To Kill or Not to Kill ...

[Heliotrope]

I agree with Penpilot.

The girl in the red coat in Schindler's list is another example…. We don't even know her, or her name, or her history. Her significance to us is that she means something to Schindler. She represents something to him… be it innocence, or vulnerability, or the culmination of the ridiculous waste of genocide… she is important to him. He sees her in one scene and she stands out to him. She matters.

In the next scene we see her and she is dead. A simple red coat on a pile of bodies. This moment is HUGE both for the viewer and for Schindler.

What matters is not how often we see a character, but that the moments that we do see them matter to the POV, and we understand the raw power behind what he/she is feeling.

Another example is Up, we see Ellie for the first 5 minutes of the film. Then she dies. But it matters.

Another example is The Amazing Spider Man. In the opening scene Peter Parker is playing hide and seek with his dad. We don't ever see the dad, other then in photos. But we get the sense that his dad is important to him. He loves his dad. His dad matters to him, so he matters to the audience. The dad dies. We care for Peter. It is sad.

 

[FifthView]

I don't think MCs need to be particularly emotionally attached to another character to make the death significant, just that the dying character's continued presence should be important to the MC in some way.

For instance, the dying character may have discovered the answer to a mystery that the MC has great need to unravel. The MC is informed of this, rushes to meet up with that character, but arrives only in time to see that character shredded by some powerful villain. Or similarly, perhaps she is a master of some martial art, has key knowledge of how to use that art, and the MC needs that knowledge–but she dies before he gets it.

Also, if the dying character is made very sympathetic in ways that don't require a deep bond between herself and the MC, the death can still be made significant to the reader even if it's not particularly significant to the MC. Or perhaps the emotional bond is between that character and some other character who is important to the MC; her death will affect the MC's partner, say, and cause problems for their work together.

Miskatonic mentioned earlier making the death particularly spectacular in some way. Perhaps the method of death might itself trigger something in the MC, something more significant than whatever limited bond he has with the dying character. This reminds me a little of Sandor Clegane in the Battle of the Blackwater: all that wildfire paired up with his memory of being burned by his brother. Those nameless "redshirts" dying all over the battlefield were incidental, but the manner of their deaths ripped right through him.

I think you could approach such a death in multiple ways without having to first establish a strong emotional bond between the MC and the redshirt.

Part of the problem with your character may be in the way you have actually developed her, seeming to promise more by her presence prior to her death than you ever intended. In Star Trek, many of the redshirts never had lines or any significant interaction with the main characters. But introducing a character, giving her a seeming non-redshirt role, and then suddenly killing her off before fleshing out her significance to the MC and/or to the plot was like breaking a promise to the reader–at the very least, leaving her role seemingly inadequately developed.

 

[Incanus]

I don't mean to be snarky or anything. Honestly. But I would cease working with anyone on the spot for suggesting one of my characters go into a coma. That's got to be one of the dumbest ideas I've heard in a long while. Isn't that one old even on daytime soaps?

 

[FifthView]

I don't mean to be snarky or anything. Honestly. But I would cease working with anyone on the spot for suggesting one of my characters go into a coma. That's got to be one of the dumbest ideas I've heard in a long while. Isn't that one old even on daytime soaps?

I think it's far more effective to leave a person struggling for life, but in and out of consciousness, than to dump them in a coma. This provides so many opportunities for the other characters to visit the sick bed and see the injuries, hear the moans, for snatches of lucidity and interaction with the dying person, for secrets mumbled while in delirium, and so forth!

 

[ThinkerX]

Hmmm...Killing characters off...

Labyrinth: Apart from the prologue/epilogue, all of Labyrinth is from a single POV. Two characters somewhat close to the MC/POV character get offed in a messy fashion mid book. The way things were trending, well, people had to die. Took a fair bit of skull work to justify the survival of the MC and a couple others.

Empire: Country: People dying is part of what prompted me to write this story. I got tired of reading stories where the hero comes across a corpse strewn town, or see's people he/she knows getting killed, then just gets over it, and a few chapters later it may as well have not happened. In Empire: Country, I created a couple of small towns the MC's interact with throughout the first 80% of the book. Lots of secondary characters. Some good, some bad, most developed a notch or three beyond 'name and profession.' Almost all of them die. The main characters almost die, and their survival is about one notch from 'fluke.' Surviving that event haunts the main characters for a long while afterward; the massacres aftermath drives a big part of the plot for the rest of the series.

