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Character Death: How to Make Readers Care About Corpses

Some of you pansies might realize that, at some point in your narrative, you'll have to drag Lassie behind the barn with Da's ol' gun.

Killing off a character might hurt some of your lil' feelings, but it can be a necessary part of being a good writer. G. R. R. Martin makes a living of killing characters that are supposed to have tremendous Plot Armour, and he does well enough with it (though by now his readers have learned not to get attached to any one character) and he is not the only example (but probably one of the most extreme).

I won't go into the why of killing off a character. Maybe you just need to add that much more realism to a war scene, or maybe that anti-hero you've made the readers love just needs to be a little less alive for a bit. Whatever the case may be, you need Lassie more deader than a rusty door-nail.

The problem is never actually killing the character. Read one war scene and you'll see limbs flying, blood gushing, and projectiles zipping (be they arrows or bullets or martian laser rays) all very good ways of showing characters getting chummy with his/her/its deity of choice. You just need a few details about how Lassie's face ate that shot-gun blast and what it does to her constitution; the reader is usually smart enough to figure out the rest.

No, killing a character isn't hard at all. It's making that death count that matters.

Humans are assholes. If you don't know this by now... well, good for you, you live in a delusional world of butterflies and happiness. The truth is that we can all watch someone get their brain ventilated and not blink an eye. Why? I don't know, I'm a writer, not a bloody psychologist.

I do know that seeing the death is not enough to make us care for the death. The thing that makes us care is the emotion, the attachment we have to a character.

When a certain young king dies in G. R. R. Martin's saga, readers everywhere wet themselves in joy. They were happy because his death meant the end of a character whom they loathed.

When your Lassie dies, we want the reader to feel something. Be that happiness, terror, or sadness.

Usually, the greatest way for a reader to sympathies with a character, is for that character to display some emotion that the reader can empathize with. Unfortunately, Lassie is a bit busy painting a Rorschach pattern on the barn wall with her brains to feel much. You can't empathize too much with a corpse (zombie flicks aside).

So, what do you do?

As long as Lassie isn't your point of view character (Please don't murder your point of view character in a first person novel) then you're most likely telling the narrative from over the shoulder of some other character. That viewpoint is your key to half-decent character deaths.

I was reading a novel recently (from the Wheel of Time series by Robert Jordan) when a certain character died. I did not care much for this character, so when she died, I felt next to nothing. Still, the author made me tear up a chapter later. How?

He showed how others, the friends and companions of that dead character, reacted to her jumping into the horizontal phone booth. Their reacting, their moving with sadness and trying to fight through the grief, made me feel something about her death.

If you want the reader to feel something after Lassie becomes living-challenged, then have Johnny slump to his knees besides her hole-ridden corpse, crying his little childish eyes off.

Show Daddy I-pulled-the-trigger turn away in shame and try to hide a tear.

Have the innocent little sister see Lassie's almost-compost body, and waddle to it, asking the dog to get up, and not understanding what's going on.

Have the family mom rush over to her son, trying to comfort him after seeing his dead pup.

Maybe the character knew he was going to die? Even better! Lassie might have written a letter to her loving family (I know that dogs can't write, you don't need to leave a bloody comment about it) about why she needs to return to a state of chemical equilibrium.

Basically, when your character's about to take an All Expenses Paid trip aboard Stygian Cruise Lines, make sure he/she isn't alone. If you want it to count, make others react to it.

Last of all, I leave you with some sage advice: Always remember: many a plot-hole can be filled with a corpse.

Keep warm, stay cool,

Edgar A.