To Kill, or Not to Kill. That is the Question

I wrote a short story recently where, to me, it made sense that the main character died at the end. This created a sharp division in opinions amongst my critique circle regarding when and why it is reasonable to kill a main character, and the dissent was so visceral I thought I would write a blog post about it.

At one extreme were what I shall label team ‘red shirts’. Why? Because like in Star Trek the original series these readers/writers were comfortable with the death of characters but only of the red shirts. Main characters were meant to be sacrosanct. The usual objection from this group was it was too jarring to have the main character die. That if that person had to die they should not be the main character, I should have chosen a different MC to tell the tale.

At the other extreme were what I shall label team ‘Lannisters’, in honor of GRRM’s famous family. They just kill everyone! This group said that never killing the MC was too predictable. That if the MC was not prepared to die for their cause or be killed, they did not care enough about it.

Most of us (me included) were somewhere in the middle. Red Lannisters, perhaps?

So I came up with some thoughts on killing main characters, and things I think might help it work, or things that might make it more likely to fail.

• It should make sense. This is, I think the number 1 rule for me. If it’s out of the blue, doesn’t really serve the plot, and is just done for shock value, you’re probably going to disconcert a lot of readers
• The story shouldn’t be relentless death. If the milieu is death/war/destruction, it’s going to desensitize the reader. What’s one more death? Inevitable. That’s what it is. And what reader is going to bond to a main character they know is inevitably going to die?
• Try not to kill only one type of person. E.g. All women. All foreigners. Etc. Hopefully it’s obvious why this might be problematic…
• Don’t kill children. Okay, I’m going to state this is absolutely just my personal preference. I walked out of the movie Mimic right after (spoiler alert for 20-year-old movie…) they violently killed the kids. But I think this is going to be too far for more than just me, even amongst those of us with a little more Lannister than Red-Shirt in our blood.
• Have other characters with whom emotion and the story can be distributed across. Despite the amount of MC death, and death in general in Gane of Thrones, our emotional attachment is shared across so many characters by the time one of these main character deaths occurs we have invested interest in enough other characters our attachment to the story itself can be maintained.
• When it’s fake. What I mean is, when in your next chapter the killed-off character suddenly jumps out of a box and announces they are not really dead, it was all a dream/trick/transition state, etc. JRR Tolkien did this with both Gandalf after the Balrog fight and Frodo after he was ‘killed’ by Shelob. Some people can get away with it. But in general, it lowers the stakes. It just shows the main character actually can’t die. And lowering stakes and removing tension is generally not what you should be aiming for in your writing.

So those were my quick thoughts on this topic. Do you have any thoughts on how to make killing a main character ‘work’ and when it will fail? As always, would love to hear your thoughts in the comments below or by contacting me using the contact box.