Writing mortality, killing your darlings
The first time I killed a character, I was thirteen. I didn’t expect it to happen, I didn’t plan it, I didn’t want it to happen. Suddenly the friend of my knightly hero dashed in between Sir Roger Mortimer and his evil uncle and took the blow that was meant for Roger.
His name was Guy. There were two other friends involved in the scene, but I can’t remember their names. Even my hero Sir Roger––that figment of a very immature mind, a living cliché who was a friend of Robin Hood and a loyal servant of King Richard the Lionheart––even Sir Roger means nothing to me now. It’s Guy I remember. I remember trying to unkill him, to reverse the clock, like Superman in the movie. It wasn’t possible. Once he’d died there was no way back. That was his truth. And having killed him, he became a ‘darling’, much more interesting to me than Sir Roger.
What does ‘kill your darlings’ really mean?
‘Kill your darlings’. It’s such a common writer’s mantra. There’s even a magazine with that name.
https://www.killyourdarlings.com.au
I’ve often used the phrase in groups I’ve run, sometimes in the same breath, as I recommend The Writer’s Diet. https://writersdiet.com. ‘Kill your darlings: get rid of wordy rambling and self-indulgent sensitivities.’
The phrase is often taken to mean the paring and refining, the battling with writerly ego:
https://rebeccafrostwrites.com/2020/11/16/but-what-does-it-actually-mean-to-kill-your-darlings/
This process helps the writer to remove unnecessary chips and lumps so that the figure within the marble stands clear and polished as Michelangelo’s David.
What about killing characters?
But writing the death of a character is an altogether darker matter.
‘Readers don’t like it,’ my editor says. ‘I don’t see why she has to die,’ says my son, one of my best readers. ‘You’re breaking the reader contract,’ my wife says. ‘It’s a quartet and the reader expects them to continue.’
Well, no, I’m not breaking any reader contract. There’s a hint in the first chapter of Volume I of the Gannet Quartet, Twin Stars.
https://www.amazon.com.au/Twin-Stars-Gannet-Quartet-Book-ebook/dp/B0CCT7VLD9
And how could I write about a setting as harsh and difficult as stone-age Scotland without dealing with death?
Anyway, ‘that’s what happened,’ as a writer friend says. This is the story of this character. I have no other story to tell. The question remains, can I do this well enough to do justice to my character?
Who are Shakespeare’s best remembered characters? Probably Romeo and Juliet. In the wonderful film, Stranger than Fiction, when Karen Eiffel changes the end of the book because she can’t bear to kill her hero, Professor Hilbert tells her that the new version is no longer the greatest book of the last twenty years, but it’s OK. Karen Eiffel can be forgiven, because she can’t bear to kill her character after meeting him in ‘real life’. But for most authors, that’s never going to happen. Sometimes we’re left trying to deal with the grief of telling a character’s truth when that truth is that they are mortal.
As Karen Outen says, this process should be heart-rending.
https://lithub.com/killing-your-characters-is-traumatic-and-it-should-be/
I care about all my characters deeply, and I want to know and relate the whole story of the main ones, main ones, and that means dealing with their deaths. Who did they become? What was the final meaning of their life? Did they learn or achieve something by their death? To refuse them the tragedy of their death would sometimes be to weaken their story.
In search of comfort, I return to my well-thumbed copy of Rosemary Sutcliff’s Mark of the Horse Lord and try to work out how she does it: the details and colours; the motifs that reappear; the light hand with the foreshadowing; the gravity of the scenario; the moral rightness of Phaedrus’s final choice. No other outcome could be as true.