Death be not proud (or something like that)

Geez, with that kind of opening, I feel like I should be wearing black and hefting a skull in my hand…

This is a post about fictional death, not about death in real life. But in the interests of full disclosure, I think I need my audience to know that I recently experienced the death of someone I considered both a good friend and a truly good man. The world is a poorer place without him.

In my typical bookish fashion, I suppose I’ve been musing over fictional death as a way to cope with my own personal grief. Whatever the reason, I’ve certainly thought a lot lately about the ways writers use death. These are the thoughts I bring you today, and even if you disagree with me (which is fine, of course), I ask you to be gentle with them, because death comes for all of us, and it’s never pleasant when it does.

*clears throat awkwardly after admitting to Vulnerable Emotions*

Anyway, let’s talk about killing characters.

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The thrust of my argument in this post is that writers tend to overuse death. We don’t understand it, we don’t grasp its full significance, so we end up cheapening it. That being said, I don’t want this post to turn into a diatribe against killing fictional characters. I’m not here to tell you that if you kill a character you’re a bad person, just because I, Charles Baker Harris, prefer to be shielded from uncomfortable emotions in fiction. That would be silly and selfish of me. Death is a natural fact of life, and sometimes we need to write about it.

But we need to find a healthy balance in the way we approach death. To me, that balance seems lacking, especially in Christian fiction circles. I’ve read Christian novels so liberally doused with death it feels like somebody handed the author a saltshaker and forgot to say “when.” On the other hand, I’ve had Christian peers earnestly attempt to convince me that the modern classic The Book Thief is “evil,” because it’s told from the point of view of Death, and Death is “evil.” I can only imagine how those Christians would feel about Terry Pratchett’s Discworld or Neil Gaiman’s Sandman.

Look, death is hard. It’s hard to know how to write about it appropriately–it’s hard to know when to write about it appropriately. I’m not going to pretend I have all the answers, especially in light of my own recent experiences. Nevertheless, I present for your consideration some reasons why death isn’t always the best way of advancing your plot or developing your characters.

First, death does not automatically elevate your story. Killing characters is not high art. We’re conditioned to believe tragedy has greater inherent artistic value than happiness or joy. It doesn’t! Do not (I beg of you) kill a character because you want to be thought “deep.” Only kill a character if you’ve determined their death is the best possible ending to their story arc.

A word to the wise–if you’re not sure what that character’s arc is because you only introduced them in order to kill them off and motivate another character in doing so, you have fallen into the great and terrible trap of Fridging, the downfall of so many brave writers in the days of yore. But don’t despair! The quickest way to escape the evil jaws of Fridging is good old-fashioned character development. Make sure each of your characters has their own independent goals and their own individual purpose, even the side characters. Then, if you still really want to kill them, make sure you’re doing it for a reason connected with their goals and their purpose, not someone else’s.

For more tips on avoiding fridging, check out this excellent Trope Talk from Overly Sarcastic Productions.

Killing poorly defined side characters in order to further the main character’s journey is just the tip of the iceberg, though. Most writers would agree this is an obvious problem. But there are other, subtler ways death is overused in fiction. Let’s explore the issue further.

Character death is often the go-to choice for raising the stakes in an action or adventure setting. It’s a familiar formula–“whoops, somebody died, things are getting serious.” However, death is not the only way to raise the story’s stakes. Don’t automatically assume killing a member of the crew is the only wake-up call your cocky protagonist will heed. Instead, ask yourself what your characters fear besides death… what they value even more than their lives. Is there another, more unexpected disaster you can hit them with?

The good thing about death from a storytelling perspective is that it’s universal. The bad thing about death from a storytelling perspective is (oddly enough) that it’s universal. Fear of dying, fear of losing loved ones, is a common emotion we can all relate to, but fear of death will not make your protagonist unique. What else are they afraid of that’s specific to their own story?

Be aware, too, that far from being blindsided by your tragic plot twists, many readers expect character death and may even be actively calculating which of your cast members won’t make it to the end. Especially since most authors aren’t as good at disguising their intentions in this department as they think they are. If you really want to surprise your audience, don’t do it by killing Fresh Faced Kid No. 243. There are better, more original ways to raise the stakes that grow naturally out of the soil of your particular story. You just need to find them.

What about war stories, you ask? It’s true that war stories, more than adventure stories, have a deeper need to engage with death. Because war is such a horrible and often senseless situation, these stories should be allowed more latitude to kill their characters, and even to kill a character in a seemingly random or pointless way that doesn’t clearly stem from their personal arc. That’s what warfare is about, after all. Many novelists have delved into the ultimate meaninglessness of wartime death to great effect, like Joseph Heller in Catch-22.

However, not every story which incorporates war as part of the plot is necessarily obligated to kill a main cast member, and I’m wary of any arguments to the contrary. I remember when Marissa Meyer’s Lunar Chronicles came out, it was fashionable to criticize Meyer for “failing” to axe any of the Gang of Eight (the four princesses and their love interests) in the war between Earth and Luna. There was a whole interplanetary conflict, for gosh sakes! Shouldn’t at least one of the gang have died?

Well… no… not really… not in a series of fluffy fairy tale retellings and happily-ever-after romances that just happened to take place in a galaxy at war. The Lunar Chronicles never set out to deal with the horrors of violent conflict. Catch-22 this certainly was not. Pretending to be something it wasn’t would have made the story worse, not better.

