Should You Kill Off Your Characters? (And When)

Not long ago, I was ask to participate as a panelist in the day-long event "Get Published! 2016" at the Herrick District Library in Holland, Michigan. The event was put on by MiFiWriters and was the first such event they've hosted. I spoke as editor of a small press alongside the editors of MiFiWriters and Caffeinated Press -- all Michigan-based small presses. I'm hopeful it was of use to those attending -- I know I was tickled to talk to a near-full room -- and I'm certain it will only become a better and stronger event if MiFiWriters choose to run another one in 2017.

The programming mainly focused on the mechanics of publication, so that's what I'd prepped for. But there were a couple of questions that arose from the interests of the audience that I hadn't prepped for and, consequently, really got me thinking.

One such was about killing off characters. Should you kill off characters or should you avoid it?

We live in a post-Game-of-Thrones world.

The immediate response from the panelists showed me one thing: We live in a post-GoT world.

We welcome Game of Thrones (GoT) being Game of Thrones, but anything else that's as savagely death-happy we're . . . well, we're over it. Which is funny when you consider that in Dexter (the TV show not the books) you had at least one murder per episode carried out by the protagonist and frequently another murder occurring under other circumstances. What Dexter didn't have was the continual, perpetual killing off of primary characters, characters we'd grown to care about, although many did eventually get the ax, it wasn't constant. That's pure GoT.

One panelist even said that he'd been all murdered out by GoT. So many interesting characters had been killed off on GoT that he'd lost the ability to bond with or care about any new character he met in that world. A perfectly normal coping reaction. If you're constantly being tragically abandoned, sooner or later you develop a defense mechanism and assume it's better to not get invested in anyone, because if you do, they're only going to leave you and hurt you in the process. Even if they're just a character in a book.

On the other end of the spectrum, there are the sort of stories where everyone lives no matter what.

Stories where, as ridiculous and implausible as it might be for a person to live through Situation X, the characters miraculously do. Further, they tend to survive these scrapes without a scratch on them, certainly not without the months or years of medical treatment normally associated with living through a physically brutal event. So much so that by the next episode they don't even have a limp or a sling or a residual pain that leads them to a pill addiction. Nope. Everybody lives. Everybody's healthy. No need for "scraped and bruised" makeup in the next episode even though it's supposed to just happen a few days later.

Dude. Let me just say, I've had bruises from running into the coffee table that have lasted longer than most lived-through-a-car-accident-on-a-TV-show bruises.

If the above examples represent the two ends of the spectrum, where should a writer try to fit his or her story? 

The simplest answer I can give is: Probably somewhere in between the two extremes.

Of course, the nuanced answer is . . . well, nuanced.

It depends on your plot, world building, and character development. Don't kill off characters willy-nilly just because you can, or because you don't know what else to do with an extraneous character.

True story: I had a friend in high school who, whenever we were asked to write a creative story in English class, would kill off every single character by the end of the story. She wasn't a terribly macabre person -- actually, she was quite bubbly and cheerful -- she just didn't know how to end stories, and admitted as much. If everyone died, then the story had to be over, so everyone died. Honestly, next to her, GRRM looks like a spring pansy.

If a character dies in a story, it needs to serve the story. Or -- what I probably said at the conference this past weekend -- the death needs to serve the plot. 

Then -- boom! -- the following infographic appeared in one of my social media feeds a day or so after the conference. (Or maybe it wasn't serendipity, maybe it came to my attention because I was looking for it, consciously or subconsciously. Or is that in and of itself a precondition of serendipity? But I digress.)

Nifty infographic from helpingwritersbecomeauthors.com on what's a good or bad reason for killing off a character.

The infographic comes from the K.M. Weiland article "How to Successfully Kill a Character," and opens with the utterly provcative statement, "I love killing people."

On the panel we discussed how a character's death can re-frame a narrative. [Hunger Games spoilers, this paragraph only.] How nearly reaching the end of Hunger Games only to have Prim die -- when avoiding Prim's death was more or less the inciting incident of the trilogy -- helps solidify the ultimate narrative outcome as not one of triumph or accomplishment but one of futility and the cyclical nature of human greed and suffering, power and rebellion.

Proving you've got the chops to mete out death.

In a podcast, Carrie Vaughn has described her killing off of a character in Kitty and the Midnight Hour as an act of proving it wasn't another happy-go-lucky world where everybody lived. Indeed, it was more serious than that, more deadly, more dangerous. Like some sort of literary hazing ritual, killing off a character can be a moment when a writer decides they want to prove themselves as someone not to be taken lightly.

