When Writing Fantasy, Kill Your Darlings. Literally.

How to kill your characters to achieve maximum story efficiency.

You can double-dip with your characters by killing them and bringing them back. Just be warned. This is cheap, and you can only get away with it once. After that, cheating death becomes just another lie.

"Murder your darlings." - Arthur Quiller-Couch (Though many have said similar sentiments.)

My family has been watching the second (and final) season of Arcane on Netflix. Arcane is a TV-series version of the video game League of Legends. Thus, by all the Laws of Nature, it should be unwatchable. Yet, shockingly, it is pretty good.

The great joy of Arcane is that its creators are keeping it short. A total of 18 episodes. Around 11 hours. Whether this is for artistic or budgetary reasons does not interest me. Eleven hours is enough time to tell just about any story.

This is great because it gets us into the last season quickly. If you are writing a fantasy epic, unless you really seriously blow it, the last season is going to be awesome.

(Yeah, yeah. I know. The last season of Game of Thrones was infamously terrible. Bear with me. I'll get to that.)

Why is the last season generally great?

Because you get to kill everyone and blow up the world. Arcane is killing characters left and right, and that enables good fantasy.

Spock, on the other hand, should have stayed dead. His self-sacrifice at the end made Star Trek II so epic that I would happily give up the later sequels to keep it pure.

We Take Fantasy Seriously

I have made my living for 30 years as a fantasy author, albeit in a pop culture variant. I do take it seriously.

Fantasy and fables strip away the mundane annoyances of everyday human life. Instead, fantasy conveys the values of the society that makes it. That's why we tell fantasy stories to children so often.

I've written in the past about how fantasy has been a default mode for human storytelling since forever. And how modern fantasy can fail to satisfy us when the moral underpinnings of the setting and the story you're trying to tell no longer match. (Did you know they made a second season of Rings of Power? It did not make a splash.)

So when you write fantasy, death is very important. When a character in a fantasy dies, it reflects two things. One: What that society sees as the greatest dangers. Two: What a society thinks is worth dying for.

That's a huge topic. Right now I'm more focused on practical matters: How to kill your characters for best effect.

Harry Potter did a fantastic job of timing the deaths. None when the books were about little kids. Then minor characters, one a book. Then major characters. Then a massive house-cleaning at the end.

Your Characters Are Like Money

When writing long fantasy epics, one of the great joys is blowing everything up at the end. When you make a sand castle, only half of the joy is in the creation. The other half is in its destruction, either by the waves or by just jumping up and down on it.

When you write a huge story, you are going to develop a lot of characters. The main protagonists and antagonists, of course. But these are supported by a somewhat larger number of secondary characters. Which are, in turn, layered over a host of minor characters. Plus, of course, settings, religions, magic items, etc.

It's a lot of work developing all these elements. You get something in return. When you put in time and work developing "Bob, The Loyal Blacksmith," and then you force your customer to learn about Bob, you have developed something of value. Bob is now money.

What is the point of money? To spend it. You now have earned the right to find a good time to kill Bob.

(Of course, you don't have to kill Bob. Maybe Bob is rewarded for his service to his king by getting to marry Elspeth, The Hot Tavern Wench. YAWN. Anyway, Bob can't marry Elspeth. She's getting super-stabbed during the surprise orc raid at the end of Book Two to give everything moral weight.)

Spend Your Money At The Right Time

Whenever you have a big story beat, you can add emotional emphasis to it by killing a character. Or five characters. The more characters you kill, and the more developed those characters are, the greater the impact. If you do it right, your slight "Let's go kill the evil demon with the elf sword" story starts to develop real emotional heft.

Killing a character in your book does all sorts of good. The reader gets put in suspense. The reader feels emotions. The reader has one less character to remember the name of.

However you don't want to waste your money. Don't kill characters too fast, or you run out and the customer feels numb. Don't do it too slow, or there's too many characters clogging your work and not enough stakes.

Some instructive examples ...

If anyone ever says kids shouldn’t have horror and death in their movies, remind that that The Lion King was an ENORMOUS hit. Disney is so painfully WIMPY these days.

Example 1: Disney Anything

At one end of the extreme, we have Disney. Modern Disney films never kills a character if it can possibly be avoided. Even in a film that is explicitly about dealing with death, like Soul, there will always be a cheap trick to push a character's inevitable end until after the credits roll.

Interestingly, Disney films rarely have villains anymore! Their movies are so wimpy that they can't even kill a bad guy.

This is just my opinion, but: Disney and Pixar movies are no longer events in the way they once were. I think that, for the last decade or so, they've been churning out a whole bunch of really flat movies. Disney releases flops with a frequency considered unthinkable a decade ago.

My unsolicited advice: In their next movie, they should develop a nice character and then kill it. One Bambi's Mom would create enough suspense and interest to carry through ten wimpy movies.

