A story with no secondary characters is like a play without an ensemble. Without a strong supporting cast bringing the plot to life, the main characters would wander around aimlessly with no direction or conflict to spur them on. The best kind of books have a strong selection of secondary characters that readers fall in love with and want to see succeed in their endeavors, even more than the protagonist sometimes. But it is equally important not to let them take over the story or become so complicated that they overshadow the main character.

Death can serve as a powerful storytelling tool in many ways, but with great power comes great responsibility. What's the secret sauce to killing off characters in a way that readers can respect? Let’s break down the five key reasons that good storytellers choose to kill their characters.

Writers are commonly advised to craft complex characters. But what exactly makes a character complex? To answer this question, we must first take a quick dive into an important aspect of human nature.

Anthropologically speaking, humans are a tribal species. We need to band together to survive the dangers of this world, as well as the dangers that other tribes present. To more easily identity friend from foe (and to find a sense of community based on shared identity), we often apply labels to ourselves and those around us.

If I were to ask who you are, you'd likely answer by sharing the labels you feel define your identity, which may include your profession, racial or ethnic background, political or religious affiliations, who you are in relation to your loved ones, what hobbies and interests you enjoy, and so on.

Are you struggling to finish your first draft, lost in an aimless middle act or lackluster conclusion? Is your manuscript worrisomely bland, lacking a strong narrative thread to draw readers from Point A to Point B? Writer, it’s time to rev up your story’s narrative engine…

The surest way to drive your plot forward is to arm your characters with goals they’re motivated to achieve. Pit your characters’ goals against one another (or against their internal needs), and you’ll create deliciously engaging conflict that keeps readers turning pages.

But how does one develop goals that effectively serve their characters and story? Is it even necessary to give every character a goal, for that matter? Let’s delve into this topic together, writer.

For readers to care what happens next in your story, they must first care about your characters. It’s your job as a writer to foster this reader-character connection, to build the bridge that encourages readers to invest in your characters’ stories. Establishing your characters’ motivations isn’t the only way to encourage this reader-character connection, but it is a surefire way to lend context to your characters’ actions. With context in place, readers can then decide whether your characters and their journeys are worth their emotional investment.

To fill our stories with characters who feel as real as the people around us, we must delve deeper than classic archetypes and easy characterizations. This work begins with developing richly complex personalities for our characters that lend to their most vibrant portrayals. Discover my favorite personality-building tool today >>

At the heart of every good story is conflict.

In plot-driven stories, this conflict is primarily external in nature. The protagonist fights to overcome a series of obstacles and/or defeat an antagonist in their quest to achieve a particular goal. For example, in Suzanne Collins’ The Hunger Games, Katniss Everdeen must outlive her fellow competitors and outsmart the game-makers’ vicious whims to survive a televised fight to the death.

However, in character-driven stories, external conflict often takes a back seat. Instead, it’s internal conflict that drives the story forward as the protagonist struggles to overcome a core fear or flaw to achieve a particular goal and/or become a better version of themselves. This fear or flaw often manifests in a false belief that’s otherwise known as the “lie” your character believes. It’s this lie that we’re going to explore in detail today.

External conflict often plays a major role in genre fiction, forming the foundation for a story’s plot as the protagonist struggles to achieve their goal in the face of opposition. As such, many genre fiction writers spend a considerable amount of time developing their story’s plot arcs while giving little thought to an equally powerful story element: character arcs.

As writers, we hold the power to counteract marginalization and discrimination in literature by writing inclusively. When we actively work to improve the quality and diversity of the representation in our stories, we help dismantle the social hierarchy, expand our readers’ worldview, and ultimately ensure that every reader can see themselves in the pages of their favorite books.

We’ve already discussed how the events that took place in your characters’ pasts should affect who they are when your story begins. Backstory gives your characters a sense of history, of lives that extend beyond the confines of the story you’re telling, ultimately helping readers view your characters as fully-realized. Backstory can even provide insight into your characters’ beliefs, worldviews, and motivations—all vital characterization elements that should affect the way your characters act and the decisions they make throughout your story.

As you can see, taking care to develop your characters’ backstories is essential to your story’s success. Today, I’d like to take an even deeper dive into backstory, exploring the aspect of your characters’ past that is perhaps most essential of all: their ghost.

As writers, it’s our job to craft fully-realized characters—characters that feel as real as the people around us. And like the people around us, this means our characters should be flawed.

Flaws and moral failings are, after all, an integral part of what it means to be human. Without these shortcomings, humanity would experience little conflict, triumph, or growth—all elements that define the stories we write. Simply put, for a character to feel real, they must share in our flawed humanity.

Readers today want to get deep into our characters rather than being told what they are feeling. Which means our characters must feel, react, emote, and process in natural, believable ways. Deep POV has become the norm across genres.

“Show, don’t tell” is the golden rule of fiction. But it’s easier said than done. If we show too much, we risk boring our readers (and ourselves) or overwriting. If we show too little, we risk failing to adequately reveal the character’s emotions and, hence, fail to evoke any emotional response in our readers. 

As we balance narrative, backstory, dialogue, action, and direct thoughts, we have to be mindful of the overarching purpose of all of it: to artfully show the character’s emotional state through her mind-set, thoughts, behavior, dialogue, and body language. It is not easy to do well. The saying “Easy reading is hard writing” is a truth seasoned authors know well.