on writing character death

[harborshore]

Tropes, why we use them, h/c, and on knowing what you're doing when you're doing it. I don't mean to imply that I'm some kind of an authority on the topic, and I'm not interested in indicting stories or fandoms that get it "wrong." I do, however, reference stories that I think do it well. Born from a need to talk about why women die in stories.


Warnings: this post discusses character death, and as such it contains discussion of stories where people die and the aftermath and the accompanying grief. It quotes a song that briefly references suicidal thoughts as a result of said grief. It also contains spoilers for synecdochic's Freedom's Just Another Word for Nothing Left to Lose, lyo's Not Dead, Only Sleeping and her Can't Stop Dropping Things. It also contains spoilers for who died on the first page of my big bang from last year.





The original catalyst for this post was a mixed bag: a discussion of sexism in slash fandom, a discussion of canonical spousal character death in Sherlock Holmes (but I want to stress that I'm not actually discussing Sherlock Holmes at all here, not having read that particular bit of the canon OR seen the movie), a number of kidfics that led to falling in love where the author didn't warn for character death of the mother of said children (the summary didn't reveal it either). And I was finding myself intensely bothered by the killing of women as a catalyst for men acquiring a child/getting together. This doesn't necessarily mean I don't think it can be done well, but I do think it should be done carefully. Because no matter what fandom you're in, if you're going to kill someone's sister/girlfriend/wife/etc., she presumably mattered to somebody, and if that isn't in your story, it's going to read somewhat oddly.

Writing (major) character death isn't easy. Generally speaking, at least. What you're doing is taking away someone who presumably means something to the rest of the characters in your story, whether you care about the character you killed off or not. And this is true even if you're, say, writing kidfic and decide to kill off the sister of one of the two boys in your chosen pairing (a sister we don't know much about canonically), because adoption is somewhat difficult to contrive for a single dude. In most cases, the sister will have meant something to her children and/or to her brother. Additionally, she may be important to some of your readers, who became attached to her when she showed up in episode five of this fictitious TV show and was sort of really awesome before leaving again. If she doesn't figure into your story much, despite it being set right after her death, this might seem a little strange to your readers.

Another example is the death of someone's significant other, which opens the door for character B to come in and comfort character A. This isn't uncommon, and it sometimes works and sometimes does not. The problem a writer can run into here is that in order for the comfort to be meaningful, character A has to have really cared about his or her significant other who died, because otherwise, where did your narrative tension go? Why aren't A and B together already? (Another option could be that A didn't care much about his or her former love, in which case they could be facing crippling guilt mixed in with their grief.) But if A really loved him/her, how do you get them to a point of letting go and falling in love with B instead?

Relatedly, there's another issue with killing women simply to make your male leads angst, which is that you're following in the footsteps of a less-than-awesome legacy (how many heroes can you count whose primary motivation is a dead wife? Now give me the reverse statistic…). For instance, in comics we have the famous Women in Refrigerators campaign, which pointed out the recurrence of using the death or debilitating physical injury of a female character as a call to action for a male character and thus having said death/injury be all about the man, as opposed to the person that it actually happened to. (An example of a story that works better: the shooting of Barbara Gordon, leaving her in a wheelchair, lead to her creating a new alter ego and a new way of fighting crime.)

But Vee, you say, how can I make sure the death affects my characters without falling into fridging territory?

I don't have a perfect answer, only to ask you to remember to think about it. It's not a problem that is unique to any genre (I've mentioned h/c and kidfic, and alluded to more action-oriented stories—there are surely others). As sheafrotherdon put it over at her post on writing and checking our privilege:

Here's what I don't think stops us from doing harm – writing one particular genre of fiction over another; writing stories about one expression of human sexuality over another; writing stories or creating art or making vids or recording podcasts about any particular set of characters in any particular canon, over any other set of particular characters in any other particular canon. None of this alone inures us from screwing up.

And I can tell you about how I do it, but mostly I want to talk about other people who get it right. It starts with a song, see. To me, Vienna Teng's Passage is a great example of how to write about the process of grieving someone and slowly, slowly figuring out how to live again. One of the reasons it works so well is that the narrator is the person who died, which does make sure her presence is never forgotten, but I realize this isn't practical for most of us.

