On Killing Characters

A List of Killed Characters off the Top of my Head:

  Numerous characters from Game of Thrones

  Numerous characters from the Walking Dead

  Spock/Kirk when facing Khan

  Mary on Sherlock

  Jack from Titanic

           **I could go on but I have a post to write. (; 

I consider myself a level-headed, thoughtful person. I believe the Golden Rule is valuable and that the commandments were a pretty good list overall. And yet:

1.) I want Arya or Tyrion or Daenerys or Grayworm or SOMEONE to beat the shit out of Cersei Lannister and cut her vile throat.

2.) I want someone to take out Negan.

Let's compare the difference in the level of vehemence in my two statements above. 

GOT: Cersei is a horrible, conniving person bent on keeping her family in power. She reads people well, anticipates their motives and acts to thwart any effort she sees as a threat. She's not afraid to unleash her vengeance-but there's a trigger beforehand. I feel she deserves to die more than most on the show who have been killed, but I have to admit last season they made me admire her inner strength. The deaths and the violence, in my opinion, feel in line with the time period and the social constructs. This 'realism,' I think, is part of what maintains my emotional investment.

**I'm no expert on the historical eras GRRM draws on for inspiration, so I have to note that WILLING SUSPENSION of DISBELIEF is a factor here.


TWD: Negan is a horrible and manipulative person, but I find him crossing the line into evil because he enjoys setting people up to fear him and to fail in order to have the excuse to hurt, maim or kill them. Watching the Walking Dead with him in it is something that must be akin to watching a snuff film. And while my writer brain understands that he is the embodiment of a level of evil that will force Rick & Co. to accept the risks of loss to up their game, I find I can no longer suspend my disbelief. I was emotionally invested until the season opener. Since then, there seems to be a personal distance. I still root for Rick & Co., but the fire has dissipated.

WHAT DOES THIS HAVE TO DO WITH WRITING?

KILLING CHARACTERS SHOULD HAVE UNDENIABLE IMPACT. 

I can prove it with one word:

HODOR

In my series, I killed a character in FATAL CIRCLE (#3) who I liked so much I've thought of going back and writing her story, set a few decades earlier. I did not intend at the outset to kill her. I had a different plan. But when that moment came, I knew it was right. How did I know? See #3 below.

In books, characters die (much as they do in life) in a few ways:

1.) Random/unforseeable accident/health issue or complication
      {Guy killed by raptor in Jurassic Park}
       VALID BECAUSE:

            it happens in real life   ok, maybe not killed by raptor, but you know what I mean

            the aftermath for the survivors will show their character and possibly growth  

2.) Murdered {Abraham, Glenn; Qui-Gon Jinn}

       VALID BECAUSE:

            it happens in real life

            it shows how far your villain is willing to go

            the aftermath for the survivors will show their character and possibly growth

            murder and/or revenge continue to be suscessful stories

3.) Self sacrifice  {Kirk/Spock facing Khan; Hodor; Mary from Sherlock; Obi-Wan}

       VALID BECAUSE:

            it happens in real life

            it shows how far your hero/ine is willing to go

            it shows how far the cult leader & group are willing to go

            in the aftermath if the hero/ine is/isn't changed by this tells us something

4.) Suicide

       VALID BECAUSE:

            it happens in real life

            in the aftermath if the hero/ine is/isn't changed by this tells us something

If you're killing a character in your story, 

the real question to me...the real root of it is:

            

How does the story change without them?

Unless you're writing an out of sequence time tale, or plan to write prequels, once you kill a character, they are gone. Their impact should not be. Whether their death hurt the hero/ine or whether it was a two-paragraph entry that defines the villain, if it is there it should have meaning beyond that death scene. If it was a beloved character, the impact for your readers will resonate. Make it count!

Die, Damn You, Random & Beloved Characters, Die!

People die in my books all the time. Unnamed characters are pretty much the Red Shirts. Named characters expire in order to develop the plot or protagonist. Once in a while, for great impact and in the third act, a character who has been pivotal to plot and protagonist will die.

Those third act deaths are either the Great Glorious Come Uppance or the Ghastly Gutting of the Soul. 

Yes, I usually know who is going to kick it in the third act from the beginning of the crap draft.  That character owns the burden of pushing the protagonist the hardest. Their death symbolizes the Goal Achieved. Sometimes it's a merciful death or the final sacrifice. Other times it's hubris.

The trick is balancing the deaths. 

Too many and the reader doesn't care; they're inured. Too few and the story rings hollow; after all, the value of life is driven by the inevitability of death.  Not every death has to be gruesome. Not every set up for the dying should be intricate. Not everyone has to die by the antagonist's or the protagonist's hand. Oh, and don't overlook a good maiming; it can deliver equal--or better--emotional resonance.