 

[Amanita]

Another thought: Reading about a female character who dies simply to serve as motivation for the (male) main character and to get the readers' sympathies happens way too frequently. And finding out that this was her designed fate all along would be extremey disappointing for readers putting their hope in the potentially interesting female character.
I don't think this can never be done well, nothing can't but if you're already unsure about this scene it might be something else to consider. Depends on the number and importance of other female character you have as well of course.

 

[Miskatonic]

I don't mean to be snarky or anything. Honestly. But I would cease working with anyone on the spot for suggesting one of my characters go into a coma. That's got to be one of the dumbest ideas I've heard in a long while. Isn't that one old even on daytime soaps?

The "when in doubt put em' in a coma" approach? lol.

 

[ThinkerX]

Suggestion for Brian:

If the goal is to keep the character 'off stage' for a while, may I not suggest some sort of forcible outside intervention? Aka powerful heroes/villains from 'out of town' step in and abscond with the person in question. People powerful enough to where even this character thinks twice before saying 'no.'

Might be a way to expand your world for the next book.

 

[BWFoster78]

I don't mean to be snarky or anything. Honestly. But I would cease working with anyone on the spot for suggesting one of my characters go into a coma. That's got to be one of the dumbest ideas I've heard in a long while. Isn't that one old even on daytime soaps?

Really? You'd stop working with someone who offers up a lot of good, valuable comments because you don't like one suggestion?

Just curious, do you have a lot of experience finding people to edit your work?

In my experience, finding people who are affordable and who give good feedback is not an easy thing. There are far more people in this world who think they can give good developmental comments than those who can give good developmental comments.

If I agreed with everything this particular editor said, I obviously wouldn't have felt the need to make this post, but to say that I should stop working with him ignores the fact that a) a lot of what he says is spot on and b) that's much better than I get from a lot of so called editors out there. For the money, this guy is fantastic!

 

[Heliotrope]

I remember a certain bran stark who spent a considerable amount of time in a coma, but he had some valuable information and the coma did help raise the tension.... Maybe Martin's experience as a tv writer in the 90's?

 

[BWFoster78]

I remember a certain bran stark who spent a considerable amount of time in a coma, but he had some valuable information and the coma did help raise the tension.... Maybe Martin's experience as a tv writer in the 90's?

Personally, I didn't take the comment "just put her in a coma" literally as much as I interpreted it as a guy who natively speaks Russian telling me to have her be kept out of the picture due to medical reasons. My plan is to leave it more as, "She's in ICU battling for her life. The docs just don't know ..."

 

[FifthView]

Beta readers in particular are best for pointing out problems—but not for offering advice on how to fix those problems. Fixing the problems is the author's job.

Editors can add that extra layer. However, sometimes suggestions are broad examples of a type of fix that might work, not intended to be taken as an exact suggestion—although the wording in the OP does seem to be a very specific suggestion in this case. Even so, the targeting of a problem seems more important to me than any suggested fixes; the fixes must be more carefully weighed.

Forum commenters are neither beta readers nor editors of the work. Too often we are given a snippet out of context, so it's hard to know the exact dimensions of a potential problem or whether it is truly a problem within the whole text. So we are often reduced to offering generalities, absolutes informed by principles, and so forth—or at least, our predicament leads us to word our suggestions in those ways.

[Edit: was writing the above when Brian commented; didn't see his reply to Heliotrope which fits somewhat with part of mine. )

 

[Heliotrope]

I was more responding to the idea of comas being soap opera material. I was more joking then anything. I guess it came across wrong. Sorry.

Because Martin was a writer for the Beauty and the Beast tv series in 1987?

 

[FifthView]

I think Bran's coma played a larger role than merely getting him off-stage or highlighting the dangerousness of the milieu. Highlighting the dangerous milieu did play a part...but there was that secret that the reader thought he possessed: Who did it? This could be revealed at any time. Plus, was he fully comatose? It's been so long since I read the book, so I'm only going by the HBO show, but I thought that Bran also began to warg while in the coma.

