Avoiding "kill it off for DRAMA" trope whilst doing it
Why hello there, old sports. I guess we all know the spiel with this one, but I tell you anyway, using this handy-dandy step-list:
- You introduce a character who is likable.
- (optional)Keep him around for a while
- Kill him/her off horrifyingly, and have the murderer bathe in his/her blood (maybe literally) and organs.
- ???
- Profit
However, old sports, this trope was used by too many writers and/or too many times for anyone to take it seriously, or don't saw it coming. We all know, that an innocent and powerless character is destined to be brutally murdered, and so, the readers will be too distanced to feel sorry because they knew, this would happen.
But I want to kill off characters for the drama.
So, how to do this trope "right"?
This post was sourced from https://writers.stackexchange.com/q/29880. It is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.
2 answers
Who is laughing? Just you, at suckering your readers into caring about a character?
Maybe this is not how you read, but most readers are making an investment of time and emotional energy in imagining the characters. Developing a character they like, and then causing that character pain, stress and grief, is part of storytelling. But if you kill the character (and there is no afterlife for it) you have wasted their time and investment for an entirely superfluous stunt. They won't laugh at that, they aren't psychopaths.
If you are going to kill a character, there are ways to make them sympathetic but undeveloped. With a single line happy line or helpful act, a pretty actress gains credit with the audience, then you can have her laughing and looking over her shoulder as she walks into an oncoming garbage truck. the audience will still not find that funny, but they will wince and move on, because they did not invest too much emotion into the character; just a first impression.
If you want to play death for laughs, you need a burlesque story with over the top or supernatural characters (e.g. Beetlejuice, Zombieland).
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The basic patterns of story are as old as the hills and they are not going away or losing any of their potency. It is always and forever in the execution.
But I think you need to stop thinking in terms of tropes, or at least stop reading TV Tropes. TV does not get by on storytelling. Most TV storylines are weak, and often absurdly so. TV gets by on your affection for the characters and that is largely down to the attractiveness of the actors playing them. The TV writer's job is to give actors and directors room to work. They can pull out the standard TV tropes again and again and let the actors go to town on them. 95 percent of the weight of the show is on the actor's shoulders (and that is reflected in their salaries). This is why recasting so often kills a show, while writers come and go and we rarely notice the difference.
In a novel, all the weight is on the writer's shoulders. You can't paper over the cracks with a pratfall or a pushup bra. Your characters are characters, not actors, and you need to focus on making them whole, human, and consistent, and on clearly delineating the desires that drive them.
This does not mean that you cannot use conventional plot devices. Story is what it is and there are only so many shapes it can assume. The key thing to understand is that you cannot use such devices to make readers care. Readers have to care about the characters before the familiar plot device occurs; they will not start to care just because such devices occur.
This is why the notion that you should start in the middle of an action sequence is so difficult to follow successfully (and why it is clearly contradicted by so many published books). You have to care about the character before you care about the action.
Get that part right, and all the tropes work. Get it wrong and all the tropes fail.
On the screen, that part is up to the actor. On the page, it is up to you.
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