But tread cautiously. Carrie Vaughn was still using the character's death in service of the plot. She could have reworked the plot to not need that death. It would have been a different book if everybody lived. And what she's talking about is making that choice to not be the book where everybody lives . . . [read the full blog post on eileenwiedbrauk.com]

Kdrama: a Primer

Kdrama or k-drama is the abbreviated form of “Korean Drama,” by which we mean mostly those TV shows produced in South Korea since the early 2000s, but it also can encompass TV shows (and movies) produced in Japan, Taiwan, and mainland China.

The whole thing intersects sometimes with KPop or k-pop.  K-pop can sometimes encompass kdrama and sometimes it’s used to refer exclusively to the South Korean music industry. Of course, there is huge cross over between the music industry and the drama industry in South Korea, far more than there is in America. In the States, most of us can name the Big Stars who’ve successfully crossed from music to acting or vice versa—Timberlake, J Lo, Will Smith—but in Korea these talents don’t hire their own agents who work for them; no, the talent works for an agency that shells out a lot of money to train and raise up the future star, ideally in as many entertainment fields as possible. Because if a member of Girls Generation is on a drama it guarantees a certain male audience, and if your favorite drama oppa sings you a song, you’re gonna buy his CD.

This may sound obscure to many Americans, but we’re not talking “cult classics” here. This is a finely honed money making machine that in under 15 years has come to rival Samsung* among South Korean exports. An utterly addictive, completely consuming, why-can’t-any-one-else-hit-on-this-formula, unique TV watching experience.

*(It so happens I’m watching kdrama on a Samsung TV. Totally coincidental.)

No, I don't speak Korean.

Whenever I explain to people what it is I’ve been watching lately, their first question is, “Is it subtitled?” This is uttered with confusion, perhaps concern, not inquisitiveness.

Yes, they’re subtitled. After five years of public school administered French lessons I could barely order at a French delicatessen, why anyone would think I suddenly had functioning foreign language skills was beyond me.

Most of the shows with US/worldwide licensing are subtitled in English, Spanish, and Portuguese. The reallypopular ones are dubbed into Spanish. I’ve yet to see an English dubbing, and I don’t think I’d want to at this point.

Of course, I understand the tension here: “Subtitled” has come to be a code word for stuffy, pretentious, European art house films. And what I’m discussing is pure candy, fabulously low-brow, insanely addictive TV shows . . . but subtitled.

We call it what it is: an addiction.

What I’ve found striking is that when people (online, English speakers) refer to their kdrama viewing habits, they call it “my kdrama addiction” or “I’m a kdrama addict.” And that is the long and short of it: Something about this type of entertainment breeds rabid fandom.

I can’t say I’ve ever heard someone describe themselves as an “HBO addict” or say they have a “sitcom addiction.” They express some form of like.  Dislike, mild like, really like. Occasionally (rarely) love. But really, the “love” status is usually reserved for one show—I love True Blood!—rather than applied to an entire channel or genre or country’s output of TV.

Most addicting is the kdrama storytelling. Namely the lightheartedness. Dire things may happen. Horrible things may happen. But the show always resolves in a lighthearted way. “Antiheroes” aren’t really a Thing in kdrama. All the better. American and British film will only show a character alone with their emotions (particularly if those emotions are happy in nature) if it can serve as juxtapositioning for what comes next. A character alone in a car smiling is not a happy situation, it is a situation of utter dread because the absolute worst is about to unfold and a smart audience knows it--Downton Abbey, I'm looking at you. In Korean drama, a character shown driving down the road smiling, is shown to the audience to convey that he is happy, not to make more notable his eminent death.

I watch kdramas for the same reason I read romance novels: I know I won’t be depressed when the story is over, which is something no other genera of novel promises in every book.

Further addicting is the format... Read the rest of this post...

The Putty-Theory of World Building

As a teenager, I attended a local day-camp for writers with several friends in what would turn out to be my first creative writing workshop ... workshop-ish. The lead instructor was perplexed (and yet fascinated) as to why my three friends and I all wanted to write fantasy, only occasionally dabbling in realism. None of the other workshoppers dallied across genres that summer, and he'd never seen teens so adamant about fantasy fiction. (Note: this was the universe pre-Harry Potter.)

