When you kill a character, do you mourn the death?

[EddyTeddyFreddy]

I wrote a death scene for two central characters as the conclusion to a long epic fantasy I worked on for a couple of years, and found myself breaking down repeatedly as I was writing it, having to stop and compose myself before I could go on. Oddly enough, the first draft was written when I was about three-quarters of the way through the story -- the scene suddenly came to me, whole and complete, and I just HAD to write it right then, in one go, no stopping till it was all written down.

Months later, when I was wrapping up the story, I pulled out the death scene draft and discovered that it required only minor tweaks to work perfectly with where I'd taken the story. More tears as I tweaked, and it was done. Even now, more than a year since I wrote it or worked at all on the story, when I read that scene I still tear up.

Have you had the same experience? Does it matter whether you like the character? Whether the character is more to the hero or villain end of the spectrum? Was it difficult to find the right death, or did it come naturally -- this HAS to be the way this character dies?

[vison]

Yes. One character in particular, I weep buckets.

Stupid, but true.

[tirial]

Yes. Embarrassingly mine came to me in a coffee shop, so I was sitting there sniffling in a corner while scrawling notes down frantically. The waitress looked rather worried.

I wonder if it is because writers know best how to push their own buttons, and write to do so.

[maggenpye]

Not at the actual death but at the reveal, and when another character learns about it later. But it was a sacrificial character anyway, promoted from the background only to die. I might just have to edit in the fact that he was wearing a red shirt.

He was a kid, a cute red headed mischievous kid and I still don't care, bwahahahaha!

If my main characters are in pain, I care very much.

[EddyTeddyFreddy]

I've killed off a couple of subsidiary characters, and what I felt was a pale reflection of the emotions of the characters who were affected by the deaths, rather than grief for the characters themselves.

[pepperlandgirl]

Kill my characters? I can't even stand to hurt them a little.

[CrashMyBicycle]

Ohhh, yeah.

There was one (very long) chapter I wrote in the novel I finished, where there was death but also terrible, terrible betrayal of several characters, and it took me like two months to write it...I would write a few paragraphs and get too sad to write anymore. And then as it went on, I started crying and having nightmares, and feeling very, very guilty, like I was the one who betrayed them.

[PapSett]

Oh God, absolutely! I am just planning the death of a character right now, someone who was initially put in the story to die eventually, and damn him, he went and became a real character, with family and friends, and suddenly his fiance was pregnant (I had no idea!!), and now the thought of killing him is a real downer. And in order for the story to progress, he HAS to die. :cry:

I also feel their pain when something bad happens to them, acutely enough to cause tears at times. I get very emotionally involved.

[DeadlyAccurate]

Yes. In one of my books, a character important to the protagonist dies at the end. I wrote, rewrote, edited, revised, and sent that book on to my agent. She returned it with edit notes. Primarily she said the character who dies has to be more prominent in the story, to make the death have greater effect. So I took the book back and revised again, weaving that character into almost every scene.

The whole time, the impending death was in the back of my mind. But the death scene itself wasn't nearly as painful as the scenes where the character is alive and healthy and cheerful. I wanted them to live so bad.

[Zuul]

I do, and I always feel like a huge wuss about it, too. Sometimes, just having a character's heart broken can make me a blubbering wreck. I get far, far too invested in them and always feel awful when something bad happens to them.

Doesn't stop me from torturing them every chance I get, though. Dance my puppets, dance!

[DaphneBlack]

I do get very upset when I kill of a character (unless they are the murder victim on the first page!). Once I even gave a character a reprieve, so that he was only (!) paralysed. That was probably a mistake.

[vison]

It is apparent that we are all pretty weird people.

I mean that in the nicest way, of course.

[Skald the Rhymer]

In my no-longer-a-children's-novel-on-account-of-all-the-rape-&-murder, I killed off my very favorite of the adult characters. At first I was pleased at myself for being clever. Then I regretted it as I liked the character too much, so I reached back in time with my godlike thumbs and resurrected the character.

[Harlequin]

Not often. I don't get too attached to small characters, villains and mooks have it coming, and with the more important characters I usually know they're going to die so far ahead of time that there is little emotional impact for me. They're written to die. I do feel a bit I-won't-get-to-write-about-this-character-anymore sadness sometimes if I like the character.

But there are exceptions. Once I was trying to figure out where this novel-length story was going and still ten years later I remember the exact spot I was in when I got the idea. She was going to die, and it was going to be the hero's fault. It would be massively unfair. I asked myself if I could really be that big of an asshole. As it turns out, I could. That character I did mourn. It didn't help that she had already been badly screwed by life and that I really liked her. I've spent some time thinking about whether I stuffed her into a fridge, but I really think I didn't.

[ulfhjorr]

I don't often mourn the death of major characters. One exception, however, stands out, but it wasn't his death so much as the reaction and aftermath.

He had to die -- there was no other way for the story to work. More importantly, there was no other path for him to travel. But as he lay dying, his lover takes his hand and places it over her abdomen, breaking the news to him that she's pregnant. In the afterword, we see her again, watching her son out a window when his mannerisms remind her of his father. She's overwhelmed, for just a moment, then must go on.

That was, I think, the most difficult sequence I've ever had to write.

[phouka]

Well, before the story begins in my first book, I kill off around 6 billion humans. So . . . apparently not so much.

I do feel it much more when I kill off a main character. Even then, I usually rehearse the death scene in my mind so often before I write it down, that I've dealt with the grief before I put fingers to keyboard.

It's the minor characters that get me. In the first novel, the main character relives seven of her students dying - one by one - and also experiences hallucinations of them hanging out with her after they're dead - broken bones, bloated corpses, and all. Writing about her grief was the most difficult part, especially the scene where she finally got to bury one of them.

Considering what I put my characters through, I think I must be some sort of subconscious sadist. At least I channel into a world of fiction.