Now we come to my biggest pet peeve about character death, the one I wish I could emblazon in giant glitter letters dancing across the screen. Which is… *drumroll*…

Death and grief go hand in hand. You should not, I repeat, should not be writing about death unless you are willing to write about grief.

Everywhere I look, I see stories that flirt with death but shy away from grief. Stories looking for short-term drama without long-term consequences. The spilled blood, the dying breaths, the whispered confessions, the passionate tears and larger-than-life funeral celebrations. We revel in the extravagant emotions for a couple chapters, then sweep it all under the rug and get back to saving the world. Because that’s totally how losing someone you love works, right?

Spoiler alert: IT’S NOT.

Grief is not a brief, extravagant emotion. It’s a process more than an emotion, and there’s nothing brief about it. It’s endless. It’s exhausting. It’s confusing as hell, honestly. It’s being buffeted with waves of doubt and anger and guilt and despair, all swirling together until you can’t tell one from another. Grief shakes your deepest convictions and rewrites your inmost thought processes. Without going into private details, I can tell you I will never be the same person I was before I lost my friend on December 9, 2022. I will never look at the world the same way. And this wasn’t a spouse or a family member, either. This was a friend. I swear, when I look at the ways “death of a friend” is commonly presented in fiction (“it’s what he would have wanted, he died doing what he loved, and anyway the final battle is over and the book is finished so we don’t have time to talk about it, ‘k thanks bye!”) I want to punch someone.

Wow, that got pretty raw all of a sudden. Deep breaths, I suppose. 😛

Do you see my point? Grief is awful. If you think what I’m describing sounds depressing and harsh and lonely and the sort of thing that would really drag down a story and put a damper on the audience’s fun, you’re right! If you don’t want to put your readers through the wringer of that prolonged psychological struggle, that’s completely understandable! But in that case, the solution is avoiding killing your characters, not… ya know… killing them anyway and giving us a fast-food drive-through version of the surviving characters’ grieving process because your story doesn’t have the emotional bandwidth to explore that process honestly.

I’m aware there are probably a few hardy souls reading this with the opposite reaction; writers who are intrigued rather than intimidated by the challenge of representing grief realistically in their stories. Writers who love to paint human suffering in vivid blues and midnight blacks. To those writers, the “I volunteer as tribute” types, I have something to say, and I hope to say it as gently and empathetically as possible.

It’s okay not to write about sad things.

You, too, have permission to avoid killing your characters. You, too, can give yourself a break from grief and loss. You, too, can have an “everybody lives” moment like Christopher Eccleston in Doctor Who. It doesn’t mean you’re scared; it doesn’t mean you’re dishonest; it doesn’t mean you’re selling out your artistic integrity or giving up your right to be viewed as deep or interesting or worthy. Not every story needs to be a tragedy. I say this as someone who’s been through some dark times in my personal life and whose early writing tended toward the dark and gritty–I still “go dark” on occasion, but there’s a whole side of my brain I didn’t fully unlock until I started writing comedy. Turns out silly escapism was good for me. It might be good for you, too.

I’ve been speaking in general terms for most of this post. Now I’d like to cite a concrete example where letting a character live actually made a story stronger and more original. Let’s take a look at Season Four of The West Wing.

Television shows are some of the biggest culprits when it comes to cheap character death. This is partly due to the episodic nature of these long-running stories. The writers need to punch up the sagging plot every now and again, and they figure death is an easy way to do it. Actors leaving the show when their contracts run out is another big factor. The guy who plays Barry Frost can’t come back for the next season of Rizzoli and Isles? No problem! We’ll just kill him in an offscreen car crash in the final moments of the season finale.

me, watching at home: sir, you just fridged that African American man

What does any of this have to do with Season Four of The West Wing? Rob Lowe, the ’80s teen heartthrob who’d matured nicely into the idealistic young speechwriter Sam Seaborn, chose not to return for Season Five. A lesser show would have killed Sam off. But the West Wing writers were made of sterner stuff. They knew Sam’s death wouldn’t fit his character arc. Worse, it would directly contradict the show’s themes of hope and optimism. So instead of removing Sam from the cast by killing him, the writers set out to create a plotline where Sam would leave President Bartlett’s White House of his own free will.

Their solution? Sam’s idealism (an established trait long known to get him into trouble) would lead him to a quixotic campaign to win the Orange County House seat as a liberal Democrat. The defeat he suffered would naturally push him to withdraw from politics for a time, allowing Rob Lowe to exit the series. But because he wasn’t dead, just down for the count, Sam would triumphantly return in the final season to help his old friends serve a new President.

In my opinion, this storyline turned out to be one of the best The West Wing ever produced. Certainly it led to some of the show’s greatest moments. And it goes without saying it was far, far more interesting than Sam Seaborn’s tragic death from an aneurysm at age thirty-five would have been.

“You’re gonna lose, and lose huge. They’re gonna throw rocks at you next week. And I wanted to be standing next to you when they did.”

“I wanted to be standing next to you when they did–“ PARDON ME WHILST I GO SOB INTO A PILLOW.

Remember, kids, you don’t have to write about death to tap into deep emotions.

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Well, I think that’s about all I had to say in this post. It feels cathartic, rather, to lay all my feelings out. I’ll be curious to see the reaction, since I haven’t talked about character death much in the past, so I don’t necessarily have a sense of everyone’s thoughts. But… yeah?

*awkward finger gun exit*