All that said, if you're reading one my books, someone will die, folks. Usually a lot of someones. 

However, I guarantee you, it'll never be the dog. 

Sometimes They Have To Die

True story. Once upon a time I turned in a manuscript for a novel (FIREWORKS) and when I got the redlines back the editor had scrawled across an entire page of the MS "NOOOOOO! YOU KILLED HIM!!!!" the Him in question was one of the main characters of the book. To say he went out in a blaze of glory would be an understatement of epic scale.

Here's the thing:I liked that character. I genuinely did. he was a nice guy who was doing his very best to keep a fragile peace in the novel. There's the other thing: I needed that peace to end. The best way to do that was to have my peaceful, kind character with the very smallest modicum of power do something very violent and stupid in retaliation to a bad situation. It is a brief moment, a tight and tense moment and given three second to think he wouldn't have done what he did.

But he did. And I knew it was the right thing to do by the reaction from my editor.

From that moment on the body count gets very, very high, I kill off characters like trees lose leaves in autumn. hell. I have knock off scenes where several hundred people die in one stroke. Those scenes are meant to have an impact, of course, but nothing like with the main characters.

Another of my proudest moments was when I introduced a little, old lady in Las Vegas who won a small fortune and rambled on about her plans about how to spend her money, who she was going to help with the cash, gave a backstory that covered her kids, her grandkids and the fragility of their financial existence. and then had one of the characters in the story shove her out of his way as he's running past. The nice, little old lady then got creamed by a bus. Why? Because I had to show EXACTLY how unimportant she was to the bad guy. He didn't even consider her an afterthought.

The editor's response: "JESUS CHRIST, JIM!!" across the page. But i mean it, Thew sole purpose was to make clear how fragile human life can be and how little that particular vampire considered them.

I'm probably into the megadeaths in my novels. I'm okay with that. Watch the news sometime and you'll see how dark the world can be. But my reason for those deaths is because in a lot of my stories the stakes are cosmic, or close enough.

One more example. In one of my novels SMILE NO MORE the man character is a dead, psychopathic clown who quite literally escaped from Hell seeking revenge. After he's had his way with the town of SERENITY FALLS, a trilogy of novels. I sent him off on his own merry adventures. The chapters were broken down thusly: First Scene: A remembrance as told by Cecil Phelps, a moment of his past after he ran away from home and joined the circus. These tales are set roughly fifty years back. That's when Cecil died, you see. Next Scene, a more recent past event as told by Rufo the Clown, the less-than-sane remainder of Cory's soul that comes back and gets revenge. The difference is, now that he'd gotten revenge he's trying to find any shred of his old family. Of course, it's been fifty years..... Finally, a multiple POV third person scene, where all of the rest of the characters have to deal with Rufo the Clown and his desire for knowledge.

In that novel there are several deeply disturbing scenes of violence Most of them happen because someone has annoyed Rufo. In one scene a man rudely hangs up on Rufo. Rufo then violently murders 12 people to make sure that when he sees the man in person, the man understands that Rufo ain't clowning around. Rufo makes the point and gets the information he needs, becasue, as Rufe later tells the cop that is trying to catch him "You're a detective. I'm not. i had to get the information somehow."

The point? Simple: Scene one and scene two are about getting to know Rufo as a person. Getting to understand and sympathize with him. Really, he's a man out of time who is seeking his family in an effort to reconnect with the world. he just happens to be a murderous psychopath and sociopath, too. I needed to make that clear. There are certain people he cares about. The rest of the world is his plaything.

My crowning achievement for the book were the reviews that made it clear I had succeeded. I wanted him to be sympathetic, so that when he committed his atrocities, it was horrifying on an intimate level. It bothered a lot of readers that they actually LIKED him until he committed his crimes. That was what I was after.

Sometimes they have to die. the characters we like the characters we love, the characters we feel for and empathize with. If they don't the story can't go forward properly. Emotional investment. If your readers don't care about the characters, they may as well be watching a you play chess against yourself. If you don't care about the characters, your readers won't either. And sometimes, just sometimes, the reader needs to suffer the deaths with us.

Killing Prince Charming

Okay, so... the cover for THE FORESTS OF DRU isn't  *quite* ready, but here's a teaser. You guys, it's so pretty!! The good news is that the book is up for preorder now!! Just at Amazon so far, but the rest will be coming. Release date is January 24 for sure!

Our topic at the SFF Seven this week is: Burning Bridges: Killing Off Characters in Your Fiction As a Plot Point.

I'd lay money down this topic is one of Jim's. The man loves to kill off characters, I tell you.

For me... I don't like to so much. But sometimes it's necessary. A lot of times I fight it, but death in fiction, as in life, is inevitable.

