Tutorial How Not to Kill a Character Literary Tactica

[Scalenex]

How to keep your Story Characters Alive Tactica

EDIT: I guess this is more about why to keep your characters alive rather than how. Anyone can not kill someone.

This contains spoilers for my writing since I am narcissistically using examples from my own writing.

Apparently, a Scalenex made a profile post promising to write this, and I Scalenex, keep my promises.

(I, handsome, wise and cunning Scalenex am aware that due to recent events, some may believe the words in the preceding sentence could lead to abuses) Be warned, Scalenex is vengeful. That promise I will keep.

In case it needs to be said

Don’t kill off the entire world.

If everyone dies, death loses all meaning. You cheapen the effect AND you leave no room for sequels. Even the End Times left some people alive. In a movie, play, TV, or some other live action medium you can occasionally kill EVERYONE and drive home emotional resonance with viewers. Visual media can use special effects, musical numbers, or jarring silence to let the audience emotional connect with the dead, but this is risky. You can’t get away with that at all in the written medium. You need to have at least one character survive to have emotional resonance.

Someone the audience can relate to has to mourn the dead or the audience will not mourn the dead. If deaths don’t make your audience sad why do it?


Before the Death (or unlikely survival)

Don't miss the Forest for the Trees

Never be afraid to kill a character. If you can’t think of a reason to keep a character alive, then they can probably die. The reverse is true. If you can’t think of a reason to kill a character, then don’t.

Before someone writes a predictable "You aren't the real Scalenex!" you need to understand that the goal of my writing is not to kill people. That is merely a means to an end.

Kurt Vonnegut’s sixth rule of short story writing:

“Be a sadist. No matter how sweet and innocent your leading characters, make awful things happen to them—in order that the reader may see what they are made of.”

Death is just one of many awful things you can have happen to a character. Death is a very efficient means of following rule six.

The biggest reason to not kill a character is to let them suffer longer (ie you are planning a sequel) or death is too good for them, or death is too predictable.

Simple Deaths

The Warhammer Fantasy world is a very violent place. It’s defined by the clash of armies. You can’t make it like a Transformers cartoon where two armies clash shoot a lot and EVERYONE dodges at the last second. Even if you want your main characters to live, Redshirts and mooks should die assuming you have a battle. If no one dies, make sure the characters realize this is unusual and special.

You can have a political story with no deaths, as long as someone loses and death seems to hang in the air, but if you are telling a war story, at least kill nameless characters. It's hard to tell war story without death, though if you are a Game of Thrones fan, you can have some nice courtly intrigue between battles where no one actually dies (though lots of people die in courtly intrigues too).


Develop Your Characters

Whether your main characters live or die, the reader should care if they live or die. EVERY sentence in a short story should either advance the plot or develop a character. If you are writing a longer story, you can get by with subplots, exposition, and setting building in a larger piece but don’t neglect your main characters unless you want to rewrite the Silmarillion. I guarantee you Tolkien would have never been able to get the Simarillion published without first developing a fan base with his character driven novels.

Your protagonist needs to be someone the reader can identify with on some level. Making a relate-able character is worthy of a writing literary tactica by itself. The short version is give to your protagonist hopes, fears, and goals. Make the goals matter so the audience cares when the character succeeds or fails. The protagonist should have both noble characteristics and flaws. It doesn't really matter if your protagonist is a hero or villain as long as he/she/per has nuance. You can lean heavily towards noble characteristics or flaws but protagonists should never be totally perfect or completely rotten to the core. You either need to (eventually) reveal a chink in the armor of seemingly perfect heroes or villains or use them as distant peripheral paragons of evil or good.

It's okay to have one dimensional characters, but they should be on the periphery of your stories. While nerds can amuse themselves speculating whether Superman or Goku would win a duel, said fight would suck in a non-visual medium. It's fine if you want to have Grimgor fight Chakax, but it would be easier to write a nuanced story about a lowly Skink Chief fighting a lowly Goblin Big Boss. The former is an irrestible force versus an immovable object wheras the latter two could be much easier for readers to relate to.

