BACKGROUND: So I'm currently in the planning/rough draft phase of a new story. But I've hit a snag. The first big event in this story requires the death of a character. (cliché, I know) This death is very important to the story, as the main characters' reaction to this death create a series of internal conflicts, and this eventually leads to the characters fighting in a gladiator-esque competition to attain a magical object of sorts (this might change later) and revive their friend. Yeehaw. QUESTION: With a death this early in the story, I don't know how to make the character likeable/memorable enough for readers to actually care about their death. I can try putting as many one-liners and small personality traits as possible, but since the reader only knows them for such a short amount of time, will their emotions be in line with those of the main characters? (I'm not trying to get full-on sobbing from the audience, maybe a pout or two) I don't want to create a disconnect between the readers and the main characters, so any advice is well-received!
First don't worry about it being a cliche, unless you handle it in a cliche'd manner. Things become cliches because they're true and because they work in stories. Yes, after they become over-familiar you want to be careful, but people won't notice it if you do it well. Like special effects, they're only noticed when they're done poorly. I don't think there is a way to wrench anything like serious emotion out of an audience for a character they've only just met. Still though it can be sad and it can be very clear that the death means a lot to your main character. You show that of course through his or her reactions in an ongoing way, how they're affected emotionally. And be careful, most people deal by trying to hide their reactions but let certain key moments slip though. At least most men do, and some women. That can actually be more powerful than going for full-on emotional overload, which can very quickly shade over into sentimentalism and sappiness. You could also show the MC's reaction (especially if it's someone who hides their emotions) by the way a close confidant talks to them. They might show some concern and say something like "You're hiding it well, but I know when you're hurting inside." Or they seem fine until suddenly some small frustration makes them explode.
Like any other character, you can fill in their attributes and nuances in a backstory. I had a short story that opened with a guy laying in a pool of blood on a concrete floor. At that point, there is no reason to give a shit about him. But as the story unfolds, you learn more through his inner thought and the backstory of how he came to be in a filthy prison.
@RUNNETHUPWENCH Please don’t go overboard with the character saving cats. First off if I get too invested in this character and you kill off that character, I may just get pissed and stop reading. Second, I absolutely hate funeral scenes where we are expected to sit there for like 50 chapters crying about this guy instead of seeing his widow raze cities in revenge. Third, you risk being boring at if you go overboard. fortunately, there are some good ways to make this work. As I said, just don’t overdo it. Put the character in danger (and have her get out of it). I’m always going to like a female character that kicks a robber in the balls. That’s just me. have the character sacrifice for someone. He could be on a final written warning at work, and he runs late and gets fired because he is helping a family member with something important. They are a POV character for a scene. I sometimes find I automatically identify with characters just because I see their POV. You are in another character’s POV, and that character likes them. If I’ve identified with that character, I will tend to like who they like.
Yes, to carry on montecarlo's last thought there-if I care about the other characters and see how the death affects them, that will make me understand, and care about, the loss.
There are a few things you can do, which I will tell you, but there isn't a lot. Just accept it. Hopefully, the audience will too. The situation is as follows. You need someone to die. That is their entire purpose. Unfortunately, you cannot place their death later in the story due to pacing issues, so you place their death early in the story. Unfortunately, this makes it difficult to care about them. It's almost entirely impossible. Give up. It's a cliche. Don't worry about it. Do it anyway. It's a story tool. It's a conundrum that occurs naturally in story writing and in real life, in fate. If you believe in a god, God certainly uses it. It's a cliche. The audience knows it. Respect them. Don't try to bleed their hearts and force them to care about someone they just met. Instead, just help them understand that it was important to someone else, even if it wasn't important the audience. We care about John Wick, and John Wick cared about his dog and wife. We saw how John Wick reacted to his dog and wife. We didn't know a damn thing about Joel's daughter, but we like Joel and saw how Joel reacted to his daughter's death. No one would give a damn about a little girl they never met dying, if it weren't for Joel crying for her afterwards. However, if you do want to squeeze what little tears you can as quick as you can, then do it efficiently and quickly. What things communicate quickly that a person is good? What is something that everyone can relate to? Nobody knows what having their throat cut feels like, but everyone knows what having teeth pulled feels like. Does everyone love their mother? Dogs? Dogs seem like low hanging fruit, and I prefer children to dogs. What acts of good mean the most to a person that everyone can understand? Make the person the most admirably person possible. Paint the most perfect scene for the most perfect mother, friend, teacher, king, son, role, etc. Show how they sacrifice themselves for others, how they don't deserve their agony. Even if they don’t help others, maybe they’re a hard worker who never bothers anyone and is deeply loved by protagonist. Maybe they had a hard life and struggled and was cared for by protagonist.