What does “Murder your darlings” mean? It means that sometimes you have to remove stuff you really love to make the work function as a whole. It’s time to face the fact that those legendary bloodbaths Game of Thrones people go on about came at the cost of the work as a whole.

Example 2: Game of Thrones

Many readers will be familiar with Game of Thrones, a series of fantasy novels by George R.R. Martin that will never be finished. The trademark quality of the series is that major characters frequently die, usually in spectacular, gruesome, nihilistic set-pieces.

If you read the third book (or watched Seasons 3-4 of the show), wasn't that AWESOME? Tons of the coolest characters going splat all over the place! One of the massacres was so spectacular that people started calling it the Red Wedding and it has its own page on Wikipedia!

Then the fourth and fifth books came out, and it turned out the heart had been ripped out of the thing. The dead characters were the people readers cared about. Worse, they were also the only ones who could move the plot along. The secondary characters who got promoted to replace them just weren't sufficiently interesting. Martin expended too many of his characters too quickly.

(The TV series was deeply flawed, but it did take the tangled mess of the books and turn them into a more or less coherent story. The TV series is thus better than the books, though it only won by default.)

Man, but I love some Hamlet. Polonius is such a comic-relief nothing character, but he is expended at exactly the right point to kick the entire show up a level. This is the moment where it gets REAL.

Example 3: Shakespearean Tragedy

The great tragedies are not all fantasy in the modern sense. Some have ghosts or witches, but not all. However, they are fantasy in the sense that they aren't realistic. Instead, they reflect our fantasies. They take place in a heightened reality, where people rise higher and have stronger, purer feelings than we do.

They are fantasy, not in the modern genre sense. They tell a fantasy of humans scaling the greatest of heights, only to then be brought to ruin by their flaws and errors. (I'm speaking about ancient Greek tragedy here too.)

Shakespeare was a guy who knew how to kill characters. In the best tragedies, the characters are developed and saved up in order to be liquidated in an overwhelming disaster. I mean, sure, you'll lose an Ophelia or two along the way to move things along and keep the audience alert.

You save up most of your characters for a truly epic disaster, to raise the emotional stakes as high as possible and try to send the audience out into the world truly affected. (What theatre nerds call "catharsis.")

(But when too much death happens, the story becomes nihilistic and the audience grows numb. I’m finding everyone-but-one-must-die stories, like Battle Royale and Hunger Games, increasingly distasteful. While Squid Game was very well made, it felt it had to slaughter hundreds of characters to affect the modern audience. Worrying. The death of one character we care about has more impact that mowing down hundreds of drones.)

To be fair, I would hesitate to walk with my family in the middle of the night through a place called Crime Alley. Sometimes, we bring our problems on ourselves.

Example 4: The Dead Master

I've talked a lot about the timing of character deaths, but I've said little about something just as important: The purpose of the death. For the death to have full effect, it needs to reinforce whatever is going on in your story.

There are lots of ways deaths get used. One archetypal example: The loss of your teacher or parental figure. In Kung Fu movies, the hero is required to avenge the death of his master to the point of parody. (eg Pai Mei in Kill Bill. Oogway in Kung Fu Panda.) But there's also Obi-Wan and Yoda in Star Wars. Spiderman driven to heroism by the murder of his uncle. Mufasa in The Lion King. Batman after his parents are killed in Crime Alley.

This is so emotionally effective because it's a condensed version of Human Existence: Our parents and elders teach us. They die and leave us to continue their work. We pass down that knowledge to our children.

When evaluating how to use death in a story, it's important to not forget the most obvious thing: Death is the universal human experience. We all, at some point, gotta do it. When a character dies, we feel less lonely in this grim fact. If the death has meaning, this comforts us in the face of grim, unavoidable reality.

Well-executed character deaths help a decent show become legendary. Arcane is handling this well. The Walking Dead, Battlestar Galactica, and The Expanse were really good at it. For old nerds, Blake’s 7 was also awesomely bloodthirsty.

Writing Fiction Gives A Weird Sort Of Power

When a fictional character dies, it affects us. Our strange brains can feel great empathy for people who don't exist. Seeing these imaginary people die gives us a tiny, tiny fraction of real shock and real mourning. This must have some value to us, or humanity wouldn't have chased that sensation in fiction for thousands of years.

If your movie is about an epic battle, characters have to die. That is what a battle means. If nobody dies, your whole work becomes a lie. So, if you are going to kill characters, do it with maximum effect. Spread it out. Make it unpredictable. And be sure to save up a bunch for a really big finish.

The characters we create and control are powerful tools which can create strong emotions in our customers, for good and ill. We need to use this power responsibly. But, more importantly, we do need to use it well.

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Spiderweb Software creates turn-based, indie, old-school fantasy role-playing games. They are low-budget, but they’re full of good story and fun. You can still late-back the Kickstarter for our next game, Avernum 4: Greed and Glory.