If you’ve ever written consistently you’re going to find yourself killing someone about one week in. No matter what genre, eventually someone dies. Like death itself, it’s natural and inevitable. But that doesn’t make it easy, unless you don’t care. For this character I’ve got on the chopping block now, I’m getting chewed up.
That said, I’d like to go over the mental hurdles and emotional constrictions that’ve for six days kept me delaying this character’s end. It’s not live, as with writing that is difficult to pull off due to the time differences between each reader’s, and the writer’s, comprehension and digestion of information. My hand stays preverbal axe suspended only by my reservations. I’m as close to frame by frame commentary as I can get in this field. Hopefully you’ll get something out of this in examining the mental state of a writer faced with a choice, understanding the creative process, and how you can lie to yourself. With any luck, I’ll be able to follow my plotted course and move on with the story.
As I said, the easiest way to kill a character is to not care. “And then this happened and they died. Why? Because that’s what happened. Moving on.” That’d be the simplest thing to do in the moment and for a throwaway character it can work. Every person is unique and the central figure in their own story but sometimes an underling needs to die to progress the plot. No lines, no face, no name, no fuss. My problem has a name: Mayrin. That was a first draft name for a first draft convenience presenting its own problems for the subsequent drafts should I deem it changed. It’d still be far easier than reversing a character’s death in the second draft. But over seventy thousand words (I’m estimating) since her introduction, Mayrin is her own character to me (and you can trust the writer to see that when no one else does).
Born into slum adjacent squalor in a late eighteenth century major city and crammed into a small apartment with her mother, Mayrin hasn’t had a charmed life. Her father left soon after her birth and though her mother hardly spoke of it. She inherited her distrust of men without examination. Her mother found her work at a textile sweatshop, chiefly employed by women and girls — until two orphaned brothers labor there too. The younger brother weaves past the social divide to teach Mayrin how to tuck her scarf so it doesn’t fall into her wool brushes. The boys are praised for their hard work and cheerfulness despite their abject poverty and the women see fit to install them in Mayrin’s mother’s apartment for a small rent. Now the house makes enough to hire Mayrin a tutor; she in turn teaches the brothers. The house warms to a family with the mother dubbing one Mayrin’s younger brother despite the slight inaccuracy. But a flash riot delivers the mother prolonged, fatal injuries. The three children invite two older women, sisters, to ease the rent burden. The apartment is brought down in a fire. They all move in with the two sisters’ extended family. Starting afresh, the brothers craft a dream to leave the city and own a farm. The older brother dies. Mayrin has a sickening encounter with a pimp. The younger brother, targeted for standing up for her, flees to the army. She remains with the adoptive family spinning yarn at home for five years until the younger brother returns wealthy enough to start that farm. They head out to the countryside and there I’ve been delaying the inevitable.
I have compassion for this young woman’s tumultuous life and the courage it took to persevere under circumstances I might not have survived. Compliments aside, I don’t know if she even has an arc over the sympathy I’ve made for her. Ultimately she’s a soft spoken, tender sister figure who couldn’t stand up for her want to continue to live with the kind, adoptive family she’s found in opposition to the childlike drive of her adoptive brother for a dream they once both believed. She loves him too much to crush that dream and he loves her too much to see her continue to suffer in the city that stole almost everything from them. But she’s not the protagonist, not by a longshot.
Mayrin is a background character I’m killing to move the story along. Why? To give her little brother the despondency and drive to return to the army and rapidly climb the ranks so the rest of the story as I have it in my head can happen. This would be flexible if I was early on but it comes about seventy thousand words into one part of a larger story that’s now nearing six hundred thousand words. A bit late no matter how far you turn the wheel. The scythe is sharp and ready to swing. But I feel like a jerk.
I’m killing this character for nothing more than another character’s arc. All her ambitions and wants dropped six feet into a hole so this guy can feel sad. Such is the fate of background characters in even the best written stories. If she lives the protagonist won’t continue his story. Is it fridging? Yeah kinda. Will that stop me? Nope.
There’s a checklist I could go down in revisions to not make it technically fit the simplified definition of fridging but I already stumbled into it. Her death isn’t unnecessarily gruesome even though it’s at the uncaring hands of tetanus. Be thankful we have vaccines and treatments for that affliction. Why tetanus? They moved to a farm around a lot of overturned soil and old, rusty nails. Why did they move specifically to that farm? Him. It was his choice. Ultimately her fate unintentionally falls upon his hands. He’d wanted her to find a husband amongst the neighboring farmers and himself a wife but alas that dream is crushed. There’s no malice to the act just the unfortunate prevalence and lack of treatment for many diseases during that era. Part of the despondency he faces is the pointlessness of her death. Why did she die? Why does anyone at any given time? It was going to happen eventually. Why? Because. Because. Why? I’m still killing her but story-wise the universe landed on double zero. Really it’s more akin to a Disney protagonist losing their parents in the prolog. Shipwreck, wasting sickness, blizzard… No one really to blame unless he wants to blame himself, and he will.
That’s what makes it tough as a writer, throwing out “It just happened that way deal with it” as justification to the reader. I can foreshadow with symptoms and the environment and place the impetus on another character’s overbearing personality, but behind all that at a mechanical level is a faceless (and in that period nameless) force to dramatically propel the story. There will be no object to shout at and no means to combat the force. Just an empty void that’ll devour you if you let it. But keep reading, happy resolution awaits… It sucks. When reality bogs down a story in its morass it’s not fun. However, this need only be a not fun moment to serve as the trough for better times before and after.
It’s not unprecedented for the story to dip into bleakness or for such tragedy to befall those characters. They’ve both lost someone dear to them. The specter isn’t a stranger. They both continued on bearing the mark on their mannerisms and dispositions. Mayrin doesn’t deserve to die. But neither did any of them. But hopefully, like starting the farm, the survivor in her brother can attempt to give meaning, in addition to remembrance, to her death. Even with a noble sacrifice, you can’t give meaning to your death, just the last thing you do with your life. It’s on those who proceed you to make your death meaningful. Her mother, through her love, devotion, and tireless, thankless work, gave her daughter the skills and disposition to make her own life for over a decade without her and those efforts and sacrifices were made worthwhile by Mayrin’s will. Likewise, everything she sacrificed and toiled and suffered for can only be made manifest after her death by her little brother. Her life was hers (as far as she controlled it). Her death is his. After the axe falls it’s no longer up to any of us. Leave a good spirit in your wake.
Colin Klawans 