8 Tips for Killing Off Characters

if you're like me you probably can't write a story without leaving a body count and depending on what type of genre you're writing in whether it be horror or action or sci-fi fantasy whatever it is typically a lot of drama can be created in life-and-death situations if you have life-and-death situations you got to have a little death in there too so today I'm going to give you some advice on how to write death scenes and how to kill off characters in the most effective impactful way what's up guys my name is Brandon Nolte I'm a writer and welcome my writing channel today I'm going to talk about killing people fictional people and I'm gonna give you some tips on how to get the most out of your character's deaths so the first tip I have for you is that you should never pull punches when it comes to death and this is something that I seen a lot of stories particularly like the horror genre oftentimes you'll have like a monster that's just a menace it's just capable of extreme speed and extreme power and it's it's just a death machine and yet when it reaches the main characters all of a sudden it's clumsy or it just it all of a sudden loses whatever powers it had or it just can't manage to get after the people it needs to kill and it can be really disappointing in this regard and I think this is just a classic example of writers who just they're afraid to kill off characters and you don't want to be one of those people because if you're afraid to kill off characters your reader is not in suspense they're just they know that you don't have what it takes to kill off a supporting character or a major character my number two tip is to combine shock value with emotional impact now a lot of younger writers tend to think that shock value alone is enough when it comes to death and yes we do like to be surprised when a character dies well maybe we don't like it but it's exciting it throws us off it draws us right into the story if someone just dies and we expected them to live that's a good thing for entertainment value now it can be shallow however if there's not emotional impact along with it if you just kill off characters just for the sake of killing them it's just not gonna resonate with the reader in the same way that a character's meaningful death will and by a meaningful death there's gonna be a lot of different things but whenever you're killing off a character ask yourself does this character's death affect the rest of the characters in the story does it impact the main character does it have huge ramifications throughout the plot these are things you should look for as well as that shock value now my number three tip it also goes back to this idea of meaningful characters and I think when it comes to making a character's death meaningful one of the things to keep in mind is that you want to have a complete character die rather than a nobody and when I talk about a complete character this is a character we've gotten to know we've seen them they're well rounded they have a character arc they have hobbies they have interests they have flaws they have all kinds of things that a regular human being does they're not just simply a random person who died for the sake of dying now on the other hand you have a lot of stories where maybe you have a mystery that opens up with like a prostitute dead in an alleyway or you have just some old man dying in the opening pages and we're supposed to care about that but if you don't make us care about those people who die it's just not gonna have the same drive for the reader yes it's an excuse for the story to happen it's an excuse for the detectives to get on the job but at the same time it doesn't have the same amount of impact that if you have a character who you develop even over the course of one chapter even if we just get to know that person a little bit if you have a meaningful death with a complete character that will always be more important than a nobody dying my number four tip hint at a promising future for a character before you kill them off now this is one of my favorite ways of killing off characters because it's so effective and when it's done well it has a lot of emotional impact and what I mean by this is that if you have a character and you convince the reader that maybe they have a promising relationship down the line or maybe they're finally going to get into college or they're finally gonna get the job of their dreams or they're gonna be reunited with their family or there's gonna be some other great positive thing going on in their near future and then you take that character away through death your audience will feel that it will have a ton of emotional impact and I see this in a lot of different stories I think in season one of Game of Thrones right before Ned gets what he gets what happens is there's that that scene where we learned that Ned's gonna be sent to the wall and apparently gonna be reunited with Jon Snow and I remember when I was first watching that I was like oh man I can't wait to see Ned and Jon Snow together that's gonna be so exciting and then well it never happened my number five tip be aware of death related cliches now there are tons of these cliches out there I think one of the most popular ones is the final girl cliche and this is something you see in slasher movies where you have a lot of teenagers and a bunch of them are just you know they're rotten people they're scumbags and then you have this girl who's just a total saint and she survives in the end because the monster only kills the bad people and we've we've seen this so many times that we expect the final girl to sort of survive and when she does survive we don't really care because it's been done before same thing goes for epic fantasy when the mentor is killed off oftentimes you have a story like Star Wars where Luke is learning from obi-wan and then about the three quarter mark of the story obi-wan gets killed off or Gandalf gets killed off this is something that happens in a lot of mentor-mentee stories and