Welcome back to Musings of an Arthritic Artist! Today I'm going to be going over my tips to writing a death scene.
There are spoilers for Thor: The Dark World, Thor: Ragnarok, Frozen, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, The Titan's Curse, and City of Glass, which I use as examples.
Without further ado, let's get into the post!
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Today I'm going to be talking about how to write a death scene. I'm predominantly talking about novels, though this applies to any form of writing.
I want to preface this by saying that I am not a professional nor published author (despite the fact that I have published two short stories onto my blog). However, in my semi-structured 5-6 years of writing (I have written for longer than that, but I started my first novel at 13-14) I have researched and have found some tips that are incredibly helpful.
1. Figure Out the Tone
The tone of the scene is largely what's going to shape how your readers are going to feel about the death itself. If it's your villain's death scene, maybe the characters are relieved. Write your tone that way.
If you're killing off a child, then you're likely going to want it to seem sad, sudden, and tragic. So write your tone accordingly. Tone is set with word choice. The type of words you use are incredibly important when writing tone in any scene, but death scenes in particular.
If the tone of the scene isn't written as you intended, you may get a reaction from readers--and maybe even yourself--that you didn't intend to get.
2. Make the Readers Care
In order for the death to mean something, the readers have to care about the character you're killing off. Sometimes this is direct, in that the audience cares about the character because they're likeable.
Other times this is indirect, a situation where the audience cares about the killed-off character because one of the protagonists cares. In indirect situations though, the reader must first care about the protagonist. After that, they'll usually proceed to care about the character you've killed off.
This is a tip especially true for the characters in your story that are good. If the reader doesn't care about your character, they aren't going to care about that character's death. They're likely going to feel cheated.
This is where character development comes in. Show their personality. Show their interests, likes, and dislikes. Show their relationships with other characters.
Make them feel like a person who has their own goals and desires. Make them three-dimensional. Make them feel like real people. This will usually make readers care about that character.
And, make sure your character is either relatable or somewhat likeable. If your character isn't likeable, the reader may feel relieved or happy that that specific character died.
So make sure that if you have a character who is somewhat of an anti-hero, they have redeeming qualities.
3. Leave a Goal of Theirs Unfinished
There's nothing that saddens readers more than a character they like dying before they complete their goal.
This goal could be large, or it could be small. Sometimes the smaller the goal, the more sad it is. But that isn't true in all cases. Sometimes the goal can be huge, and it's just as sad. Most of the time though small goals are the most effective at accomplishing this.
This goal could be something as simple as seeing the ocean, or it could be as large as saving the world. It's really up to you and what your story is about.
4. Make Their Death Count
Nothing cheapens a death more than a resurrection scene. In some cases this works, but in most cases it doesn't, and it only succeeds in cheapening the character's death.
This is especially true in cases where the main character watches that character die. Sometimes you can get away with it if the character 'died' off page and is presumed to be dead. These are the few instances where a character's 'death' may be 'erased.'
However those are very particular instances. We're talking about death scenes though, as in deaths that happen on page.
The only instance where this works is when there's a 'cure' introduced sometime before the death. However, if this isn't written well, it can feel very cheap.
5. Don't Get Melodramatic or Rely on Cliches
I'm sure we've all read a death scene where the character who's dying gives a speech before they die, and is able to tell the character everything they need to know despite the fact that they're bleeding out.
Yeah, I wouldn't recommend doing that. It makes the death feel inauthentic. This drawn out speech death scene is likely not going to make your readers cry (if that's what you're aiming for). It's going to make them roll their eyes.
I highly recommend not making your death scene cliche or melodramatic.
Now, there are some types of writing where melodramatic death scenes recurrently appear. That would be writing such as plays.
However, when writing a novel that isn't intended to be a satire or play, you want to strive for realism. Unless of course you're purposely making your novel melodramatic.
Most deaths aren't dramatic. That isn't to say that the character that is dying can't say anything, they most certainly can. This happens in real life. But in real life, people don't give half an hour speeches as they're dying.
If you are trying to write an authentic, emotional death scene, avoid melodrama. There are instances where deaths are portrayed as melodramatic for humorous purposes.
For example, let's take Thor: Ragnarok. There's a scene in Thor: The Dark World where Loki dies. However, Loki is also a trickster who can use illusion magic, so sometimes when he dies, he doesn't actually die.
