Is tragedy necessary or indulgent?

Kinda off topic on my part, but: You know that by the nature of wikipedia you can go right in and edit the page, yourself, right?

Edited to add: I've mostly corrected Wikipedia misconceptions about fried chicken.

 

Yeah, I know, but have you ever looked at the discussion pages for wikipedia? Downright venomous. So.... No.

 

You discuss? I just change the page.

 

My question was a snap reaction that actually had me thinking about my motivation. I've never considered exactly what you said. I suspect I'll forever associate romance novels as things that switches me into chill mode, that it's so hardwired, it cannot be unchanged from over 25 years of reading them. So when I picked a story to analyse, I instinctively picked a horror short story. But I also realized that I refuse to read certain books for similar reasons. Thanks for not taking my comment the wrong way.

I feel like you're missing the point of the original comment. You're writing a WAR, so death is expected. Even a hardened happy-ending worshipper like me would be wondering what is wrong with this picture, if nobody has died. Could it be that you're setting up a scene of mayhem? A failure resulting from a strategic miscalculation? Whether it is a specific individual or a whole battalion, I assume there would be a point as to why you killed them off? Everything needs to have a story purpose. I don't think the original intent is to labour over every death. It's about the characters that are integral to your story. A soldier in a story could die out of bad luck. But as the author, I would assume that you would have set the expectation that this was entirely possible, the sense anyone could be lost at any point? That this is the chilling/depressing reality of every soldier who goes to war, that they can be a victim of bad decisions, incompetence, that there is a real possibility that they won't make it home etc, etc. Everything in a novel needs to mean something, especially the significant deaths. There's nothing tiresome about that at all. What would piss me off is getting the sense the author made us fond of a character, killed them off for drama, to make me sad, and then for me to wonder...

What was the point again? That was unexpected, random and I really liked him/her!!!

So in your case, does that mean I am to then think:

Oh...that's right, the author just wanted me to know people died for pointless reasons...because that is life. People die. Well, thanks for nothing, I already know that! Why am I paying for this?!

I feel you're oversimplifying.

 

Having deaths in fiction mean something wouldn't really be unrealistic, because we write stories about the things that have meaning, and we focus the spotlight of stories on the bits that have meaning. If sixteen people die for no reason, and the seventeenth one's death is meaningful, that seventeenth one is the one that's going to get a story written about him. The story may mention the other sixteen, but focus on the meaningful one.

 

https://www.ssa.gov/OACT/babynames/

If we are talking about an important character that- we hope - the reader has came to care about, my feeling is that there will need to be some sort of meaning to their death, in terms of the resolution of the plot, or the reader may close the book with a feeling of emptiness and dissatisfaction rather than the sort of emotionally satisfying grief aimed at.

I mean, witness the uproar when a popular TV character is killed off without acceptable (to the audience) reason...

 

After writing almost exclusively downer endings I finally came to the conclusion they were self-indulgent. They are what I like; in fact it's almost a point of principle. I hate the image that you can just happily skip away at the end, that life will just be lovely now instead of being a painful constant slog towards the grave. But that's me, because I'm crazy. I love my downers but other people don't. Maybe in a literary book or in a long series you can put a downer ending in, either to make a point or to set up the next book, but I think you shouldn't be doing that in traditional fiction unless you have very very good reason to do so.

You just spent a whole book making the audience like someone and invest in them as a person. And then you shoot them in fucking head just because you can. And that leaves a bad taste in the mouth as a reader. Sure, it's a twist and it's unpredictable(ish) but it's also really unsatisfying. And maybe that's the point. But that doesn't stop it being unsatisfying. Particularly with character death I think the only reason to do it is if you genuinely believe there are more/better stories that can be told with this character being dead; that is to say that you've done everything you could with them and that them dying in itself will be a story worth telling. Failing that you shouldn't do it.

The problem is that death is kinda a dead end as a plot point. You can get rid of a character in loads of ways, but killing them means that the character can't live outside the book. It means that the reader will never ask what happens next or talk about them in the present tense as if they are a real person. You could do something creative with them to get rid of them some other way, and at least leave the audience with the idea that this person they like is still out there somewhere even if they don't ever see them again. But killing them ends that.

I started writing I think three projects in a row with the idea that it was going to end with the protagonist killing themselves. That seemed like what I wanted to do. But I was so wrong. By the time the crunch came I couldn't show these characters giving up like that, it just didn't fit them and it felt cowardly as a writer. It felt like I was saying that I couldn't come up with a way for them to conquer their problems and that says more about me than about them. Dying at the end would have made all the development null and void as well as meaning that the characters could never go on to anything more. It would have been so unsatisfying to the readers too; leaving a weirdly shaped plot curve that essentially is just plummeting down at the end just when the reader wants it to go back up in a moment of success.

