The Life and Death of a Character

By AnnetteDashofy

I’ve once again delved into my list of questions posed by my street team at Zoe ChambersMysteries & Friends. This time, Jolee Jank asked if it was a good (or bad) idea to kill off a regular or semi-regular character.

I’d have answered this sooner, but I’ve been pondering it for several weeks.

Killing off a regular or recurring character is always tricky business. Fans feel these people are friends. If we, as writers, have done our job well, our readers genuinely care about the characters who populate our books.

I’ve been known to weep as I’ve killed off a character who only appeared in that one book, and who I knew had to go from the moment I opened the document and typed “Chapter One.” 

So the decision to permanently end a character who has been around awhile doesn’t come lightly.

Like readers, television viewers become attached to characters in their favorite series.

Cait meets her end after one season

I was as shocked and saddened as everyone else when Cait was felled by a sniper’s bullet at the end of NCIS’s first season. Eventually, I and most other viewers came to love Ziva David, who took her place. So much so that when she left the series in 2013, fans were in an uproar for years.

Major characters “die” in television more often than in books. Actors choose not to renew a contract. Sometimes the actor playing the part dies in real life leaving producers with the decision of whether to kill off the character, too, or recast.

 

Hannibal Heyes before
Pete Duel's death

(For the love of all that’s holy, guys, do NOT recast. Please!)

 

Hannibal Heyes recast
as Roger Davis

In books, characters can live on, even after the death of their author.

Twice in my series, I started a book with the intention of having a regular-but-secondary character die at the end. Twice I changed my mind. Or to be more accurate, the story changed my mind for me. However, I’m not ruling it out in the future.

(How’s that for a tease?)

Here’s the thing—like my readers, I also feel that my characters are real. They live and breathe inside my head and my heart. I try to make them real and place them in real circumstances for my readers too. And in real life, no one gets out alive. Tragedy and illness happen. Only a cartoon character can have an anvil fall on their head and pop up to foil their nemesis another day.

I don’t write cartoons.

So, is it a good idea? Probably not. Will it happen anyway? Probably.

Fellow writers: have you ever killed off one of your secondary (but regular) characters? What kind of reaction did you receive? Fellow readers: which characters—in books or in TV shows—have you mourned when they died? Did you continue to read or watch the series afterward?