6 Ways to Write Sadder Character Deaths

great novels are fundamentally about creating emotion and a well-written character death can be an incredibly poignant way to achieve this so in this video I'm going to share six strategies that I use as a fantasy author to write emotionally impactful character deaths that aren't just done for shock value but rather feel like they add an incredibly deep sense of meaning to a narrative and at the end of this video I'll also share a bonus strategy that can amplify any of these ideas even further and the first idea is to give them deep relationships with other characters when you do this the impact of a character's death ripples through that character's web and is magnified by the depth of their connections readers get to see how this death affects everyone that that character knows and each relationship offers a unique vantage point to reflect on this death and to access a different facet of emotional experience ideally no two characters should feel the same way about another character's death instead their unique relationships with this character should color their perceptions and lead to Unique into interpretations and then hopefully unique emotional experiences for your reader for example you might have one character who sees the dead guy as a rival or saw the dead guy as a rival and after the death that character now feels maybe a little bit guilty about how hard he pushed this person or you might have another character that had a romantic relationship with a dead guy and again that's going to color their perceptions further and give you another opportunity to access a sort of different angle on your reader's emotions number two the Redemptive sacrifice the best way to Showcase why this technique is so powerful is simply to share an example of boromir's death scene from The Fellowship of the Ring Boromir Begins the story as a fairly upright character but as he progresses with the fellowship and learns the power of the Ring he becomes tempted and tries to steal it from Frodo however he soon becomes horrified by the corruptness that has set into him and sacrifices himself I will follow you my brother my king and this particular way of killing off a character where you kind of turn them to the dark side and then they redeem themselves just in time for them to die and perhaps their death is actually an important part of that Redemption is a really powerful and emotional way to kind of make readers feel renewed sympathy for this character and therefore for the death to kind of hit them in a much harder and more profound way three remove the protector if there is a figure in your story who protects guides and teaches your main character then killing them can be a really effective way to force your main character to stand on their own two feet which creates so much more tension and suspense as George RR Martin says just the minute you kill Gandalf the suspense of everything that follows is a thousand times greater because now anybody could die 4. subvert expectations particularly in fantasy novels we often expect the mentor to die and for their Young Apprentice to live and that is largely what my previous point in this video was all about but what about a story where the opposite happens imagine the why is old Mentor teaching the young protagonist how to learn their magical abilities or learn their skills and then that young protagonist goes off and is killed and now the mentor has to kind of Step In to solve the story's problem or to avenge their Young Apprentice this is why it's so so critical to understand deeply the genre that you are writing and the reader's expectations it's only by deeply understanding and internalizing those reader expectations that you can know how to play and twist and manipulate them in interesting and unique ways in your story a key warning that I will put in here though and this is a big caveat is that the death still needs to make sense and it still needs to be properly set up you've probably read plenty of stories where characters get killed purely just to shock you as a reader and while that can sometimes be effective you do have to make sure the death is still set up in a way that was logically foreshadowed and feels inevitable in hindsight otherwise it's going to contribute to a sense of feeling a little bit Hollow and feeling like you as the author were just doing this to get the shock value out of readers 5. promise us a great future then take it away happiness this equals expectations minus reality so when you make readers expect a really bright and promising future for a character and then you take it away that can be a really effective way to make readers quite sad and if you're thinking that this technique applies to things Beyond just character deaths then you're absolutely right and you can certainly use it in other Realms in your story as well again it all comes back down to knowing how to establish and understand reader expectations which then gives you Freedom as an author to play and experiment with those now this strategy here is effective because it relies on interrupting a character's art but this brings us to the next principle which is to fulfill the character's Arc perfectly sometimes the greatest character deaths are the ones with the most poignant sense of meaning attached to them and with this rush and crystallization of meaning we feel a great surge of bitter sweetness the way to achieve this is to have a character's death be the only real way to resolve or conclude their character Arc for me personally these are usually my favorite character deaths to write and if you've read my novels you'll know exactly what I'm talking about here but without wanting to spoil any of my books which you should definitely check out if you haven't already one really great example of this comes from Game of Thrones and I'm about to spoil Game of Thrones here for you if you haven't already seen the TV series specifically so skip ahead to this time stamp if you want to avoid spoilers okay you're still here so I'm going to talk about Hodor and hodor's death in season six of Game of Thrones as a perfect example of how completing a character Arc can lead to an immense feeling of sort of Bittersweet poignant meaning Hodor is a gentle giant who can only say Hodor due to suffering a traumatic seizure in his youth while helping Bran Stark escape from the undead bran uses his time traveling wag abilities to go back to the younger Hodor who is then named Willis and instructs him to hold the door leading to this traumatic seizure and damage to his mind and meaning that his older self in the future with bran sacrifices himself by holding the door closed so bran can escape [Applause] [Music] it's an absolutely perfect example of this character Arc that really clicks into place through their death and their death is almost this last piece in a puzzle that when that piece gets put down you're suddenly able to step back as a reader or a viewer and you see the kind of grandeur of this whole thing and it leads to an immense feeling of of sort of Bittersweet emotion and a lot of people cry at that scene for this reason so those are our six strategies to write sadder character deaths but I promise that I give a bonus strategy as well to amplify these further and this is a small technique it's not the only way to do this but this strategy is to use callbacks to re-puncture the emotion a very simple example of this is that maybe a character gives a certain token or a certain item to another character when they die now all the character holds on to this that token now becomes an opportunity for you as the writer to re-puncture the emotion of that character's death whenever you want to do this further in the story so in my upcoming Epic Fantasy novel Kingdom of Dragons I use this technique I basically have other character who sort of dies early on in fact they die before the book begins so it's not really a spoiler and they give this small Stone Eagle to rovin who is one of the main characters in my story and it allows me as a writer to every time that I want rovin to re-experience the emotion of this character's death you can bring the Stone Eagle into the story and it kind of serves as this shorthand where readers will be reminded of the trauma that has happened in the past and as a writer you can use that to amplify emotion within the present now of course you don't want to overuse this and when you read the story you'll see how I only use this in very tactical and specific ways throughout the narrative because if you just over rely on this readers will become quite accustomed to it and they're going to blank out but it can be a really effective way to sort of heighten and again just reaccess that emotion As you move through the narrative and as you'll see in Kingdom of Dragons it becomes a very key part of Romans Arc throughout the story by the way if you want to read Kingdom of Dragons it is going to be launching on Kickstarter on November the 1st you can check out the pre-launch page right now so sign up to that and Kickstarter we'll let you know when the book is live I put like two years into writing this book and I think it is the best story that I've written so far so if you've ever gotten some benefit from this channel I think you'll really enjoy the writing in that novel so go check it out link is in the description down below cheers and I'll see you in the next video foreign

Channel: Jed Herne

Views: 31,422

Keywords: writing, writing advice, writing craft, story, fantasy, author, jed herne, authortube, booktube, wizards warriors words, self-publish, indie, publishing

Id: ivY-_im3NrU

Length: 8min 27sec (507 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 06 2023