I'm going to talk about my book THE MARK OF THE TALA, the first of The Twelve Kingdoms books. If you haven't read it and don't want a huge spoiler, better stop now.

Okay? All the spoiler-nervous folks fled?

(Not like they couldn't guess from the title, though.)

So, THE MARK OF THE TALA ends with Hugh, the handsome and noble prince who marries Princess Amelia just before the start of the story, dying unexpectedly and brutally. As one guy who read the book said to me, "I can't believe you killed Prince Charming!"

I've quoted him a lot on that, because it does perfectly sum up what happens - and how I also felt about it. As I wrote that book, I fought the dread all along that Hugh would die. There's a recurring premonition where Princess Andi - the heroine of the story - sees Rayfe, the hero, dead in the snow. At the end, fate twists - because Andi changes it - and Hugh dies instead.

It really sucked and I cried over it.

But... Prince Charming had to die. While these books do end with Happily Ever Afters, as in life, those are only for some people. Others are passing through stages of grief and loss. This series, and the continuing saga in The Uncharted Realms are all in a way about loss of innocence. Or, at least, the loss of comforting illusions. Each heroine discovers the world isn't what she thought it was. The truth she discovers is often better in ways - certainly better for her - but each much shed the old beliefs of childhood to move forward.

For all of us, that means putting Prince Charming in the grave.

Because the idea of Prince Charming is one of the most profound illusions we're told. As an archetype he borders on ridiculous - forever riding about on his white charger, hair gleaming gold in the sun and noble visage in handsome profile. He is without flaw and utterly... dull. In THE MARK OF THE TALA, Hugh's essential flaw emerges in that his nobility blinds him. He can't see past it. And, in his zeal to be Prince Charming, he is ultimately the agent of his own demise.

Love this bit from Into the Woods. "He has charm for a prince, I guess - I don't meet a wide range."

When It Comes to Creating Memes

I got crickets.....and my free stockphoto site gave me grasshoppers, locusts and lots and LOTS of emblems/logos/etc having to do with the game of cricket. No actual crickets. Which probably sums up my feeling about doing memes nicely.

It's like me and telling jokes. I can laugh at a joke. Can I ever successfully retell it? No. Not even if I had Abbott and Costello standing right next to me, coaching me through every bit of their famous "Who's on First?" routine.

I used to love the "LOL Can I Haz Cheeseburger" cat memes but I guess they ran their course.

I enjoy the Boromir "One does not simply..." memes...

I knew the whole doge meme thing was going to die. Too complicated....

Not a visual, 'one picture with punchline story teller' here, folks. Would love to be but we all have our limits. It's like Sam getting handed a rope, versus the cool daggers, golden strands of hair and the eternal starlight and whatever else the other Hobbits received from Galadriel that morning. I'm Sam today, with my lowly rope, no glittery, fabulous item to share.

With the help of my cat Jake I DID manage to create a sort of clever ad for PETS IN SPACE, a Library Journal Pick for Best Books of 2016! Which is on sale for $.99 for one week only, January 17th through the 23rd (if you don't - gasp - have your copy yet)....

iBooks    Amazon    Nook      GooglePlay     Kobo

Writing Memed

HAPPY FRIDAY THE 13th! You'd think I'd come up with some kind of meme to honor the day.

There you go. Some days you're the victim, some days, you're the one wielding the bloody knife. I believe that at the moment, I am the one wearing the mask and repeatedly stabbing hapless victims. Because next meme:

 

Relax. Talking about the bad guy in the latest WIP. You know. The book that was supposed to be draft complete on 10/31 of last year? The same day Dad had that first heart attack? Yeah. This leads us to the second meme in this morning's 'Writing Experience as Meme'.

ON TO EDITS! And submissions. And . . .

A Meme of My Muses

So, this week the theme is to make a meme about your writing experiences.  And since, for me, it's just going on at a breakneck pace, with my mind being almost overrun by different ideas and the different stories I want to tell.

And then I found an old picture of me that seemed perfect for what I was thinking...

This feels like an accurate portrayal of what my relationship with my muses is.

Memes

This one is not mine, but it always makes me laugh, and it sets the right tone...

These two I made, so....

Not ALL of them. SimpLY not!

 Annnnnnd....

Because I spent years honing my craft to act on my own ideas,

and not to be insulted by someone's thoughtless notion that:

a.) I don't have my own creativity

b.) the idea is the 'hard part' of writing 

and it is worth half

c.) if their great idea isn't worth 

their own time effort, why should 

they presume it is worth mine?

That said, I always encourage folks who approach me about this
(usually at signings) to write it themselves because
what they will learn about writing
and about themselves
in the process
is worth their time and effort.