Many of the heart-wrenching and gorgeous character arcs I can think of involve either sacrifice of life or willingness to sacrifice with no hope of being saved. I will list a few at the end of this post, below a significant spoiler space, so folks who haven't read those books or watched those shows won't come for my head.
Or ... you know, maybe it would be more effective for this week's topic if they did.
Because we are talking about death, after all. Specifically, we're discussing whether the threat of death is enough to drive character and story arcs, and if character death, in and of itself, raises the stakes enough when our reality has a daily death count that has made us numb.
And my answer to that is...not really? Death does not immediately equal stakes. Let me explain.
Writing a death that hits readers where it hurts is hard. I've said that the difference between romance and other genres, and the thing that really elevates romance structurally, is that all writers, metaphorically, send a protagonist up a tree and throw rocks at him. Romance is the only one that requires a writer to bring that character back down from the tree, changed by his experience, and heal him. I would call this a complete character arc, not just a logarithmic curve, and I believe that the best character deaths, the only ones that really work and feel earned, are the ones that occur on the far end of a complete arc.
If an author just sends the protagonist into a dire situation, makes him suffer, and then kills him, the stakes are meh. Saw it coming. Whatev. He doesn't earn it.
But if the author puts that character through hell, has them dig deep and overcome a challenge, and then claw their way right back out only to willingly sacrifice themselves for the greater good? People will weep! It's a lot more work, true, but it's also a lot more effective.
So that's my advice on this topic: if you really want to kill a character and have it matter, make sure that character earns it. Just torturing a character with the threat of sudden death isn't enough for modern readers. Note, this advice also goes for secondary character death. If Mom has to die in order to progress Protag's journey, you need to set that up. Much as I dislike the trope, Disney does it right.
Oh! One more thing: never kill the dog. I don't care how much you think it adds to your story or character stakes, there are a lot of readers who will immediately DNF if the dog dies. I might be one. Too many of us are permanently scarred by required-reading books with canine death, and we are not here for it. I can't even stand sad ASPCA commercials.
Below be spoilers....
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Sacrifices that killed me in fiction:
- Hodor holding the door in the Game of Thrones tv show (I'm told George R. R. Martin was consulted on this plot point, so it's extremely likely he had planned to write it in the book series, too.)
- Kanan Jarrus in Star Wars Rebels. Didn't see that coming, but it was so right for that character, so very much what he had been growing toward all series. I bawled.
- Sydney Carton in A Tale of Two Cities, making emo and angst really work for him.
