There are many reasons writers decide to kill off their protagonist. The trick is to do it for the right reasons and in a way that won’t make the reader stomp off in a huff. If you’re a writer considering doing away with the main character (MC) in your short story or novel, we’ve got a few tips to keep in mind.
In 1893, thousands of English readers canceled their subscription to The Strand when Sir Arthur Conan Doyle killed off Sherlock Holmes. Conan Doyle simply was tired of the series and wanted to move on to other things. He was a little surprised by his readers’ outrage, and, eventually, he succumbed to public pressure and resurrected the beloved detective in The Hound of the Baskervilles.
When Tony Soprano was killed in the season finale of The Sopranos—well, we’re assuming he was whacked, as the tension built and the screen suddenly went black—the audience had no choice but to accept it. The series was over. And the final scene (or lack thereof) packed a serious punch.
Alice Sebold took a different—and highly successful—approach to killing off her main character. In The Lovely Bones, her protagonist and narrator is a young girl who has just been murdered, and she comments on the events that happen after her death:
“These were the lovely bones that had grown around my absence: the connections—sometimes tenuous, sometimes made at great cost, but often magnificent—that happened after I was gone. And I began to see things in a way that let me hold the world without me in it.”
If you’re considering killing off your main character, keep the following tips in mind:
- Be somewhat realistic. It may be hard to swallow if your main character survives what no one should be able to. When a jumbo jet crashes in the desert but your hero, Jack, walks away unscathed thanks to his skill with a nail file and a soda can, you can practically hear your readers groan.
- Plot problems. Don’t kill the protagonist if you are having problems with the storyline and simply don’t know what to do next: The heroine finds herself between an enraged grizzly and a cliff—if you can’t figure out a plausible way to extricate her, this shouldn’t be the only reason to kill her off.
- Beware morality statements. Perhaps your main character’s death is a natural consequence of his fatal flaw. He is a functioning alcoholic and sometimes drinks and drives. Be very careful not to make this into a morality statement by waving it over your readers’ heads: This is what happens to drunk drivers! You want the story to be powerful, not your personal statement on drunk driving.
- Don’t kill the MC off in a trivial or anticlimactic way. In other words, unless it’s tied to the theme or plot in some significant way, Hattie Heroine should not die from an infected paper cut. If we’ve invested in her character, we need some tension building up to her death.
- Avoid resurrections. Please don’t be tempted to miraculously bring a main character back to life unless it’s an integral part of your plot or theme (like a medical thriller centered around a miraculous new drug that reverses death). What? It was actually Hattie Heroine’s twin sister who died of infection? Like an ending where the MC wakes up and realizes everything was just a dream, a miraculous resurrection can be a little cheesy—or an easy out.
As a writer, consider the impact your protagonist’s death will have on your audience. There’s a fine line between a meaningful ending and ticking off your readers. Your reader has invested emotionally in your main character, so make sure it’s important or relevant that he/she be killed off—and preferably not death by paper cut.
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I definitely struggle more with #1 (Be realistic) than anything. Even when the storyline calls for it, I do pretty much anything to avoid killing off my main character! I get so attached to the characters I create, I end up writing myself into corners because I don’t want to let anything bad happen to them. I’ve probably often left my readers groaning!
I HATE when I read or watch something that uses the examples illustrated in number five. Thanks for these tips!
The Lovely Bones? Really?
I have a difficulty killing my main characters, but recently, in a work in progress, I killed a major character. It was difficult, but it moved the plot along better than leaving him alive. These are great points to remember!
My sweetie also hates resurrection stories. But they’re more than cliche–they’re part of the archetypes everyone has in our subconscious. Writers go back to them again and again because rebirth is part of every mythology, and one of all humans deepest desires. The tale of Odin hanging from the tree, the Buddha sitting beneath the same, Persephone in the land of the dead, of course Jesus–all religions and mythologies have tales of someone who has been brought to the brink, or just over, and snatched back. You see it work successfully in everything from *SPOILERS* Harry Potter to Game of Thrones.
