To kill or not to kill. Another fine line writers must walk. If you kill too often or too easily, you lessen the impact of the death. If you avoid doing harm to your characters, your story might seem too shallow.
So, do you Game-of-Thrones it or nah? In a post on Writers Helping Writers, Angela Ackerman offers advice on when to kill a character.
“When it comes to killing, there’s a time and place,” Ackerman says. “We don’t kill because the scene needs some spice. We don’t kill because we’ve spotted a plot hole, and killing a character seals it off. We don’t kill when it’s the easy way out. We don’t randomly kill someone to show readers how bad our baddie is.”
From your story perspective, you shouldn’t kill off a character when the death serves no purpose or if readers aren’t invested in the character. If you want any emotional impact, your reader needs to care about the person being bumped off. Story-wise, the death should move the plot forward.
So what are some good reasons to bump of a character?
- To remove your character’s support system
- To support the story’s theme
- To show the cost of failure
- Because the character had it coming
