Should You Kill, Cut, or Keep Your Characters? (In Memoir, Too!)
Use them, or lose them, but don’t let them linger on the page just because “they were really there”
For many writers, the decision to kill, cut, or keep a character poses a major conundrum. If they’re there in the scene in your head or in the cast of real life figures, shouldn’t they also be on the page? The answer is: it depends.
Hello Loreates,
While reading the historical novels of Christina Baker Kline in preparation for our Well Published convo here on April 28 (details below), I was gobsmacked by her decision in one book to abruptly kill off a primary POV character. I won’t tell you which book or character, but it was not a murder mystery, and I was shocked at her authorial audacity in simply eliminating a character whose mind and life we’d inhabited for many chapters.
I remembered the anguish I felt when killing off one of my principal POV characters in Glorious Boy, and I could imagine her reasons being much like mine: it was historically accurate and necessary to prove to readers 1) how high the stakes were in the times we were describing, 2) that no one was immune, 3) that bad things really did happen to good people. I suspected Christina felt that the death was necessary to galvanize the rest of the plot.
And then I thought this business of killing off characters would make a good post for you, Loreates. So here goes.
Aimee
Save the Dates!
Saturday, April 25 at 9am PT
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Tuesday, April 28, at 10am PT
Well Published: MEGA-Bestselling Author Christina Baker Kline
I’m delighted to invite you to my next Well Published, Live! with the formidable . We’ll be chatting about her star-studded writing career, her astonishing new historical novel The Foursome, and her vital work as Vice President of the Authors Guild.
Imagine your cast of characters as actors you have to pay out of your own meager pocket. Is every single character worth what it costs you to keep them onstage?
Kill, Cut, or Keep?
I can’t count the times students have told me they included their siblings in a memoir “because they were really there,” or named every character in a story, regardless of their relevance to the plot. For many writers, the decision to kill, cut, or keep a character poses a major conundrum. If they’re there in the scene in your head or in the cast of real life figures, shouldn’t they also be on the page? The answer is: it depends.
As usual, everything I’m going to say here applies to your choices in revision. I never recommend censoring or dictating your choices as you compose. In the first creative drafts, your job as author is to allow the characters to come and go, appear and disappear as they please. Let them have their way with you! They will often lead you in unexpected directions far more meaningful than any you’d planned.
But when you revise, you have to analyze and evaluate those directions, ruthlessly prune the dead ends and streamline pathways that lead to the heart of the story. That means getting rid of characters who only get in the way or who divert attention for no purpose. And it means activating characters who should serve a meaningful purpose but don’t yet.
Let’s take the options in the order you’ll most likely encounter them as you revise.
To Keep
It seems axiomatic that you’d keep your central POV characters. But your key characters won’t necessarily appear in every scene or for the entire duration of the story. And secondary characters are even trickier, since some are as important as protagonists, even if they’re hardly noticeable (I’m thinking of one of my favorite characters in literature, the young sheep dog in Hardy’s Far From the Madding Crowd, who turned the entire plot upside down by being too good at his job in a single heartbreaking scene, and then had to be killed off. Do read it, if you haven’t!)
Here’s a checklist to help you decide if a character is earning their “keep” in the scene or chapter you’re revising:
Do they push the scene toward change? Do they nudge, jostle, vex, challenge the other characters in ways that force movement toward a meaningful new direction, discovery, or decision? That’s the goal for every character you keep.
For more on the kind of change I’m talking about, read this:
