How to Kill off a Character

Listen to your heart

I’ve always been fascinated by the creative process: where do ideas come from? When we write, we tend to have a general notion of where we’re trying to go in this episode or paragraph or whatnot, but the writing itself can be a pretty free affair. I guess that’s what I enjoy the most in writing: the spontaneous aspect to a predesigned destination, if you will. We know where we’re supposed to go, but we have no idea how to get there.

When you build a character, you go through a gestation process where you mature the idea/character in your head until you think you know just enough about the person to be able to write about them. However, the character is rarely a set figure. They will evolve and change as you put them through different situations in your head, whether you write these down or not.

Creating the character, building the novel, simulating situations in your head, all these exercises bring you closer to knowing your character, to understanding them and being able to choose the right option for them in every moment of your novel, making it real.

Writing a novel is like pushing a boulder up a hill: You start with a lot of effort, but once you get over the bump, the boulder rolls down the other side and becomes almost unstoppable. Your characters start in 2-D resolution, where you see them in your head, and you can feel them, but something is missing.

As you write along, your character starts to evolve and acquire its own aspects. It starts to become 3-D, as if it popped out of the page. It starts being a “he” or a “she”: the character is alive.

This point is a blessing and a curse, the boulder at the zenith of the mountain. Your character has become something in your head, but now they have demands. Your character wants you to think about them a lot more. They now have ideas. They make you daydream. They take over your life. However, this is when good writing starts, the crème de la crème. You must hurry, because the candle is burning. You can only be obsessed by this idea for so long.

So we splurge. We act like Venezuela, trying to torture the ground and make it give us all its petrol. We only have a limited amount of time to exploit this gold rush before it dies down. The toll the character takes on your psyche will become unbearable after a while.

I don’t know how this process plays out for other people, but for me, it can be really grueling. The balance between committing to a choice, versus leaving options open and being free, will break you down. As long as the character is in your head, anything is possible. He or she hasn’t committed to anything, so all options are on the table. Should my character go to the party or stay home? Should he try to talk to the beautiful girl? Does he blurt out his secrets?

All these possibilities split options into fractals that just keep on evolving. Now he’s at the party, but does he drink or not? What kind of drink? How much of it? As long as the character is in your head, all these competing branches remain real in your psyche, and you have to juggle them all at the same time. It’s like watching dozens of TVs at the same time, and it can sap all your energy (this explains why your fiction writer friends look sleepy and miserable most of the time).

The strangest part of the creative process is when you understand that the character has to die. I use very general structures, so I’m often switching, adapting and moving stuff around while I write. When the character is ripe, when he has taken over the process, when I’ve reached the top of the hill, I just unleash the guy onto the novel, see what happens.

The transition is weird, since you have to go from a character you’re constantly injecting with emotions, wants and needs in order to develop them, to a fully-formed character that is now dragging you along. Now, they’re 3-D in your head, and they seem to take on a life of their own, in what has to be one of the most magical aspects of writing.

By the same token, sometimes you’re pushing the character into new situations, and you feel like the guy is just not there anymore. It’s as if the well had dried up: the character has become dull, has ceased to “speak” to you and doesn’t seem to “want” anything else.

The character has died, and he must now be killed in the manuscript.

However, killing a character is not as easy as you may imagine. I can’t remember a character I had to kill that didn’t shake me up a bit or even made me cry. After months (or years) with this guy in my head, trying to understand what makes him tick, why he does what he does and what makes him human, now we have to part ways. The feeling of loss is real. I wouldn’t say it’s like losing a real friend made of bone and flesh, but it’s definitely something like losing a dog you loved deeply.

This year, I realized a character in my current manuscript had to die. There just wasn’t any way around it. I spent the last couple of months staging their death and going through the impact on their family. It has been complete torture, connecting with those feelings, even though they aren’t mine, they’re my character’s.

Finally, the deed is done. Here’s a final tribute to my character and an apology for having killed you, there wasn’t any other way. Unfortunately, I can’t reveal anything else, since this manuscript is the follow-up to Fish Food!, and I don’t want to spoil it for future readers.

R.I.P., and thanks for all the humanity you injected into my book.