This is the case in Thor: The Dark World. When Thor returns to Asgard in Thor: Ragnarok, he stumbles across Asgardians putting on a performance that reenacts Loki's death in Thor: The Dark World.
Odin is sitting by, watching, quoting and overall enjoying himself. We soon find out that Odin is actually Loki, and Loki put on this production as an homage to himself.
This reenacted death scene is melodramatic. But it's supposed to be. It fits into Loki's personality in that he's an arrogant person who always thinks he's some sort of hero.
So this melodramatic reenactment serves to show Loki's personality and be humorous. This scene is supposed to be funny.
However, this is intentional. If you're writing a death scene, and you aren't trying to be melodramatic, sometimes you can accidentally fall into melodramatic territory.
Also keep in mind that this performance wasn't Loki's actual death scene in Thor: The Dark World. His death in that scene was way less dramatic.
6. Show How It Affects the Other Characters
This is especially true if the character was someone close to the protagonist. Grief can be such a useful tool in fiction. It can change some of the way characters react in the future.
Make sure the grief makes sense with the character though. The loss of an acquaintance isn't going to affect your character as much as the death of a sibling. You want to make sure the character's reaction is realistic.
Remember that different people go through grief differently, and some people take longer than others, so make sure you know how you want to deal with grief in your character.
Showing how a character's death affects other characters usually makes scenes even more emotional. I've learned that this is the key to making my sister cry about a fictional death. She doesn't usually cry when the character themself dies. She cries because of how other characters react.
In Frozen, my sister didn't cry when Anna 'died.' She cried at Elsa's reaction to Anna 'dying.' In Avengers: Endgame, while she liked Iron Man, she didn't cry when Iron Man died. She cried at how Peter Parker and Pepper reacted. She cried when Morgan was shown the video from Stark.
These reactions, when done well, are going to create an emotional impact, and sometimes this emotional impact is worse/better when it comes to a character's reaction.
An example from my own adventures reading. In Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, I didn't cry because Fred died. I cried because of the reactions of the Weasley family. On its own, death in fiction means almost nothing. In most stories, death is going to happen.
In fiction, death is common. It's even common in real life as much as we'd rather deny it. On its own, the death doesn't have much of an impact. But, rather, it's the remaining living characters (in real life, the people who are living) that'll really make that death mean something.
That isn't to say that death is meaningless. It isn't. But in fiction, that death has to mean something. It has to impact the characters, sometimes even the plot. It has to help move the story. It can't just be a stagnant piece of information that happened. You don't want a character's death to be forgettable and have done nothing.
7. Make Their Death Unpredictably Predictable
This may seem confusing at first. I'm going to get there.
What I mean is that the character's death shouldn't come out of left field, but it shouldn't be completely predictable either. This is where foreshadowing comes in handy.
There are cliches with this though. Unless your reader is young and hasn't caught on to a lot of death cliches in books, I wouldn't foreshadow in a predictable way.
A predictable way would be the main character promising another character something. This usually doesn't end well and results in a death of some kind.
I have two examples of this. One is The Titan's Curse (book 3 in Percy Jackson and the Olympians) by Rick Riordan. This book introduces Nico and Bianca Di Angelo, two siblings who are revealed at the end of the book to be children of Hades.
Sometimes promises are made to a character, and if the reader has seen it before, then they know that character is going to die.
Percy promises Nico that he will watch out for Bianca and make sure nothing will happen to her. What happens? Percy can't keep this promise, Bianca dies, and Nico gets mad at Percy at the end of the book.
This same thing happened in City of Glass. Not long before Max Lightwood dies, Clary teaches him how to read his Naruto manga, then promises to take him to Forbidden Planet, a comic book store located in New York City.
This promise isn't fulfilled either. This is a cliche used sometime before a character dies. Something is promised to the character that dies, or a character who's related/friends with the character who dies.
If a reader knows this cliche, then this is one way to make a character's death predictable. Instead, I'd recommend trying subtle ways of foreshadowing a character's death, something that makes sense but something that can't easily be predicted.
Things like death symbols are more obvious as well. Things like crows and that sort of thing. These types of symbols can be overused. There are other animals that symbolize death as well as plants and types of weather.
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