As a Dark Fantasy and Horror author, I used to wonder whether I kill enough characters.
This felt like a valid concern—character death comes with my genre territory, after all. As more books ticked by and my authorial body count saw only modest increases, I looked harder at the prospect of putting a few more characters in the ground. Their deaths would require tact and meaning, yes, but I knew what I was doing. I could leverage the fallout to drive plots, ratchet up tension, and emotionally damage my readers, all for the relatively low cost of a character or two. In large ensemble casts, surely that was reasonable.
My characters thought otherwise
Almost every time I contemplated this, though, something happened. My interest in future scenes waned. My remaining characters struggled to carry on the story, or did so with conspicuous gaps in their midst. I got better ideas that required death-marked characters to remain alive. One by one, I dropped their proposed deaths from consideration.
After a while, I came to expect this. Each book of mine would finish with its main cast more or less intact, genre be damned. Exceptions were rare. But I never stopped thinking about those deaths that never happened. Not because I wondered if I’d made the right decision, but because I wondered why. Those deaths would have advanced the plot! Impacted the other characters! Changed the whole story’s progression! Why, then, had each one fallen through?
They had the right idea
It took me years to unpack this question, but the results were enlightening. As it turns out, character deaths weren’t just bad for the stories I’d personally dropped them from. They’re often bad, for both writing craft and audience engagement. And they only get worse when their justification is “realism” or some other flavor of the same. As a prolific Dark Fantasy and Horror author, then, I have come to a paradoxical place. I write dark stuff. That’s not in question. But nearly all my major characters make it out alive.
My stories are better for it.
Here’s why.
1. “Realistic” death violates the first principle of storytelling
Common writing wisdom tells us character deaths should have meaning. This is true. It’s also the chosen antagonist of the “realism” argument: deaths in real life are often meaningless, and deaths in war or disaster are even more so. Why should meaning be given so much weight?
Grappling with reality
The answer to this lies at the very core of storytelling. Books are not reality. They are STORIES, and stories abide by different rules than the directionless chaos of our real world. Chief among these is cause and effect. Every action in a story should change something. This chain of interlocking actions, events, and decisions forms a plot, and its loss causes that plot to wander. Many storytelling problems can be traced back to this.
Cause and effect is the reason ancient humans started telling stories in the first place. It gives momentum to idleness, direction to disorientation, and meaning to randomness. It brought a semblance of order to a world our ancestors could not understand, but had to cope with. Myths, legends, and cosmic explanations construct structure and purpose from a daunting and nebulous reality. This brings us comfort through understanding or a sense of control. That type of comfort isn’t a luxury. It’s psychological survival.
Meaningless death shatters that and lets the world back in.
Making meaning
Reality is not the point of storytelling. Even nonfiction adheres to this—it just hunts for stories in real events rather than building them from scratch. Character death, then, must be both a product and a driver of the story. It must link into the narrative chain on both sides. Death can’t come by random asteroid or sudden illness in the middle of a book. That asteroid must, for example, be sent by an angry deity, who must be angry for a reason. The illness must be a targeted poisoning, or the culmination of a character’s recklessness, or the manifestation of a hitherto undiscovered intergenerational curse. You get the idea.
Likewise, that death must also drive the story. It might propel a surviving character through part of their emotional arc, or vacate a position for someone to get promoted to. It might trim down a group and force them to recruit replacements to cover the loss, or hold that loss over their heads, to their future detriment. There are many options.
Realism is a trap
A character death without meaning falls into the same narrative category as a side quest that starts on a whim and accomplishes nothing. It just takes up space. Worse, it does so while putting your readers through the wringer—an emotional tax without reward. Pursuit of realism can (ironically) lead to something akin to a violation of suspension of disbelief among these readers. Many will feel betrayed, like the author tasked with guiding them through randomness with storytelling has let them down.
Character death does not need to be deep and emotional every time. Villain deaths are a great example. But deaths should result from the story and contribute to the story, or you are no longer storytelling at all.
2. Character death is a massive opportunity cost
Killing a character—especially a major one—insta-kills all the growth and emotional damage you could do with them if you kept them alive. Setting aside all undead shenanigans for a moment, you can’t emotionally torment dead characters. You can’t make them fall in love. You can’t break their hearts. You can’t fulfill their dreams or prod their flaws. That is all the emotional potential of a living character, and it’s much more difficult to outweigh than many authors might expect.