I'm all for screwing with the audience, but I think that writers generally should eer towards happy(ish) endings. I think that they are the more natural feeling way to end most plots. You can have a character die in the course of the climax, and in fact that might make it even more climactic. But that's not the same as a character's death being the end of the book. You need the climax, then after the end to tie it together and show the characters moving on from there, resetting back to normal and ideally with a positive outlook. If you are going to kill a character at least you need to fit that pattern; their death should be before the end, and the end should still be an 'up' beat so the reader walks out thinking "Wow, that was dark, but I feel optimistic about where these people are going".

 

Necessary, I think, 1) to catalogue the human condition, 2) as a tool with which to move the reader, 3) for variety.

 

None of those are bad reasons but only in the right story. Absolutely there is a kind of story where you are deliberately looking to explore the totality of the human condition, where you would want to yank the reader the other direction, or indeed to just do something different. But most stories aren't those.

Confronting the reader with the inevitable prospect of death is fine in your great literary novel but not in something people read just for entertainment. An unexpected death will always get a reaction, but only if that's the very specific reaction you want and you can't get it another way. And in the midst of a long series, or at least a long career with established readers, you might decide that this is the right time to do something different, but not so much as someone trying to break out.

There's definitely reasons to do it. But you better be absolutely certain that it's perfect or it'll come across as smugly screwing with the reader to show how clever you are.

There's nothing wrong with just writing the normal ending, the expected ending, the ending that the reader wants. You definitely shouldn't be doing things just because the audience doesn't like it.

I mean, you want people to actually like your books, right?

 

There is a time and a place, of course.

 

Yes indeed; I didn't mean to sound as negative as I think I may have. Everything should always be about what works best in this story and sometimes that definitely can be death or downer ending, it's just I've been burnt a few times doing it basically because I wanted to, not because it was the best idea.

 

True, although I would argue that the meaning of those deaths is prove the point about how life isn't sacred and how death can arrive at any moment, which is technically symbolic for the greater message of your book. I just think death should align with the message of your story and if you're writing during a time of war then the message will be bleak haha My main beef is basically with writers who kill off characters because they think it will make the story "sadder" and therefore "more meaningful because sad stories are automatically more meaningful right??". Wrong, sadness for sadness sake is a waste of the readers time, unless your book is ABOUT sadness then, well, touche.
Even for your war story, I really don't want to read about like 8 random characters being killed off in random ways, I would really just want to hear about the characters that were important to the main character and why their death matters to the story. If their death doesn't matter to the story at all then why write it??? I'm assuming ppl are dying in a war, you don't need to explain that to the reader. If I wanted to know that people die a lot I'd read a newspaper. The fact that you're even mentioning this soldier or general, means that they mean something to the story/character, so really this isn't a meaningless death at all. It affected the characters that are remaining, or if it didn't, then the lack of effect is it's own message.
Not every death should be a super climatic tragic plot point that reverts through out the whole story, sometimes the value of a character is subtle, sometimes it's anticlimactic and that's it's own message.
But if a death truly doesn't mean anything to the story, and the reader isn't even supposed to care, then it shouldn't even be in the book. I don't need to know everything that's happening in the realm of a story, only the parts that matter.

That's just what I like though, I'm sure everybody has their own interpretations and pretty much everything has an exception especially considering someone's writing style.

 

I completely agree.

Some settings obviously imply more tragedy in a story than others but as a point of writing craft things that don't matter shouldn't be in the story. You can do loads of things with a death to make it matter but you do need to do something with it, even if it is just to show that the other characters have become hardened and cynical or highlight that war is really depressing or dangerous or pointless or whatever. But these are things that matter and should be treated as such. You shouldn't be sitting there flipping coins to decide who dies in this scene. Maybe that does reflect the reality of being in a war but it's bad writing. Everything in a book is an illusion; there is no uncertainty to the author. You control every word and every act or thought. Deciding to kill a character is an affirmative decision; there has to be a narrative reason to make that happens. No-one just drops dead by magic, you know? No, that isn't how the real world works but it is how good writing works. Death isn't certain for anyone, only the people you want to kill should be dying. Anything more kinda is gratuitous.

 

Which brings me to the definition of "tragedy." I'm old-school enough to believe that there's something inevitable about a tragic ending, coming as it does from a character's "tragic flaw." The death of a child isn't tragedy; it's pathos. Macbeth's flaw was his overweening ambition. Hamlet's was his hatred for Claudius, which prevented him from killing Claudius because he didn't want Claudius to die in a state of grace. And so on.

That said, there's a place for the death of a character, if the death was a logical outcome of a situation that couldn't be resolved any other way. And there are good deaths, deaths that are welcomed by the character (I'm thinking of Old Lodge Skins's death in Little Big Man -- the book, not the movie).

 

Sure, we're in agreement. I was being more general, earlier. I meant it would be unnatural if 'art' didn't represent the darker side of experience, if every story had a HEA, every symphony a major key finale, every watercoloured cloud a silver lining. Sadly some cocktail sticks are destined never to wear cherries.