Several TV shows i’ve not liked have done this…”Whoops, ratings are dropping again! Who do we kill now? *rubs hands together in glee…*”. Yeah, i HATE it when that happens. I guess that old saying, too much of anything can kill you applies here as much as anywhere else. Just make sure you dont overdo it with your killing.

Instead of killing off a character, I prefer to put them through H*ll, killing some aspect of their personality, their beliefs, a principle they revere. Then I examine how that “death” affects them, how they feel as a person, their future decisions. I often find that more fulfilling than upping the body count. It just depends on the story.

The death is there for a purpose and something that comes out of it becomes central to one of the main sub plots. There has been one thing bothering me about it though and that it who gets killed. The person is meaningless in the greater scheme of things.

So, it just hit me that I need to change who gets killed and make that person important to my POV character who witnesses this.

And I also realized that I needed to make one of my more important characters an actual POV character. I took a look and discovered that none of my POV characters are set to die in my WIP and by adding this character, whose death is really the turning point in the lives of all my POV characters, as a POV character I think it will add to the book - and let the reader know not to think that just because a character is a POV character they are somehow “safe”.

So, thanks for this post. It has helped me identify a couple of things that have been nagging my about my WIP, which naturally leads to solutions to them.

I’m not a big fan of “soap opera” deaths (though I LOVE the terminology — I’d never heard that one before). To me they always seem contrived. Now that’s not to say that you can’t occasionally give a head fake toward a character’s death (to mix metaphors). For instance, I see nothing wrong with ending a scene or chapter in such a way that it makes it seem a character’s death is inevitable, and then returning to that character later to discover that he/she escaped. But once you show the body, as it were, I have a hard time with bringing that person back. Am I making that distinction clear enough? There’s one series that I like very much but stopped reading because the lead character kept dying only to be brought back by a strange twist of the “rules” of the universe in which the books were set. It just got annoying after a while — it seemed like there were no consequences for this character, no real risks to the person’s life. For me, that’s not fun or compelling.

One of the reasons I apologized in an earlier comment in this thread for the glib tone of my post, is that killing off a character is something I do with purpose. I never do it lightly. And I think the “soap opera” phenomenon cheapens the death of a character, which I don’t think should ever happen.

What is your opinion on the “Soap Opera” deaths? You know, those are the ones where you kill off a character only to have them return at a key moment in the story due to a confusing twist of events. Is there any way to do those right or should people just chuck it?