there is symbolism involved usually when the mentor dies off it's there to show that the hero has to pick up the torch and carry on the values but when we see it so many times and we see it as often as we do it's just too predictable at this point so if you are using these type of tropes you know the mentor the Protege try to do something different with it ask yourself is there a way I can have the mentor survive maybe the mentor becomes the villain or maybe the mentor survives but the Protege dies and then what does that mean for the story what does that mean for the plot those are types of examples of how you can just you know subvert expectations and try to do something new my number six tip is to ensure that there is an adequate reaction to a character's death by this I mean that when a character dies the other characters who survived should be reacting to it they should be shedding tears they should be making mistakes at work they should be thinking about it they should be miserable they should be wishing they could have stopped that they should have survivor's guilt all those different things Glenn credence to your story they let the readers know that this character's death meant something to these people so many times I will see in a story a character gets killed off and then the survivors they barely even think about it for a second or there they're beat up for maybe one scene and then they move on as if it never happened if you're doing that it's just not honest storytelling you want that death have meaning you want the survivors to struggle with it to grasp with it to maybe even become better people as a result of it to challenge themselves to do better you have to find a way for there to be a proper reaction to every major death you include in a story my number seven tip is to tie your story's theme into each death now this is something that it's a little more advanced if you're a newer writer you might not yet be comfortable with working with theme and tying it to different aspects of your story but I think the easiest way to explain the idea of combining theme and death is to look at like a slasher film think about a story where maybe you have a group of teenagers and they're a bunch of bullies and they pick on people and then some monster comes after them and he the monster kills all the bullies except for maybe the kids who they weren't causing havoc for other people and what would ultimately be suggested by this is that the lesson of the story would be that those who caused harm will receive harm or something like that that's just a crude example just something I came up with right now but you get the idea if you have death sending a message to your audience it will have more impact and it will make your story deeper and this is something that we see in stories like Game of Thrones where you have characters who they pay the price for their actions and we learn a lesson about power and resisting power by looking at why characters die I think a lot of times when we watch a show like Game of Thrones we ask ourselves why did that character die what were the mistakes they made that led to their death and that's something that makes a story compelling so if you can do that if you can tie a character's death in to the theme of your story make sure your roll with it your readers are love you for it now my eighth and final tip is to be careful when you bring characters back to life whenever you bring a character back to life for instance in a fantasy story or maybe like a horror story where there's black magic involved whenever you bring someone back to life there should be a cost and if that cost is not severe enough it's really gonna diminish the impact of your story because if if you're just bringing people back to life and the people who are resurrected are just totally fine or they're more powerful than ever what does that say about your story world it's almost like sending the message that wow we should just seriously just kill off everybody because then they'll just be better off for it and that's not the message you want to send you want death to have impact and if you're gonna reverse the process of death there should be some kind of a cost involved maybe the characters you know they're not at a hundred percent or maybe they they have something clouding their mind or messing with their brains or something like that maybe they're there they can't think straight or they're just you know they're their body aches all over they can still feel pain in the wound that killed them and if you need an example of a story where a character's killed off and brought back to life at a cost look up Stephen King's book Pet Sematary that's one of the best examples out there but regardless of what you do if you are killing off characters and you plan on bringing them back make sure it's very difficult to bring them back it shouldn't be easier to cure death than it is to cure the common cold and if you do make it that easy your story world is only going to suffer as a result so I hope this helps question of the day what character's death disappointed you the most let me know in the comments section below and also be sure to mark for spoilers just tell us what story is from before you go into detail about it thanks for watching guys be sure to check out my other videos hit that like and subscribe button for me and remember to keep on writing

Channel: Writer Brandon McNulty

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Keywords: killing off characters, killing off characters in novels, writing tips killing off characters, writing tips, how to kill off a character, writing advice, writing, creative writing, game of thrones, star wars, final girl, how to write death scenes, george rr martin, writing death scenes, death scenes, character deaths, how to write a novel, ned stark death, how to write a book, horror cliches, death, horror tropes, writing horror, slasher film, novel, book, killing characters

Id: iUr2FjAGQbM

Length: 10min 33sec (633 seconds)

Published: Thu Nov 07 2019