Last night, after days of holding the moment off, one of my characters died. A character in a book is just a collection of words making up the narrator's description of them and their actions, and the words they speak. But in my head, as an author, and in your head, as a reader, you have your very own version of this imaginary friend. Left alone, the character lives forever, can fight countless unsurvivable battles, put the world to rights, whatever you like, there's nothing that can destroy them, except for the author's decision to tell the reader that they're gone, and will not be the source of any further dialogue (unless you're writing a ghost story or zombie epic, I guess).
I try to ground my stories in a realistic world, where death is the end of the story for the character. However, their death is not the end of the story for the other characters, just another event. I wanted to explore how my characters deal with this event, because although it's one of life's inevitable events, it always seems to draw out some of the strongest reactions. Possibly even stronger than birth (although I'd like to explore that idea eventually).
So, tragically, I ended the life of a character, and because it was the first time I'd done this, I decided to announce it on Twitter (I like sharing my writing experiences). Within minutes, @Thoughts4Paper asked me "What made you decide to kill the character?"
This question seems to imply that some authors just kill characters, because they want or need some death in their story, and don't really consider why they're writing each death. This is probably true for some authors. I, however, had considered my first death for some time. When I started writing the manuscript, I will admit that nowhere in the plot plan that I'd drawn up did I say that this character would die. This is the truth:
There's a point in writing a manuscript, at around the 10k mark, where something odd happens in nearly every story I write. It's something I can't properly explain, but lots of authors seem to experience it. What happens, and how I describe it, is that my characters seem to start "breathing on their own". Regardless of my intentions, the words I write seem to become independent of the story in my mind, and my characters take on a life of their own. I become aware of them as real people, and imagine them reacting to their world I've created, and the situation they're in. This doesn't happen in the first few thousand words, it takes time for them to run in a bit.
I've asked myself "why does this happen?" and I've come to the conclusion that while I seem to be pretty good at creating worlds, plots, and story lines, I'm rubbish at creating characters. Really. I know it. I know it, because when I start writing, most of my characters don't even have names! This is one my greatest weaknesses as a writer. I think it's also one of my greatest weaknesses as a person - I just don't "do" people. I make few friends (although I'm friendly to just about everyone), and I don't seem to connect to people in the way that many of the people I admire do. I have trouble remembering names. I have trouble empathising. It's not because I think I'm a bad person, it's just that I don't think and feel that way. It's probably deeper than just the way my brain thinks, it's who I am. I've had to come to terms with this, and so far I've managed to lead a good life, working around this flaw (if you want to describe it that way - some people find my natural naivety towards other people endearing, apparently).
The upshot of my personality problem, is that I don't discover my characters properly until after I've written them. As a result, they can end up being inconsistent, or not fitting the role I intended for them in the story. This is one of the reasons why it's essential that I re-write my stories several times. At the start of the second re-write, I'm much more aware of who my characters are, how they think, and how they'll react to certain events. I can make notes about them to help me improve their consistency. It's not a perfect way of writing, but it's the only way I can deal with the characters that I've created, having got to know them in that first draft.
So why did I kill my character? Because I had to. He started breathing on his own, and it turned out he was an alcoholic. He wasn't very well, and his actions were upsetting to my main character. My main character had never been upset like this before, and I wanted to explore this. I also wanted a vehicle for bringing my main character and his estranged father back together. I'd initially planned a lame search plot, but it seems that deaths, or more correctly, funerals, have a way of bringing families together that other events don't. @Thoughts4Paper responded "Brutal..." Yes, it is, but I think it's entirely necessary.
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