This is the biggest reason why I kill so few characters in Horror books in particular. Readers experience a story vicariously through the experiences of its characters, and in Horror, the goal is to scare both. You can’t scare dead people.
Living with consequences
I suspect this point is the driving force behind the very concept of a fate worse than death. Dial up the pain and torment far enough, and death becomes the easy option. We’re not looking for the easy option in storytelling, especially in dark genres. We’re looking to punch our characters (and therefore readers) in the gut. There are very few situations in which killing a character has a greater or more enduring emotional impact in that regard than, say, the narrative fulfillment of their worse fears.
Make your characters live with the consequences of their actions, not die from them. Life is long and death is short. If the worst-case living option is more emotionally fraught than killing someone, you’re on the right path.
(This is incidentally the same reason I have a bone to pick with the entire concept of martyrdom, but that’s a blog post for another day).
3. Maximizing death’s emotional potential is difficult
Making readers feel things is not as simple as just killing a character. Maximizing the impact of a character death requires a strong grasp of emotional building blocks leading up to the death, in the circumstances of the death itself, and in unpacking its aftermath.
Grief is a journey, not a destination. It takes time. It takes wordcount. It has impact on the thoughts and decisions of other characters. Treating it as a one-stop shop for emotional damage is similar to relying on jumpscares in a Horror book. Does it create something that passes as the desired response from readers? Yes, but that’s where it peaks. It’ll never truly haunt them.
Digging holes
If your first response to this is, “My book is too short to waste all that time unpacking grief,” you’re probably right. But that also means your book is likely too short for a major character death.
Picture a character death like a hole you’re digging in your story. The more major the death, the deeper the hole, and the more mourning it’ll take to adequately fill it in again. If your story is a ten-foot-deep novella, digging yourself a thirty-foot hole isn’t going to set you up for success. Your story’s believable progression, emotional resolution, and narrative satisfaction will all suffer. One of the few potential exceptions is stories where death and its meaninglessness are core themes of the narrative. In those cases, a lack of resolution may be the whole point. But that’s not what most authors are going for—especially when major characters are among the casualties.
Death is not a triviality. Grief is not just a tool. It’s a lived reality for nearly every human being on planet earth at some point in their lives. Waving that off doesn’t just dismiss people’s real-life experiences; it trivializes the entire concept of death in your book, and therefore paradoxically cheapens any death you try to write.
I’ll say that again: Writing death without grief actively undermines death’s emotional impact. If emotional impact is the point of writing death in the first place, you can probably see the problem here.
Context matters
Now, not all character deaths are created equal. A villain death often closes out a story in my genres. Unnamed side-character deaths might pad out casualty numbers without really costing anything. A main or major character death needs special care. The death of anyone close to a point-of-view character—say, their parent or mentor figure—does, too. If you don’t have a good sense of the lingering impact parental death leaves on a person, CeeMTaylor has a great video about this. If you can’t access it, try on a computer; TikTok typically lets you watch videos on desktop without an account.
When planning character death, consider the web of relationships the character in question is a part of. Who is most impacted? Are any of those characters POVs? Do they appear on-screen? Do they need time and space to grieve? If they do, you’ll be the one writing it.
4. You risk undermining the core driver of reader engagement
Readers want to read about people being people. Character development elevates nearly every genre, even those whose mainstream forms prioritize plot over personal progression. Character connection (often manifesting as relatability) is a powerful tool for audience engagement. I would go so far as to say it’s one of the most important tools in an author’s entire storytelling repertoire. Your readers trust you to take them on a journey (see Point #1 above). Part of this is trusting that their investment in the characters you introduce to them will mean something.
When you kill a character, you are asking your audience to trust you again. You are tacitly promising that the story will be better with the death than without it—that it meant something, and that it will carry the book to a new level you couldn’t achieve any other way. If the character was beloved and you can’t or don’t deliver on this promise, you run several risks beyond simply squandering that character’s potential. At best, your audience may be disappointed or unsatisfied. At worst, you may leave them feeling like you wasted their time.