We told him that the fiction we enjoyed reading the most was fantastic in nature, but this answer didn't appease him as we all admittedly read across many genres

It wasn't until I told him why fantasy was, at the time, easier for me to write that he seemed enlightened. At sixteen, I had (perhaps) half-a-clue as to why people behaved the way they did. Oh, I was engaged in social groups, but half the time I wasn't able to predict how I would react in a situation let alone how other people would. I didn't understand fully what motivated people or how they expressed those emotions, but I cared about getting it right in my fiction. And I just wasn't able to. But when I wrote second-world fantasy, I  could make up some cultural/magical reason for my character's behavior. Having a malleable world let me fill plot holes with fantasy putty.

I've since come to what I hope is a more sophisticated understanding of plotting and world building than I had at sixteen, but the putty or plaster-and-paint-over of fantasy writing was necessary to keeping me writing for years as I came to understand better how humans worked and how the adult world worked. I suppose I could have solved the same problem by setting all my stories in a high school, but that approach brought its own risks (and still does): anytime you write about a setting that too closely resembles your day-to-day life, people assume that you're writing about yourself / people you know. Getting caught in such a situation in high school can be the end of the world. Post-high school it's still pretty damn annoying.

Recently, a discussion came up about which genre was more "freeing" for a writer, science fiction or fantasy. As in, in which of these speculative sub-sets does a writer have more freedom to "just make stuff up." The initial question was posed with a predisposition toward sci-fi as freer, which given my experience, struck me as a goose of strange feathers: I would have never been able to use fantasy as putty if it hadn't been freeing.

As as teen, I also tried writing sci-fi, but like urban fantasy, sci-fi rests on the presupposition that our current society has developed into the story's society. So I'd still have to understand people to build the story. Unless the story was full of aliens, then rock on. But for fantasy set in a secondary world, even if it was pseudo-medieval, it was never actually "earth," so I could wend as I wanted.

Classic (i.e. mid-century) science fiction was open to a lot more possibilities. Recent trends in sci-fi suggest that it should be bound by known physics ... which has led us to lots of post-apocalyptic Earth-based stories since so many scientists believe that faster-than-light travel was impossible (although that opinion might be changing), so we couldn't have space operas or alien encounters (the odds of humanoid life developing independently on another planet are ... minuscule), or space federations or Death Stars, or ray guns, or living ships ... in short, it got serious about its science, which curtailed the freedom of writing sci-fi while sucking the fun out of reading it.

Similarly, there's been a movement in second-world fantasy fiction to make the worlds more rule-based and harshly criticize any novels that don't make rigid physics-like rules for their worlds. Destroying the freedom of bending fantasy into any shape you want and -- to make a personal appraisal -- giving us fantasy novels like Game of Thrones which has a pseudo-medieval setting but very, very few traces of magic and speculative wonder in it. And what magic there is, is disapprovingly scrutinized.

Anecdote: I once heard that a reader, upon meeting George RR Martin, questioned him on why he had a giant wall of ice in his novel as it was physically impossible. GRRM (not pleased by the question) responded, "it's magic."

Personally, I think it's a question GRRM set himself up for by having a world that was so rule based, so seemingly real that the presence of magic sat with the reader as ... odd.

But the notion that science fiction should be bound by physics and fantasy should be bound by a rule system as rigorous and rigid as physics is only one school of thought.

There's another school of thought out there that writers should reclaim the fun and freedom of science fiction and fantasy. That says let magic be magical, not so rigorously studied and understood that there could be a Wikipedia page on it. See N. K. Jemisin's beautiful piece where she asks "Why Does Magic Have to Make Sense? A piece she opens with the Arthur C. Clarke quote "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." There's a revival of this fun and freeing fiction going on. I feel it's more noticeable in science fiction as editors and writers take a stand against the dark depressing overtones and produce works like Far Orbit: Speculative Space Adventures, which is coming out in spring 2014.

I say hurrah! to putting the fun and freedom, the mystery and magic, the awe and wonder back into science fiction and fantasy. A novel should, of course, always make sense, but I say that having a malleable world is a beautiful thing, and so long as a writer is willing to sand and paint after they've plastered some strange magic into their world, then bravo!, it need not be one continuous, unblemished piece of drywall. Why take some beautiful, wondrous, unexplained but unblemished creation like an energy field created by all living things that surrounds us, penetrates us, and binds the galaxy together ... then go and kill the wonder and restrict its freedom by quantifying it into a threshold number of midichlorians?

Top photo credit: "Students' notice board, 1973," LSE Library via Flickr.