I am only about two thirds Thanqol as of writing this. I have many grievances with the book, but I believe the GW writers were wise to marginalize the Slann early and force the Saurus and Skink leaders to the fore.


Success and Failures


The character needs to experience some small successes. If they always fail, death will be an improvement. If a character never fail they risk becoming a joke. They can’t always win either, we are technically writing fan-fiction here. Perfect protagonists are an easy trap to fall for. No Scaly Stus.

Best to temper success and failure together. A success should come with a higher than expected cost or something to make it bittersweet, even if it’s only the realization that greater challenges are to come (though admittedly the “greater challenges to come” thing is a bit overdone in WHF). Failure should have hope afterward, or a moral victory. Generally the protagonist should have a noble losing effort. They may have lost to their nemesis but they left a literal permanent mark on their nemesis through a scar.



Symbolic death


You built a likeable character with nuanced depth. Even if the protagonist is a necrotic animated lizard, the character needs to be "human" enough for readers to identify with. He, she, or per has goals the readers care with. Now what?


Here is a list of things you can do to make a character suffer without killing them. Warning I'm going to spoil my works a lot, so read up to Legacies if this is an issue for youl


Pyrrhic victory


The victory comes at such a great cost it feels like a defeat. GW writers use this a LOT with the Forces of Order. The Dwarfs win most of their battles in terms of strategic objectives but pretty much always lose a larger portion of their population than their enemy. Yawn.

Look at your protagonists alone here.

Victory may come with breaking a taboo or crossing a line the character never thought to cross.

Huan-kai saved his kin from a rampaging Troglodon but then had remorse for killing a Troglodon (a venerated creature). Not just killing a Troglodon in a natural life cycle but sucking said Troglodon into oblivion separating the Troglodon from the natural order and basically looking like a witch to the only family he really had.

A costly victory or survival is more poignant if the character loses something they value but originally took for granted.

Huan-kai had a miserable life but he always tried to enjoy the little things. Sunny rocks, baked potatoes and grubs, fresh fruit. Naturally undead Huan-kai cannot eat, taste, or feel warmth.

To reference @discomute. He had a character escape the clutches of evil Kayishen. He turned his back on his family and neighbors, survived the harsh jungle, broke a taboo/crossed a moral line all to survive and warn Klodorex. Then he lost something he never expected to lose…his humanity.

Belrikt was annoyed by the long-winded scribe Stroln, but he secretly appreciated his good nature despite his galling lack of wisdom. Belrikt planned to nobly sacrifice himself to save his brethren, but Stroln unforgiveably beat him to it. He lost Stroln before he even realized that he appreciated Stroln. Belrikt also had an awesome speech at this event highlighting his tragic condition.

My very first Lizardmen piece had Kaitar die saving four Slann. He nobly led his people in their time of greatest need rising from a lowly underdog to a great hero (who still fought underdog battles). The entire Kahoun mourned his passing for generations. That’s a phyric victory. The fact that the First Children of the Old Ones lost lots of soldiers and the Daemons didn’t permanently lose soldiers, that’s par for the course for WHF Forces of Order. The personal loss is what matters.

To be technical though. Not one Scalenex piece has a Pyrrhic victory in it. The definition of a Pyrrhic victory is a victory whose cost is so high, it's tantamount to defeat. The cost for victory are high, but never TOO high. I have never actually gone that far as to have a true pyrric victory (maybe The Fall of Turochlitan but that doesn't follow a short story format). I should have called this section "costly" victory but "pyrrhic" sounds cooler.

Now to use my own stories for examples: SPOILERS AHOY!

Renliss' Journey to Lustria: Renliss gets his freedom and knowledge. He just suffered humiliation to get there.

Orphaned Temple City: Slann are saved and the Klodorex is reunited with it's leaders. Kaitar just had to die. But one Saurus hero for four Slann AND two imprisoned Daemons is a trade-off the First would do over and over again.

