Story Design: Death

 To commemorate writing about death, I killed all of the pictures that I was going to use in this blog post.

Death can be a controversial aspect in story telling. There are a plethora of ways that death can be done poorly; many of which I myself am guilty of. However, I have my own policy about death in stories which I try to adhere to, which is this: the dead don't come back to life. There are a few caveats to this rule and a bit to explain about, but the long and short of it is that the rules of death in your story can seriously impact the believability and tension in a negative way if you're open to the idea of people coming back.

First off, why do I believe that people who die in a story shouldn't come back? Mainly because characters who return from death tend to cheapen it for "the rest of us". If someone is very clearly dead, and then they return, then that opens the door for everyone to return. You then lose your tension, at least when the threat of death is on the table. Is someone captured by a villain? Don't worry, we'll just bring 'em back to life, no harm, no foul.

This is especially true if a person's death was supposed to mean something or be very impactful. You remember that character's life and the way in which they died, the death is used as a tool to motivate other characters and to move the story forward. However, if that character then returns (looking at you, Superman), it cheapens their death and makes all of the emotion meaningless; going forward, your readers won't take any other deaths seriously because they know that at any point that character could be brought back to life. There's no permanence in the actions of the author.

This is why a return from death would have to be done very carefully. Gandalf in Lord of the Rings is a great example. He was thought to have died, but actually returned specifically because he's freaking Gandalf. No one else could have done this, so the risk is still there when Aragorn is in danger or when anyone else is in danger, because they can be killed. However, if someone comes back in a way that seems can fit multiple people, you have the problem of, "well, this new character was revived, why not use this method on this other character who is dead?" "Because." "Because...?"

The question of "why" in this case is also important. You should rethink things when you find yourself coming up with very complicated explanations as to why a method of resurrection would only work for this one character. The more complicated your explanation, the more holes can be poked into it for other characters, although likewise, the simpler an explanation, the more unbelievable it would be. There needs to be a good middle ground; Gandalf came back from the dead because of the nature of who he is. Not so simple, but not complicated in the sense of, "well it was the right time of the month, the moon was in the right place, etc."

Returning from death is only one part of the problem - killing a character in a proper way is another. This is something that, anyone who is familiar with my writing in City of Heroes will know, I'm very familiar with. When you're trying to kill a character off for good, their death has to be believable. I was sad about a certain character's death in LOST, but then when I thought about it, I felt, "wait, that could have EASILY been avoidable". That bit there takes the sting out of it a bit. If you want someone to feel for a character's death, you can't have that "oh man they're so stupid" idea. On the other hand, however, if that stupidity is due to an inherent character flaw, i.e. pride, lust, etc., then their death is tragic. It goes from a, "they could've easily avoided that" to, "they could've easily avoided that... if that person wasn't the way they were."

Statesman and Sister Psyche's deaths are ones that I think about a lot; not in a, "their faces haunt my dreams" way, but in a way of looking at how they could've been done better. I'll say it right now for everyone - in retrospect, their deaths could have been done better, but I am happy with how they turned out. The two of them show the difficulty with killing off powerful characters - how do you explain their deaths without opening up the, "but wait, they could have done...". I can't say that the ways I killed them covered all of that, but I did my best. This goes into my final point, actually!

When you're writing a character in a scenario where you want death to be taken seriously, ask yourself if there would be too many ways where they can "cheat" death. Sister Psyche is a great example - there are literally a ton of ways that she could have avoided her death, even with all my "but's" and "if's" put in there. How are you supposed to kill someone who can jump into other people's bodies at will without it feeling like a cop out? Even catching her by surprise isn't fully gratifying, as I saw from feedback from players. Granted, there were probably more holes I could have covered with her and Statesman's death, but it's an example that you should be careful about writing characters who are so powerful that you need long, complicated explanations for their deaths. You should keep your deaths and character's abilities simple and balanced.

In the end, death is a very powerful tool for story telling, but one that needs to be used wisely. Too much death makes people not care for characters, i.e., "oh there's a new character that I like, I bet they're going to die. Sigh.". This is something that I've been guilty of in the past. However, too little death takes out the tension if you're trying to use it as a tool. It's a very complicated subject, one that I admit I don't fully have a handle on (as I try to admit about most things on this blog - I'm not a master. Yet.). However, I'm looking forward to exploring the nature of it more and trying to understand better how to use it as a method of storytelling that is believable, useful, not cheap, and meaningful for the story. My last rule of death, and this is my own personal one, is that it must have meaning. A meaningless death for a major character is just depressing, in my opinion. That meaning doesn't have to be clear right away; it can take a while for it to settle in, but there should be a meaning to it.