The key is to show that person changed. The person who has been to hell and back must be, in some key way, in entirely new person.
Then again, I have #5 in my own novel, so perhaps my viewpoint is not to be trusted…I’ve been reading a lot of Joseph Campbell!
Correction: Sherlock Holmes was resurrected in The Adventure of the Empty House, not Hound of the Baskervilles.
The only time you kill your main character, or even bit players, is when that’s what happens in the story. Most readers will know straight off if the death is ‘organic’ or a mere contrivance.
I always wonderd if Tolkien didn’t intend to kill off Frodo Baggins, and in the end couldn’t bring himself to do it. He found a compromise that worked. But that solution isn’t readily available to most writers. Margaret Mitchell would have looked awfully silly if Melanie had sailed off with a bunch of elves at the end of ‘Gone with the Wind’.
I keep waiting for Dexter to get caught and face the music but I hope, although hopelessly evil, that he lives on.
Rob, Absolutely right. We weren’t clear: It wasn’t so much a resurrection as an appearance. Conan Doyle resumed writing about his character in Hound of the Baskervilles. You are correct that Sherlock Holmes himself was not “brought back to life” in the novel. Rather, Conan Doyle brought back his creation for a reunion tour in The Hound of the Baskervilles. published in The Strand magazine between 1901-1902. This story, a sort of prequel, was set before Holmes had his unfortunate cliff diving accident, so there was no resurrection just yet.
I think one of the examples in fiction is the way Richard Matheson killed off Richard Neville in I Am Legend. It isn’t necessarily a morality statement, but facilitates ongoing discussion/examination for the reader because it touches upon themes that are universal (social in and out groups, minorities and majorities, etc).
I personally don’t go for resurrections but The Lovely Bones would have to be an exception, only because the voice of the protagonist was written so well.
As for Harry Potter. I’m still not sure whether Harry’s death would have been better or not. As a writer, I would have killed him off, only because I wouldn’t want to be placed under pressure to continue the story.
Even though my romance short stories never end happily ever after, I haven’t killed off any of my main characters. I may decide to bring back some of these protagonists to wreck havoc on more people’s lives.
Years ago I wrote a story about “the other woman” in a relationship, who was, at story’s end, killed by the wife. I had many questions from readers who were invested in this “other woman”. The one question I heard over and over was, did the wife kill her or did the author? I resurrected that story, took a hard look at it and found the REAL ending. It isn’t the “other woman’s” death. It was her own realization that she preferred relationships that were open-ended. She was someone who could not commit.
I say don’t be in a hurry to take the easy way out, let the story germinate, however long it takes.
Nancy, Really great advice! Thanks for sharing the story of your story!
In the original Rambo novel, not the book of the film, but the true original, Rambo dies at the end.
It was, as the author knew, the right ending for the poor mad dog who didn’t fit into society. He and the sherrif were both ‘walking wounded’, scarred for ever by their respective wars.
But Hollywood didn’t want to kill the golden goose. The subsequent stories all rang false to me.
Gyppo
This is really good advice. One of my favorite books turned movie, My Sister’s Keeper, changed when the book became a movie. I think when the MC dies in the book it added more depth to the story overall. But when I saw the movie and the MC lived, that change made it, as Gyppo put it, ring false to me. I was extremely disappointed.
I think if you’re going to kill off an MC it should MEAN something, but one thing I hate is the amnesia killing. The body isn’t dead but the mind is sort of thing. You follow a character for long time and then suddenly the character “gets amnesia”. I’ve seen that happen and I was willing to go with it until the character became so stilted and robotic that there was NO reason to continue following the story. Even if the MC regains their memory, that period of time has ruined the entire story for me. The MC went from a vibrant, passionate, HUMAN personality to a robotic, emotionless, clumsy (and I don’t mean physically) cartoon. I saw the potential there for a great idea, but the writing on that character changed so much I felt it was obvious the author wasn’t in it. Anything that is death-like should be fluid and belong. It should never feel contrived.