Respect your readers
For all the jokes I make about tormenting readers, I stand by this: playing fast and loose with readers’ emotions is a great way to lose their trust. You don’t owe them any specific version of a story, but they don’t owe you their attention, either. Sharing your writing with others is a mutual exchange.
In the context of character death, then, always ask yourself whether you’re killing off a character to further your story or to make your audience feel a certain way. These are not the same thing. When death is on the line, your audience doesn’t actually matter—they live vicariously through your characters, like I mentioned earlier. If you make the decision that’s best for the story and the development of its characters, your audience’s feelings will be brought along for the ride.
5. Death should not outnumber disability
This last point is particularly directed at the “death is realistic” camp, but it’s a trap any author can fall into, so it’s simply good awareness to have.
Casualty numbers
In any war, disaster, or otherwise deadly and traumatic event, significantly more people will emerge disabled than dead. They will survive with physical impairments and mental scars in the form of PTSD and other mental illnesses. Far fewer people will die than will lose things that are precious to them: homes and belongings and a sense of safety or identity, and that’s just scratching the surface.
If an author kills a lot of characters but has few (or no) well-written disabled or mentally ill trauma survivors—with a very special mention for PTSD—I would like to ask them… why? Does death feel cleaner? More noble? Is the hard work of learning to properly represent disability and mental illness too intimidating? Do they consider disability to be a fate somehow worse than death? All those stances are problematic in a variety of ways, and should be interrogated rigorously.
Extraneous deaths
All of this sums up into a numbers game. As someone who does write war and disasters and other traumatic (and deadly) events, the dead / injured / traumatized ratio of survivorship means I have plenty of non-death trauma on my hands even if I don’t kill, or kill very little. This means I have plenty of opportunity for emotional damage, stakes, and costs to keep me occupied. At this point, adding the burden of character grief over unnecessary death is often simply impractical—not to mention worse for representation.
Speaking of representation…
If you find yourself in a place where you should realistically (see what I did there) be tackling this, please, please, please do your research. There are far more harmful tropes in this space than I can list in a single blog post, and that’s research I believe everyone should be doing anyway.
Disability may result as a consequence of a character’s bad decisions, but it should not written as divine punishment, and it is not a fate worse than death. It is also far more common than death. If you write war or disaster but the prospect of sensitively writing a character learning to live an altered life with PTSD or another disability is too intimidating for you, I encourage you to interrogate your definition of—and motivation to pursue—realism.
6. Who are you killing?
An alarming number of tropes in the bad-representation space revolve around the deaths of marginalized characters. Some are so egregiously common, they have their own names: Bury Your Gays, Black Dude Dies First, and Disposable Woman are exactly what they say on the tin. Disabled character deaths can cause a book to fail the Fries Test (similar in spirit to the Bechdel Test, but for disability) at best, or veer into I Will Only Slow You Down territory at the worse end of the spectrum.
There’s not much to say here except… please do your research. Pay attention to who you’re killing, especially if you’ve only got one or two characters who die. If those deaths are overrepresented in your marginalized character population, you’ve got some work to do.
Conclusion
The point of this post is not to say you should never write character deaths. Only that such deaths are needed less often in fiction than many authors (especially those in my genres) might expect, and that handling them too lightly can hurt a book in a remarkable number of ways.
I still kill characters. I’ve taken out fan favourites that had readers stop talking to me for days. I’ve also planned to kill others that I subsequently found I couldn’t justify losing. I’ve written characters who carry grief for tens or even hundreds of thousands of words. And I’ve had characters pick up the pieces and carry on through the plot with mental, physical, and social repercussions that drove things forward without needing to kill anyone.
Questioning death has unequivocally made me a better writer. It’s made the deaths I do keep far more impactful, and it’s honed my ability to build up and follow through on the consequences of the things I do in my books. It’s saved characters that have gone on to play pivotal roles, and encouraged me to look for those roles instead of expecting death to do the heavy lifting.
It’s also saved me from breaking my own heart too often… so at the end of the day, everyone wins.
About the Author
A.B. Channing is a queer speculative fiction writer and blogger who loves analyzing the writing industry and dislikes speaking about himself in third person. Most of his work is Dark Fantasy or Horror, but he frequently dabbles in Sci-Fi, Paranormal, and Romance. When not at his keyboard, he can most often be found up to his elbows in a pond.
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