Do Characters HAVE To Die?

This week we're asking ourselves if we have to kill characters for there to be sufficient risk to maintain reader interest. What other threats work better or just as effectively?

Here's my unpopular opinion: 

Death does not present sufficient stakes. 

Not anymore. Culturally, at least in the US, we're increasingly inured to it. It's everywhere in our entertainment. It's every night on the news. It's every morning in our feeds. It's exploited by industries and charities to reach deeper into our pockets. It's a revenue stream in the business of healthcare. Six degrees of separation connects most of us to it at any given time. It's shoved in our faces so often that unless it befalls someone in our immediate presence or our core/chosen family, our reactions are muted or performative. Nowhere is our DNGAF about death more apparent than in our national and individual response to the current pandemic. Over 33 million Americans infected with a virus proven to lead to a gruesome death, and our mental disconnect from mortality allowed prevention to become a culture war. American exceptionalism at its worst. We believe dying will happen to "everybody except me," even though, logically, we know our time on this world is finite. Logically, we know we don't get to choose how we go out. Still, we hide behind our illusion of safety and delusion of "it won't happen to me."

Thus, I think as authors we ought to strive for different stakes if we're going to really connect to the reader. If we want to reach beyond the sameness of "welp, that character was fun while they lasted," then we have to elevate our world-building so that death isn't the most feared consequence of our characters' actions or inactions. Loss of liberty, loss of home, loss of status, loss of mental capacity, loss of physical ability, there are so many things a character can fear more than dying. A loss of love not through death but due to being driven away by one's own actions is far more heartbreaking. As long as there is a clear line of ownership of the consequences, a direct cause/effect of the choices the character made, then I think--I hope--the stakes are more vital to the character and more captivating to the reader.

Day's End

 

Sunset out the back tonight. We don't normally get vibrant sunrises or sunsets in Florida. It's a land, sea, and sky of pastels. Colors washed out and faded by the sun, mostly. And then, this.

Most of us enjoy sunsets. We'll pause to marvel at the exuberant color and texture brought on by the day's death. Some of us make a ritual of stopping for the sunset, taking a seat to watch the show with a beverage at hand.

Why then do so many of us falter when faced with our loved ones' final days? 

An uncle on my mother's side of the family lays in an ICU not all that far from here. Pneumonia. (Not Covid, not that it matters at this point.) The prognosis is grim. No one is allowed in to see him or sit with him or hold his hand. Not even his wife, my aunt. This is the part that Covid has stolen from us - the comfort and distraction of loved ones at a dying man's side. And you'd think that at this moment, that would be my aunt's sole occupation - worrying over her dying husband. 

It isn't. It isn't, because it can't be. Not here. Not now. Not in this world where our lives have been forever altered by pandemic. No, at this moment, my aunt's worries are the business of dying. Who will pay the hospital bills. Where are the living will documents the doctors need should someone have to make the decision to pull life support. It's all lists and hurry and busy work.

There's no time (or safety) to sit at my uncle's bedside and pause of the final exuberant flush of life. Even without Covid, while we could sit at bedsides, most of us did so as a means of talking over death. We made timid small talk and watched shitty hospital TV to avoid the specter of death, no matter how close it hovered.

I don't say any of this to propose any kind of solution. Other than to maybe pause for a moment at endings of all kinds because sometimes there's breathtaking beauty to be found there.

Dead Is Dead - Or Is It?

*kitty is not actually dead

Our topic this week at the SFF Seven is: Beware the Ides of March: Fav/Most Intriguing Method of (Fictitious) Murder.

Do I get to pick pandemic??

Seriously, it’s kind of creepy that Calendar Maven K.A. Krantz picked this topic while we’re all practicing social distancing to #flattenthecurve on COVID-19—and she picked it months ago, before she could possibly know this would happen.

Or did she?

I mean, a global pandemic sounds like a great Evil Mastermind Plot…

Anyway, all of this is to day that I don’t really think about types of murder. Just not my thing. I occasionally have to kill off characters, but I tend to do it in efficient, not very interesting ways. I guess I figure dead is dead and I don’t have a lot of morbid curiosity about how to get people that way.

Probably this is why I don’t write murder mysteries.

Is this something you all pay attention to as readers? Are there more interesting deaths than others? Do you have a favorite fictional death?