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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 (almost 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 (almost 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