Divided We Fall: Most of the adventuring party dies but the Southands and Lustrian Slann are reunited. A greater Daemon is more or less permanently killed which is no mean feat. More importantly they found their McGuffin and delivered it where it needed to go.

New Alliances: A lot of good people die but an alliance is forged between the Southland's Lizardmen and Dwarves. The bad guys lose.

Legacies: Huan-kai worse than dies and his reputation dies but the forces of Chaos are still beaten. Unless you take Adrienne's side, in which case she lost and did not win a Pyrric victory.

Dead Water: Renliss accidentally destroys most of his war spoils, but he still walks away with more than he started with.


Sacrifice


Nobly sacrificing one’s life for another is a common literary staple. It’s a classic, not a cliché. Kaitar did it at the climax of “Orphaned Temple City”. Half the cast of “Divided we Fall” did it. Tay the Kroxigor only had one line ““Dead warmbloods not hurt my friends again!” Hopefully his death made you sad. Stroln sacrificed himself for Belrikt.

Two important things. First, it needs to seem like a worthy sacrifice or at least an unavoidable one. Second you need survivors’ guilt.

Zat-kai not only died, but he lost his chance to make a name for himself. He finally stopped being second fiddle but his great deeds are secret to all but three living Skinks, and boy do they have survivors’ guilt. I plan to keep Belrikt, Preylot, and Tal-Lat around a long while. Death would be too nice for them.

Besides death as a sacrifice, a good way to use this without killing someone is to have a protagonist willingly give up what they value most.

Really the difference between literary sacrifice and a Pyrric victory is just the math. A sacrifice is worth it. Maybe barely worth it. Maybe one character suffers a disproportionate share of the cost, but it's not a pointless or futile loss.

That's all fine and good. A downer ending is okay once in a while, but if your piece is longer than a short story, it's okay to have a happy ending. As long as the character(s) earned it. Relate-able underdog does good covers most movies and novels. It's very hard to break this formula and still have your piece be well-received. There are very few well-liked movies or books that break this formula. I can't think of something that qualifies that's not a dystopian allegory (1984, Animal Farm, Planet of the Apes). Even those mostly involved plucky underdogs that almost won.


Body Horror


If the characters are practically begging for death, they probably shouldn’t die.

Belrikt was trying to sacrifice himself nobly but then he couldn’t. A more extreme example, Skaven normally do anything they can to live, so if they want to die things are bad. One half of my Skaven short stories has the protagonists suffer unspeakable non-ending torture. One case was an almost literal “I have no mouth and I must scream.”

Body horror is big on this. I tried to do this with Huan-kai’s new undead state, but both @discomute and @ravenss do a good job with body horror in their pieces.

Inverse of Killing Likeable Characters

You'll notice I've had a few jerk Skink Priests. They all lived. If people dislike a character you can get almost as much resonance by NOT having bad things happen to them. It heightens the sense of unfairness for the bad things happening to the protagonist.

Not that the jerks always get to live. I hope my readers were pleased when Captain Dreher died. Sometimes you need to subvert patterns, similar to keeping a likeable character alive just to keep things somewhat unpredictable, sometimes you want to kill the guy readers love to hate.


Other Genres

The above is assuming you are trying to tell a dramatic story. If you are aiming for laughs instead, ignore everything I said (unless it's parody in which case take everything I said to ridiculous extremes). If you are trying to tell a fictional anthroplogical history (like the Silmirillion) then your goal isn't to tug on heart strings but to create an interesting cohesive picture. If you are just writing back story ("this is my army fluff", in my case the Fall of Turochlitan, "This is my RPG setting") then your goal is to establish a setting that provides a foundation for actual stories.

Those aren't the only things you can write about. You could write a piece focusing on the alien rather than the human side of character or try to add pizzazz to a battle report.

