How to kill your characters · 7:15am Feb 21st, 2016
Gore - A tag I see on many stories I read. I personally don't like gore, in the very essence of the word. Guts flying everywhere and so on or stories written just for that bloody purpose. I also know that sometimes, in some stories, it is necessary. That a character gets hurt or even worse. But the biggest problem I don't have with "Gore", but with a character being hurt or fatally wounded. (What most of the times happens at the end of a chapter to create suspension.)
My problem is when authors decide to hurt their mane character so much that they should be dead, but survive anyway because they are the mane character. As I said, this is mostly done to to create suspension, but most of the time my only reaction is me rolling my eyes. You see, the problem is, most stories focus on one main character and in 99,9% of the cases the author will not kill him mid story, maybe at the end, but not at any other given time. What makes said character being injured pretty anticlimactic.
So, if you plan a story were your main character could die, add several backup characters as a fallback. Or just add redshirts from the start, so nobody notice there are redshirts.
Redshirts: Characters added into a story for the whole purpose of dying at a certain point.
If you add some at the beginning, give them at least some character development and personality, people won't even notice there are redshirts. And if you kill them off, or hurt them badly, there will be actual suspension. Well, at least if you managed to get people to care at least a bit about the character. I think I don't need to mention the author who is a master of this craft, George RR Martin, wedding planer extraordinaire. All you have to do to use this is to plan your story before you start writing.
If you got a real pair between your legs and developed all character equally you could even kill off your very main character and switch to another one.
But please, don't bring them back two chapters later with some magic or so. You don't want a Krillin or a Jean Grey in your story.
