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.

Themes are an integral part of any good story. Yet many genre fiction writers fail to consider their story’s themes, believing they have no place beyond literary novels — or worse yet, that authors who actively explore themes in their stories do so to preach to readers.

These harmful misconceptions hinder writers’ efforts to produce effective and engaging stories.

Themes are present in all forms of fiction. More importantly, when handled with care, themes lend purpose and meaning to the stories we tell. To fail to develop our stories’ themes with intention is to risk undermining their ability to engage and compel readers.

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.

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.

Part of crafting characters involves exploring their history. 

Just as your lived experiences have shaped the person you are today, a character’s backstory has the power to provide depth and understanding to their characterization. It can even lend context to the conflicts taking place in your present story. Without that history, your character’s attitudes and actions have little foundation on which to stand.

But crafting a rich and compelling character backstory is far from simple. What elements should you consider when weaving your character’s history? Better yet, how do you translate that history onto the page without bogging down your story? Let’s answer both of these questions and more in today’s article…