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When characters die

Angel

Paige, from Milan, MI, writes, “How does it feel when one of your main char­ac­ters dies?”

That is a ques­tion I have nev­er been asked before, and it is an inter­est­ing one. It is real­ly ask­ing, what is the writ­ers’ rela­tion­ship to the char­ac­ters we cre­ate? How real do they become? To what extent does the writer become caught up in the character’s lives, when, in essence these char­ac­ters are not real? They are, after all, fictions.

To begin, some­times a char­ac­ter IS based on a real per­son. The writ­ers ‘engage­ment there is com­plex indeed. It is hard to relate the death of some­one you know—even when fictionalized.

As for the total­ly fic­tion­al char­ac­ters: I think that unless the writer becomes ful­ly engaged with the fic­tion­al char­ac­ters they cre­ate they are not like­ly to come alive on the page. One wants to think of them as alive, and real. I want to see, and hear my char­ac­ters. The more I do so, the bet­ter my writ­ing will be. The more alive they are, the more painful their deaths for me.

Now, some­times, the writer, in some serendip­i­tous fash­ion, stum­bles upon a char­ac­ter that springs to life almost on his or her own. Con­sid­er Bear from Crispin. In some respects, he took over the book. So that in the sequel to Crispin (Crispin at the Edge of the World) when I wrote of Bear’s death it was very hard to do. That said, in my opin­ion, it helped make the sequel a bet­ter book than the first one.

(When a read­er came upon Mr. Drabble’s death, (from Beyond the West­ern Sea), she sent me a furi­ous let­ter telling me she hat­ed me for not let­ting her favorite char­ac­ter live.)

Ulti­mate­ly, nov­els about life and death are hemmed in by the plot. A plot, a good plot, has a log­ic all its own. The good writer con­structs a sense of true life about char­ac­ters. Where there is life, there may well be, alas, death.

Here is an idea: Maybe there is a spe­cial heav­en where fic­tion­al char­ac­ters go when they die. I like that.

1 thought on “When characters die”

  1. I love the notion that Bear is in a spe­cial heav­en for fic­tion­al char­ac­ters! And, he’s cavort­ing with oth­er fic­tion­al char­ac­ters that I’ve had a hard time let­ting go. Even though my head knows they’re fic­tion­al, my read­er-heart knows they’ve been alive while I’ve lived through the expe­ri­ence of the book. [P.S. I’m still rather fond of CRISPIN over CRISPIN AT THE EDGE OF THE WORLD for New­bery-ish reasons!)

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