 

[Heliotrope]

I think Bran's coma played a larger role than merely getting him off-stage or highlighting the dangerousness of the milieu. Highlighting the dangerous milieu did play a part...but there was that secret that the reader thought he possessed: Who did it? This could be revealed at any time. Plus, was he fully comatose? It's been so long since I read the book, so I'm only going by the HBO show, but I thought that Bran also began to warg while in the coma.

Yeah. It was a bigger deal. He had a secret that couldn't be figured out until the end (that was the ENTIRE first book was that the children were not the KIng's but Jamie Lannisters. And yes, he did start to warg in his coma). Icanus just made the comment that coma's were used in the 80's and 90's all the time in soap opera's, and so I was taking a jab at Martin because hew was a TV writer at that time. That is all.

Carry on. Disregard.

 

[Demesnedenoir]

Without having read the book... here are the problems I see.

First: The editor may be right for the wrong reasons. A character can make an attachment to the reader plenty fast and be "worth" killing quickly. I once had a character in a prologue appear to die, and readers always commented how happy they were to see that they lived, which means they made a connection to care either way.

Second: Your motivation for killing the character is a bit thin as stated, "I wanted to ratchet up the stakes". If the character's death is no more than that, then really, it means nothing. The death of a "fairly major character", however that is defined, should mean something to the story, and if not, then dying is rather pointless.

If you are convinced that the character needs to die, go back and write to make that connection with the reader, and then it make more important than just raising the stakes, for in reality, without it being meaningful it doesn't ratchet up anything anyhow.

That's my quick take.

 

[Incanus]

Really? You'd stop working with someone who offers up a lot of good, valuable comments because you don't like one suggestion?

Just curious, do you have a lot of experience finding people to edit your work?

If I knew that an editor had such proclivities beforehand, I'd absolutely pass them over without a second thought. If I'd worked with them a bit, a nice big red flag would be waving in my mind. Of course this is all theoretical, context is everything, and I'm not normally given to speak in absolutes. But I could certainly see some instances where I'd toss out the baby with the bathwater. For me, this kind of suggestion is radically at odds with where I intend to go with my stories.

Currently, I have no experience finding editors. If my progress keeps going as it has, I'll be looking for editors in about a year or two.

 

[BWFoster78]

Currently, I have no experience finding editors. If my progress keeps going as it has, I'll be looking for editors in about a year or two.

What I've found is that copy editors are a dime a dozen. Not hard at all to find competent ones.

Developmental editors on the other hand ... Let's just say that I plan to hold on to every one I find that can offer me any kind of value for my money.

 

[psychotick]

Hi,

Not having read the work my thought is that you've got to go back to basics. Ask the obvious questions. And the most basic question is what does this character's death / injury do for my book? Does it advance the plot? Does it hit the reader with an emotional impact because they were becoming attached with / or identifying with the character? Does it show the MC in a new positive or negative light? Does it show the villain as a really bad guy? Does it raise the tension as the readers believe that anyone could die at any moment?

Once you can answer these questions you can work out what the best story arc should be for that character.

As for the suggestion that you should not use your editor - I disagree. The value of beta readers and editors is not that they should be right all the time and tell you what works. (Save for error checking of course.) The value is that they offer an opinion which you as the writer can agree with / disagree with. They make you think about your work, put it under the scope, shred ir and rebuild it. Often when the things they pull up are wrong, that's brilliant. It makes you go back and question things. It makes you wonder, how could they have got it wrong? Because the chances are that even if they are wrong about something, there's a reason for it contained somewhere in your book.

With my editor I probably agree with 70% of what she says. But often the 30% I don't agree with makes me rework something so that it becomes clear to the reader why I wouldn't want them to think that.

Cheers, Greg.

 

[Incanus]

I'm very much in agreement with Mr. Tick here.

As for the suggestion that you should not use your editor - I disagree.

However, if this was a response to what I said, then I believe I was misunderstood. The distinction may not be that apparent, but I expressed how I myself would respond. I in no way suggested that anyone else should respond in a like manner. A quick re-read of my original post should make that pretty clear.