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Post by Valhalla Erikson on Aug 9, 2023 15:20:21 GMT -6
Ever come across a situation in your story where you've strongly considered wanting to kill off your main character? Either to showcase that nobody is safe or to just see where the story takes you? If so how do you come up with a replacement character to keep the story going?
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Post by Alatariel on Aug 10, 2023 11:57:58 GMT -6
Ever come across a situation in your story where you've strongly considered wanting to kill off your main character? Either to showcase that nobody is safe or to just see where the story takes you? If so how do you come up with a replacement character to keep the story going? I don't think I've ever wanted to kill my MC but I know some authors have done it. I know some readers love stories that keep them guessing and enjoy the rawness of it. I'm personally not a fan, I like a bit of security when reading. I'd much rather see the MC go through impossibly difficult trauma and learn to manage all the complex emotions that come with it than just kill them for shock factor. But if you feel it's the right way to go, try an exercise where you do kill them off and end the chapter. Then start the next chapter with a side character POV who then becomes the REAL MC. My main suggestion is to make sure the new MC has even higher stakes in the story to keep it compelling. Think Psycho. Hitchcock kills off the MC and then transitions the POV to Norman Bates who is a much more compelling character with much higher stakes in the story. |
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Post by Valhalla Erikson on Aug 10, 2023 14:35:34 GMT -6
Ever come across a situation in your story where you've strongly considered wanting to kill off your main character? Either to showcase that nobody is safe or to just see where the story takes you? If so how do you come up with a replacement character to keep the story going? I don't think I've ever wanted to kill my MC but I know some authors have done it. I know some readers love stories that keep them guessing and enjoy the rawness of it. I'm personally not a fan, I like a bit of security when reading. I'd much rather see the MC go through impossibly difficult trauma and learn to manage all the complex emotions that come with it than just kill them for shock factor. But if you feel it's the right way to go, try an exercise where you do kill them off and end the chapter. Then start the next chapter with a side character POV who then becomes the REAL MC. My main suggestion is to make sure the new MC has even higher stakes in the story to keep it compelling. Think Psycho. Hitchcock kills off the MC and then transitions the POV to Norman Bates who is a much more compelling character with much higher stakes in the story. I recall a documentary on Psycho where one critic once theorized that it can be easy to assume Norman Bates as just an ordinary guy trying to deal with his mother's murderous rampage and the stakes were coming to terms with the possibility of stopping his mother from killing more people. Before we knew what we knew. Your statement regarding killing MC's is one of the reasons why I'm not 100% fond of A Song of Ice & Fire because, by that point, I felt the author spent more time in trying to subvert tropes rather than just tell a story and what happens is he subverted too much that he ended up writing himself to a blank page. I'm all for flipping the script on a story but the story should always come first. I'm more of an author who'd have my MC's go through a road of intense trauma and come out of it much different characters than how they start in the beginning. I might kill off an MC if the story requires it but I always make sure that there are other characters capable of filling the void when the time comes. |
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Post by Alatariel on Aug 10, 2023 15:14:40 GMT -6
I don't think I've ever wanted to kill my MC but I know some authors have done it. I know some readers love stories that keep them guessing and enjoy the rawness of it. I'm personally not a fan, I like a bit of security when reading. I'd much rather see the MC go through impossibly difficult trauma and learn to manage all the complex emotions that come with it than just kill them for shock factor. But if you feel it's the right way to go, try an exercise where you do kill them off and end the chapter. Then start the next chapter with a side character POV who then becomes the REAL MC. My main suggestion is to make sure the new MC has even higher stakes in the story to keep it compelling. Think Psycho. Hitchcock kills off the MC and then transitions the POV to Norman Bates who is a much more compelling character with much higher stakes in the story. I recall a documentary on Psycho where one critic once theorized that it can be easy to assume Norman Bates as just an ordinary guy trying to deal with his mother's murderous rampage and the stakes were coming to terms with the possibility of stopping his mother from killing more people. Before we knew what we knew. Your statement regarding killing MC's is one of the reasons why I'm not 100% fond of A Song of Ice & Fire because, by that point, I felt the author spent more time in trying to subvert tropes rather than just tell a story and what happens is he subverted too much that he ended up writing himself to a blank page. I'm all for flipping the script on a story but the story should always come first. Very apt analysis of George R.R. Martin and the Song of Ice and Fire. He must have the worlds most intense writer's block. Or performance anxiety. The hype surrounding ANYTHING he produces is enough to paralyze anyone. The longer he makes us wait, the more our expectations go through the roof. But as you said, he kind of did it to himself. I'm sure he's his own worst critic and sees every idea he has as not good or shocking enough. Oh definitely! I like all of this. As long as it serves a purpose to the larger story then I can forgive a lot of choices on the page. |
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Post by Bird on Aug 10, 2023 16:16:24 GMT -6
Ever come across a situation in your story where you've strongly considered wanting to kill off your main character? Either to showcase that nobody is safe or to just see where the story takes you? If so how do you come up with a replacement character to keep the story going? The biggest problem I see with it is based on expectations set by the writer in the first few chapters:
1. Who the reader encounters in the first chapter establishes who the primary characters will be. There can be exceptions to this, where you may encounter a crucial character who joins the party later, but generally that character isn't the main character.
2. If the main protagonist is killed off but there isn't a secondary character established as crucial in 1, then the reader is blindsided and the expectations the author created in that first few chapters has been destroyed. It's like falling off a boat in the middle of the ocean with no life raft. That's very jarring. Books that have done it often have not good reviews I notice.
So to pull it off, you need to establish expectations about who are important characters right away in the book. Then stick to those characters, so when the "main character" is killed off, those secondary characters step forward to fill the role with often higher stakes.
That's been my analysis from reading books that do well or have good reviews and have main character deaths. (George R.R. Martin is an outlier but then he established expectations right away that anyone could be killed, so the reader is taught to expect their favorite character to die. So when the character lives, it hits differently. This also is a route that can be done, but it's hard to pull it off well.)
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Post by RAVENEYE on Aug 14, 2023 9:23:24 GMT -6
I've totally killed my main character. No spoilers, so I'm not telling which one or in what book. I can't remember at what point early on that I knew it was an appropriate plot point. It happens near the end, he and his arch-nemesis pretty much kill each other. Very dramatic, very emotional, the fallout for the other characters is so ... emotional! I can't even. My throat gets all tight with tears just describing it.
So yeah, there are times to go there and times to save the poor character.
To answer the second question, finding replacement characters was easy because the series was so epic in proportion that there were about 3 main characters, so the other two effortlessly, believably filled that gap.
IF I wrote a story with a single main character, I'm not sure I'd feel confident killing them off.
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Post by saintofm on Aug 14, 2023 12:48:52 GMT -6
Its one of those things that needs to be handled with care. Kill too many important people off and the audience might come to expect that only a handful of people might have an immortality clause or not grow attached to them.
If they are well liked, this can get the gut punch needed (Wash's death in Serenity for instance). But if not handled with care it an annoy most people.
And then there is what I like to call the Slasher Problem: With little exception the people that get killed in Slasher films tend to either get so little character that we don't care when they die, or are so grating that the killer is putting us out of our misery when they put a machete through their skull.
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Post by handofjustice60 on Dec 8, 2023 11:07:58 GMT -6
For me, it really depends on the story especially the genre.
Sometimes, I kill my protagonist and replace him or her with someone similar or someone related to him or her.
I think it is in genres where the story doesn't focus on the protagonists that you typically see protagonists being killed. In many realistic stories, protagonists die.
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