Just look at the way she chronicles the transition of the characters that miss the woman who died. She starts out two days after the crash:

My lover sits, the silent eye
in a hurricane of warmth and word
My mother trembles with the sobs
whose absence seems absurd
My sister shouts to let her see
through the cloud of crowd surrounding me
My colleagues call for silence in my name

Then she moves to three months after the death, when things are worse (which can be very true for grief, the way it takes a while to sink in):

My lover puts a knife to wrist
says tomorrow comes, hold on a while
My mother tosses in the sheets
and dreams me holding my own child
My sister plays our homemade tapes
laughs as tears stream down her face
My office door now bears a different name

Then four years, and now it is easier:

My lover hears the open wind
and crawls blinking into the sun
My mother leafs through photographs
and thinks "yes she was a lovely one"
My sister can't decide her truth
asks aloud what I might do
In a conference hall my brief efforts engraved

And at the end, the lover has someone else, the tree that they planted in the yard has grown, and life has moved on. But the song doesn't end in despair, it feels like the sorrow has come and passed, and the reason it feels that way is that we saw the worst of it, so we can believe in the transition, the passage. That's one way to do it.

Both synecdochic's Freedom's Just Another Word for Nothing Left to Lose and lyo's Not Dead, Only Sleeping get there, too. In both cases, the stories are gen, chronicling how Rodney and Mikey, respectively, get through the grief of losing John and Alicia. And the reason the catharsis of the ending works, in my opinion, is that they do go through the grief, more or less openly. Rodney holds himself so tightly you spend many parts of the story being terrified that he'll break; Mikey does break, but he puts himself together again, and when he's back on stage at the end, I defy you not to smile through the tears.

That's the key for me, maybe. If it matters to your character A, whoever it is, it will matter to your reader, and the ending will be that much more triumphant for it. Pairing stories are more difficult: one of the reasons the reader can buy the h/c of Can't Stop Dropping Things is that it's a gsf story, so all of the three persons in the pairing care about the death of the fourth. Also, the moment when they say to each other that they're going to sleep together not just because Ryan died becomes more powerful for it, in my opinion. They love him but they love each other, too, if that makes sense.

And then lastly, what if we have a death that is a catalyst for action? I did that, in my big bang last year. I killed Pete, Greta, Steve, Cassadee and Andy on page 1, for many reasons (and agonized over it so much, my poor poor betas). The reason I killed Steve was that Lindsey needed something to propel her into her own impassioned campaign against the regime. Steve is Lindsey's best friend—I didn't want to kill him. I took pains to mention him enough as the story went on that we knew that Lindsey was thinking about him beyond the fact that she was drawing pictures of him and Greta and to demonstrate that he'd been rather important for the underground music movement (music is illegal in this particular NYC). What I was trying to do, mostly, was to carve him a presence in the story even though he died when it started.

Greta and Pete though, they both died because of the sequel, because of what the rest of the Hushies end up doing, and because I needed Ashlee and Patrick to go a little crazy. I've spent quite some time trying to figure out how to retcon their deaths (I'd like to give Pete back to Ashlee and Patrick, and I'd love it if Greta could come back and sing) but I can't, and the reason I can't do it is that grief should matter. Grief and the process of getting over it, and in this case what it leads to (working just that much harder to fight the revolution), they're too important to retcon away. Also, in a way, I need that passage of grief and sorrow to mirror the war. Even though no one is sadder than I am that Greta and Pete are dead, because I know them in this verse.

When I first decided on the deaths, it honestly was a matter of needing to demonstrate that the revolution is just that necessary, even though I knew Steve's death mattered and Pete's would set something else off. But as I was writing, I got to know the characters, and now I know what Greta's death leads to, and I know that just about ten minutes before the last show they ever played, Cassadee got up the courage to kiss Greta, who smiled like the bright thing she was and told her, "After the show." I know Andy was down there as much to help Pete as to play. I can't judge whether I got it right, but I can tell you I thought about it. A lot.

So where does that leave us? People do die in wars and revolutions and cancer and on the other side of a stargate and—and sometimes we're going to write about it. My point, or my wish, is that death in stories isn't ignored or glossed over, because you run the risk of missing escapism and hitting bewilderment and hurt on the part of your reader. I don't want to tell you how to write something (the stories I reference deal with it differently, even if two of them belong to the same writer; what they have in common is that they in some way chronicle the passage) but I wanted to ask you to think about it, and to be careful. Because it is that important.

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