Don’t kill me!
Fiction authors often kill their characters. In mysteries and crime stories, there are victims. In thrillers, good guys and bad die. In sci-fi, there’s also violence and death. So I performed an auto-survey and asked myself which characters did I want to keep alive and which ones did I reluctantly kill.
I considered both protagonists and antagonists (villains) and came up with a list. While I won’t divulge that list (too many spoilers), let me explain why it hurts, even for the villains: if authors do a decent job with characterization, their characters come alive. An author knows them far better than most real people. In novels, and in series, in particular, characters become real. Mostly humans, but in sci-fi they can be realistic ETs and in fantasy they can even be dragons. Readers can experience this reality too, and often do, but the authors who create these characters usually have a special bond with them.
The latter is clearly true for main characters. Often a novel is written in the third-person point-of-view (POV) of one character, and the author gets inside that character’s head. It’s a mindreading exercise in a sense that readers can appreciate and no movie can capture. But it’s especially true if the book is written in the first-person POV, at least for a time, as I do with my Detective Castilblanco. I am him and he is me for the duration of the novel.
But this bond often occurs with villains too. Life is often gray with mixes of good and evil. A good villain, “good” in the sense of being a well-developed character, is complex like that. While I don’t feel as strong a bond with Vladimir Kalinin, who starts his literary life as Chen and Castilblanco’s foe in The Midas Bomb but is even present in Soldiers of God, he exhibits this complexity and also allowed me to get into his mind in third-person POV.
Strong characters often lead to series, of course. Not only do readers want to read more about them, but authors also want to write more about them. Many characters who are killed are transient ones, although they should still be complex and interesting. They give up their lives so that the story can move forward. Readers (and maybe writers) are more shocked when the main character dies—maybe not so much for villains but certainly for the “good guys.” The decision to kill a character should not be taken lightly in any case.
Modern fiction often isn’t about “living happily ever after,” though. It has to seem real, and real life isn’t a fairy tale. Readers have to be prepared for this; authors have to include it in their fiction. And we can all celebrate the great characters of fiction who live on in books after the authors are long gone.
***
Comments are welcome.
Did you miss the sale? Accompanying the free novella “You Know I’m Watching” that ended last week, the first six books in the “Detectives Chen and Castilblanco Series” were successively placed on sale. #5, The Collector, and #6, Family Affairs, are still on sale until January 6–$0.99 each on Smashwords. The first four books and #7, Gaia and the Goliaths, aren’t on sale, but their retail prices are reasonable and equivalent to the sale prices of Big Five ebooks. Hours of exciting mystery and thrills await you, dear readers!
Around the world and to the stars! In libris libertas!