 

[spawning of Bob]

I couldn't have put it better myself. Think about what I said. It cannot be refuted.

The Scalenex = Death meme is fun, but I have always appreciated more method than madness in it (logic and repeated protestations of innocence have helped)

I would like to develop a thought a little bit.

Never be afraid to kill a character. If you can’t think of a reason to keep a character alive, then they can probably die. The reverse is true. If you can’t think of a reason to kill a character don’t.

There is a third side to this. If you think you NEED to kill a character, should you?

The answer is: "If it is a short story, probably. But if the character is part of a larger narrative arc don't be too hasty."

Once they are dead that is it. Unless they are Nagash, Setra, Karl Franz, Vlad Von Carstein, Spawning of Bob etc etc."


I recall a conversation with the other Scalenex about a very enjoyable character (with issues), who we both liked and who was SO AWESOME that he was at risk of becoming predictable, overpowered or even worse, Flanderized. The Scalenex way of thinking was, "I would rather kill them than allow that to happen to my overall narrative." (because no character is bigger than the story)

We battled over this imperative, first using a hand weapon and then a spear (I certainly would prefer a cliche to death). My point of view was that, in a multi character, multi location fiction universe which is going somewhere (like Scalenex's) there is enough room for that character to just disappear from the narrative. Go write about something else. Bring back the condemned when you know how to use him in balance with the narrative. Heck, you can bring him back emotionally or physically crippled with a convincing event that happened while the audience's attention was elsewhere.

I won't be surprised to find that character floating face down in the Amaxon River anyway, but I tried.


By way of contrast, Spawning of Bob's genre is leaning towards lightweight fantasy with parody elements rather than 100% slap in the face parody. I have killed a few characters, good and bad (but not as many as you think), but this is the problem is the one I suffer from most acutely.,

"I can't kill this character for Meta Plot reasons." (Plot armour. Also known as Eggshell armour, for some reason. You will note that this link levels a pretty direct accusation. So, who blabbed? )

They need to survive, semi plausibly. This makes them lucky (which is lazy), blessed by the gods (which is weak and in the case of my bunch of heretics, unlikely), have ineffectual enemies (which is pointless, tension wise) or getting progressively more overpowered or over equipped (which is boring).

Read Daeron's Quote in this thread thoughts-on-the-end-times-contains-spoilers. for everything I hate about GW fluff (there is a lot I like as well, but I'm feeling grumpy right now.)

I have to actively make choices to avoid multiple stories with the same characters leading to escalation to godhood. I would love it if someone kept a tally of the number of times that I :

• let the characters get invincible weapons. Which they then lose or give away.
• Have access to invincible weapons that they don't think to take with them, despite the fact they are unarmed (see above)
• Allow the characters to be captured but somehow never killed or eaten by stronger foes OR they can't just can't seem to escape from weaker foes. They wait for external rescue every time.
• Allow the characters to be mortally wounded a bit. Or use necromancy.
• Completely reset the characters' abilities and personalities.
• Split the team up to increase vulnerability.
• Go from an epoch defining story one time, to one with seemingly little historical significance the next. (this is to reset the escalation)
• Be in an epoch defining story and then I focus on characters who have very little significance. A bit like "Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead"
• Have an epoch defining event happen between stories, or somewhere the characters aren't.

Killing them sounds a lot easier. I envy you, Scalenex.

 

[NIGHTBRINGER]

Tay the Kroxigor only had one line ““Dead warmbloods not hurt my friends again!” Hopefully his death made you sad.

Colour me intrigued. Where can I find this story? Do you have a link?

 

[Scalenex]

Colour me intrigued. Where can I find this story? Do you have a link?

Divided We Fall.

 

[spawning of Bob]

Tay was first in a sequence of "had to dies" in Divided we Fall. He and most of the others had to die because ensembles are a disaster if you are telling a story that relies on drama or characterisation. Think of the cast of "The Expendables". Were you ever really worried for any of them? The movie is very poorly named. It could swap names with "The Untouchables"

Ensemble muteness is a curse. The fellowship of the bamboo, all of them strong characters, stand around and argue. Any three of them interact. The most you will get out of the rest is a wisecrack.

