Communities

Writing
Writing
Codidact Meta
Codidact Meta
The Great Outdoors
The Great Outdoors
Photography & Video
Photography & Video
Scientific Speculation
Scientific Speculation
Cooking
Cooking
Electrical Engineering
Electrical Engineering
Judaism
Judaism
Languages & Linguistics
Languages & Linguistics
Software Development
Software Development
Mathematics
Mathematics
Christianity
Christianity
Code Golf
Code Golf
Music
Music
Physics
Physics
Linux Systems
Linux Systems
Power Users
Power Users
Tabletop RPGs
Tabletop RPGs
Community Proposals
Community Proposals
tag:snake search within a tag
answers:0 unanswered questions
user:xxxx search by author id
score:0.5 posts with 0.5+ score
"snake oil" exact phrase
votes:4 posts with 4+ votes
created:<1w created < 1 week ago
post_type:xxxx type of post
Search help
Notifications
Mark all as read See all your notifications »
Q&A

Post History

60%
+1 −0
Q&A When do I successfully kill off an important secondary main character... in a series of five books?

So you want Cancer's death to matter to Leon. One way to accomplish this is for the characters to have some shared struggles. Maybe Leon really cares about Cancer's death because Cancer at some poi...

posted 7y ago by kamorrissey‭  ·  last activity 5y ago by System‭

Answer
#3: Attribution notice added by user avatar System‭ · 2019-12-08T06:43:40Z (about 5 years ago)
Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/29141
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/
#2: Initial revision by user avatar kamorrissey‭ · 2019-12-08T06:43:40Z (about 5 years ago)
So you want Cancer's death to matter to Leon. One way to accomplish this is for the characters to have some shared struggles. Maybe Leon really cares about Cancer's death because Cancer at some point saved Leon's life. I can easily imagine Leon being torn up if he subsequently failed to save Cancer's life in a later situation.

This leads me to another thought. You plan for Cancer to die to advance the overall story. That's fine. But his death just happening out of the blue seems much less engaging than his death being a consequence of the story action.

#1: Imported from external source by user avatar System‭ · 2017-07-10T04:34:24Z (over 7 years ago)
Original score: 0