly, I could keep talking to myself about character deaths for a while - it's something I find very interesting - but I'll cap it. Is it overdone? Nah, just do it well. Understand the stakes and bring something interesting to the table with it.

 

To be honest, I'm a sucker for a cliche, Hollywood ending. I love happily ever after. My real life is shitty enough--the whole world is shitty enough--that I for one do not need sad stories. I can read autobiographies and history books that are full of sadder stories than I could ever imagine. As such, I don't like killing characters, and I avoid it if I can. If they gotta die, I try to make it a worthwhile moment. But, you know... A man's gotta do what a man's gotta do. Sometimes they gotta pay the piper.

 

Death is one of the few things every human being has in common. Everybody Poops, and Everybody Dies. We don't including the pooping in most books, but I think it can be pretty powerful to including some dying.

 

It would certainly make the story original if everyone lived a normal and healthy life

 

I feel like death is something that can't be "overdone", but rather just done cheaply. It also matters on what type of book you're writing and the tone of it.

 

The thing about death is that it's one of very few certainties in life, an absolute given, and dealing with that reality is part of the human experience. Some people live their lives in fear of death, others live like it will never happen to them; entire belief systems are dedicated to making sense of it, and countless resources to finding ways to stall it. We don't really understand it, but we all have our own ways of accepting the inevitability of it. Given that it's such a fundamental theme in human existence, I think it's understandable that it crops up so much in literature (much like love and relationships, come to think of it).

I agree with this - I wouldn't avoid it just because it's been done so many times before, but I wouldn't throw it in 'just because' either. As someone else said earlier, the majority of people who exit our lives don't do so by dying. But some people do, and by all means, if a death adds something to your story I don't think you should shy away from it. Coming to terms with grief and loss might add a lot of depth to your character/s, or further your plot in some way.

 

I don't see anything wrong with it. If they gotta die, they gotta die. I mean, I guess if you are just killing your characters just for the sake of killing your characters, it's probably not a good idea, but character deaths can be important for plot, the development for other characters, theme...I would condemn it right away.

 

Just some fun facts about death for you to consider.
(I just hope for your sake, that who ever dies does not poop themselves at any point thereafter.)
https://www.verywell.com/what-happens-to-my-body-right-after-i-die-1132498
https://health.howstuffworks.com/diseases-conditions/death-dying/dying-process.htm

And may they be never used in any way to be reanimated. Unless you have a macabre sense of humor.

 

If you have the opportunity, you should read Stiff and Spook by Mary Roach. She does an excellent job researching both what happens to us when when die, what happens to our bodies after we die, and whatever possibly exists of the afterlife in these two books.

 

This is just my opinion.

I feel like Death should be done if it makes sense for the story, moves the plot forward, and develops the characters more. But more importantly, if there's a good reason. It may feel like people are dying in Game of Thrones all willy nilly, but each death has its own drastic effect on the world and the characters.

I feel like if you're just going for sheer shock value, and just a feeling of, "This is too happy, I need to kill somebody off", it comes off as forced and unnecessary to me.

But on the other hand, death in stories makes things unpredictable, nobody is safe, people can die, and there are stakes and consequences.

 

For example I live in a part of the country that is experiencing a heroin epidemic. People are dying every day of OD. People are dropping like flies. It’s nuts how dangerous heroin is yet people use it daily.

I think if I wrote a story about a heroin addict who struggles with their addiction and ends up dying anyway. I think this treatment of death would be non trivial and would serve to illuminate the nature of addiction and death.

I think death is one of the most important things that we can write about as long it is approached with the gravity it deserves.

As an example: Faulkner and Cormac McCarthy treat the subject of death very well, in my opinion.

 

Context, context, context.

If it makes sense for them to die, sure. If not, then no.

Also, is the character someone the reader ought to have invested into? If so, then it could be a meaningful death. If not, then honestly who cares they're just an extra.

Ultimately I don't think you should be killing characters for its own sake like a discount George Martin. Instead characters ought to die when it makes sense (like a real George Martin) for them to and drives the story forward in a good way.

 

Let me tell you a story:

We were in a car accident and my wife almost died but I pulled her out, then she held pressure on my cut, and we lived.

Let me tell you a story:

We were in a car accident and I tried to pull my wife out, but she died. I'll die soon as well. Nothing could be done.

_____

I think a lot of people enjoy stories because they include examples of people overcoming problems, and they hope that they can do the same. People learn from stories. When you kill an important character, a lot of people will say, "thanks for wasting my time."

There are readers who don't mind a good tragedy, but a lot of tragedies seem like warnings, or examples of what not to do. We enjoy watching other people descend and say, "that won't happen to me."

Killing a character the audience was rooting for, because the character had hope and was giving their best effort, feels really cheap. It feels cheap in the same way as "deus ex machina." The writer is basically saying, "there is no hope so you better pray for the machines of god to save you."

Maybe that is art, and maybe the writer feels that way, but it usually sucks to read.

Let me tell you a story:

I hate my wife and was planning to kill her. She was cheating on me and scheming to get my insurance money--her new lover is an ex-con and told me as much. The night I was going to kill her, she drugged me. I became so enraged when the sedative kicked in, I began speeding down the highway and caused a huge accident. Suddenly, I regretted it all. I tried to pull my wife out, but she died. I'll die soon as well. Nothing could be done.

Edit: I think the problem with a lot of character death stories is that some writers really just want to give the reader an emotional experience. They want them to feel sadness and regret or melancholy, or whatever, so they build up sympathy for the character before killing it. They write it, they feel sad, and they assume the reader will also feel sad, which is what they want.

But they aren't taking into account what the reader was actually getting out of the story and what was motivating them. They may feel sad, but mostly, they will feel cheated.

Personally, the two main stories I enjoy are:

Good person gives their best effort and comes out on top.

Bad person learns from their mistakes too late and comes out on bottom.

Two stories I hate:

Good person gives best effort but still comes out on bottom.

Bad person learns nothing and wins.

Two stories that can be great but often suck:

Good person tries their best but comes out on bottom due to a tragic flaw.

Bad person learns from their mistakes and rises to the top.

Edit 2: One of my favorite authors is a woman with 7 SF/F books out and several more on the way. I've read 5 of them, because I love her writing. The last 2 of her books I read were a 2 book series, at the end of which, she kills one of the POV characters. I'll admit, I was sad. But also, it made me actually angry. I never finished her other series. While I'm still glad I read what I read, I don't have the patience to sit through another one of her stories just to get to the end and get robbed.

For me, the wrong kind of lame ending is enough to totally turn me off.

 

It depends on how it's handled. If it's just for shock value, then...maybe not the best idea. But if the death(s) make a meaningful impact on the main character, while also being important to the main plot, then go for it. I don't kill off many characters in my stories, but when I do, it's for a purpose.

 

Old thread, new deaths. No, not really. Well, I am writing a murder mystery now. It's kind of hard to avoid death with that one.

 

I write war so far, and death is kinda unavoidable.