If this was a movie, it isn't a problem. Fellowship of the Ring, just before the Crebain Birds report to Saruman. The whole group is together, but visually separate due to camera positioning and shot direction. This allows different bits of dialogue / action / characterisation to happen simultaneously.

Try and write that scene into a story. You need different tools for writing. It just happens that Scalenex chose the fluffy pillow of mercy to get his crew down to manageable numbers (fun fact - there were three left by the start of the next story. Three's a crowd. Scalenex wrote one of them (Tal-Lat) out of the narrative without killing him. Going soft much?)


Ensemble muteness is another reason why I need to constantly split my teams up.

 

[Scalenex]

Tay was first in a sequence of "had to dies" in Divide we Fall. He and most of the others had to die because ensembles are a disaster if you are telling a story that relies on drama or characterisation.

That's implying I started offing party members to thin the herd and make the group more manageable. I made the group big I could establish my villains credible threats via sacrificial lions. Divided We Fall was practically built on the trope. Even before I studied up on Death Tropes, this seems to be my favorite Death Trope of all (before I realized it existed as a storytelling tool) though I blur the line with Hero Killers when greater daemons are involved Darfiel and Locklirist have a lot of kills between them. Also Teklon died before Tay.

I had five of these in Orphaned Temple City to establish the Orcs and Goblins, Darfiel, and Thazerick all as credible opponents, especially Darfiel who got the lion's (PUN!) share of them. New Alliances had a named Skink Chief die to establish Kreela as a credible threat. I had a named Skaven chief die to establish the Lizardmen as a credible threat to the Skaven protagonists. Huanboq died establishing Kreela as a threat to the Lizardmen and Dwarves. Locklirist went on a veritable kiling spree of good guys. Arguably since half the story was from the Force of Destruction's point of view the deaths of Nafik and Kalai are to Elvenkind what Sideshow Bob is to Bart Simpson.

It was the self realization of an entire pride of Sacrificial Lions that made me decide to slow down the death train an take the other Scalenex's sarcastic suggestion of a non-death Tactica seriously (and why I entered a zero death short story in the first L-O contest)

Still I can't do away with it. I don't consciously avoid many tropes, but I think villain decay should be avoided at all reasonable costs in the dark and gritty WHF setting. I daresay Nakai and Morghur are an embarassment to the official Warhammer canon. Even Nagash to a point as Bob pointed out long ago. Nakai and Morghur are pretty much on par with Sideshow Bob by this point.

Q. After two millennia in the shadows, does Nagash command the same respect from his minions that he once enjoyed?

A. Not really.

Three's a crowd. Scalenex wrote one of them (Tal-Lat) out of the narrative without killing him. Going soft much?)

The stages of grief are Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression and Acceptance. Tal-Lat has a huge helping of Bargaining. I plan to run at least one story out of that. I have an outline sketched out for that, but before I get to that I need to write Verrick's journal (my first Human protagonist story), Strange Blood (about the spiritual successor to Kaitar, Zat-kai, and Huan-kai), and my chameleon short story piece first..

He's alive because I'm not done with him.

 

[spawning of Bob]

He's alive because I'm not done with him.

Poor Tal-Lat.

That's implying I started offing party members to thin the herd and make the group more manageable.

That's not quite true. I am not saying you didn't kill them for good and planned reasons. I am saying that if you hadn't, the narrative would have been much weaker for ensemble reasons.

If you've never kept a group alive for long enough to hit the ensemble wall, I'm not sure how I can be held to blame. Unless you count the fact that I did once resurrect you. Does that make me accountable for all the bad things you do? Worthy of a thread on its own:

Why it is all Bob's fault.

 

[NIGHTBRINGER]

Divided We Fall.

Cheers, I look forward to reading it!