I would urge caution with this. If you paint a too-perfect portrait you flirt with the sentimentality/sappiness issue. If you've seen the Marvel/Netflix show The Punisher they did this with his memories of his wife and kids. It was in fact a lot like the similar memories that drove the emotional core in the movie The Crow, except they did it right in that one. His girlfriend (wife?) seemed amazing but she didn't come across as too perfect for me. That wasn't the fact in The Punisher. In particular his wife seemed like a catalog model, or somebody's idea of The Perfect Wife, but she had no actual personality—she was just a soothing comforting voice, a perfect smile, all attention for him, and nothing else. They laid it on way too thick and it became shallow and ridiculous.
Here's an example from The Punisher: I couldn't find a better example, but this does the job I think. She seems like a too-perfect Stepford Wife. Someone who's too perfect is no longer human, and you can't feel anything for them, they're just an ideal. I mean, I can see what they were doing, contrasting his too-perfect memories with the harsh brutality of his life now. But it didn't work for me, and in many other regards I really liked the show.
I agree with this. I think Lucy is saying the same thing, when she mentions making efficient and quick, and similar to what I said about not overdoing it. Great minds and all that.
Well it can’t be helped, can it? Too little and it means nothing, too much and its too much. You’ll just have to pray the reader understands that it’s a cliche, a tool, a footnote. Efficiency, Or forego showing the person at all. You probably don’t want to treat it this way. You probably want to make it realistic. This stuff happens in real life, and people aren’t just cliche writing tools (or are they). But you are essentially using them as cliche writing tools. We all knew that John Wick's dog and Joel's daughter were cheap tools. We didn't care because of what came after. That seems to be the only difference between them and Tim Burton's Alice's father. Such a doting father obviously has to die, and he did, and we were annoyed because the rest of the movie sucked.
This scene shows how the same thing can be done much better. It's essentially exactly the same thing, they're contrasting the pain and anguish of his current lonely life with the beauty and pleasure of his memories in a flashback scene, but here the girl has personality, she isn't an empty vessel of sappy perfection: She's a real person, not an empty ideal.
Watching that scene I just noticed something that greatly increases the emotional impact of her death. In the here-and-now shots where he's devastated, he's in the same house they lived and loved in, the same one shown in the flashbacks, only there it's beautiful and filled with warmth and love and the artifacts of their relationship. But in the present parts of the scene it's a ruin, shot in stark blue light, with wind moving through it. It demonstrates the devastated state of his soul, of his life (his death, whatever). Powerful stuff.
@Xoic you're forgetting that The Punisher was an established brand and would have made millions no matter how bad it was, and The Crow had to earn it. Your comparison between the two is a good reminder that us authors have to publish good stuff and get rich before we can publish the shit we really want to write
The Crow was already a very well-loved comic book as well. But I don't see what that has to do with establishing an emotional connection with a character who died at the beginning? That's specifically what each of my posts has been about on this thread. Which is kind of rare for me.
Did not know that The Crow was based off a comic... but still did it have the same brand as The Punisher, which was Marvel + previously successful movie? Either way, I didn't mean anything by that. Was just setting up my closing line.
Lol it's cool man. Sorry, I'm far from feeling 100% today, suffering from both toothache and back pain. Either one would waylay me completely, but they're doing a double-whammy on me tonight. It was the first movie of The Crow, and the comic wasn't by Marvel. It was an independent, and as far as I understand completely written and drawn by James O'Barr. He might have even published it himself, like Dave Sim did with Cerebus? Not sure. But it was a pure labor of love. The art was somewhat crude, in black and white ink drawings, no color, in order to keep cost down, but it helped because it had the look of a horror comic. And it became a definite cult classic for the power of the story and the inherent humanity it revealed so well. Quite a unique idea, not like the average superhero comic at all. But then the Punisher isn't exactly your average superhero comic either.
OK, sorry about veering so far off topic (but that was fun!) In an effort to bring it back, check out this masterclass in how to emotionally engage readers posted this morning by @jannert on another thread (let this be a lesson kiddies, read all the current threads—you never know where the great jewels of wisdom will turn up. But also always read posts by jannert ): When is it too much detail? Not exactly the same issue, but closely related. In fact I'd say what I mentioned in my last on-topic post, about the house being in both the flashbacks and the here-and-now part of the scene, but presented totally differently in each, is an example of exactly what jannert was talking about. Showing in multiple ways (through both the state of the house and the state of the character) the severe contrast between his happy life then and his devastated life now makes it emotionally profound for viewers. And while I do understand what they were trying to do in the similar scene from the Punisher with the black background and the harsh white spotlight, it removes all the emotion that was carried in the background of the scene from The Crow. Incidentally, the stories are the same. They're both about a man who was happy, married to a woman he loved and she was killed while they were still young and deeply in love. So he becomes essentially a revenant (a revenge ghost)—in The Crow literally, in The Punisher metaphorically, remaining alive only through the intense need for revenge. It's also the same story as in the movie called The Revenenant with Leonardo DiCaprio.
I had something similar where an important character dies early on. In the short time she was around I gave her a distinct personality, I tried to make her likeable, and I included a flashback scene that garnered sympathy for her while also showing how much she meant to the main characters of the story. Personally, I think it worked well.
