How to write character death that really affects the reader? Making Readers Feel Emotion Over A Character Death | EelKat on Writing Believable Characters 

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For me, as a reader, the death itself is not the thing that gets to me. A death on the page, is just yet another death on the page. One of many. Not the first I've seen, nor will it be the last. Fast death. Slow death. Sudden death. Grizzly death. Doesn't matter. Means nothing to me. It's just another death. Death gallops across the pages of books.

And I've seen more death in real life, so, it's hard to impress me with your fictional death that is hugely inaccurate to how real death is. 

I hate it when someone who has never witnessed a murder, writes a murder, because someone like me who has witnessed multiple murders, can pick your inaccuracies apart.

It's very difficult for you as a writer to convince me as a reader, that your characters were ever alive enough for me to care about them, to begin with. So character deaths, almost never impact me at all.

This is not to say the death is meaningless, it is just that death happens so often in the types of novels I read (Fantasy and Murder Mystery), that is become difficult for the death to strike me and have me cry over the loss of yet another character.

What affects me, as a reader, about a character death, is the people left behind. Here are some examples of things I've read over the years that affected me:

• The mother who has said nothing for days, to in shock to respond, then finally collapses at the funeral in front of the open coffin. Her, I'll feel for. Her, I'll cry for. Her heart is breaking.
• The lover/spouse left behind. Putting on a brave face in public, and breaking down in tears in private. Smiling in church, and while running to the bathroom cutting their wrists desperate to join their loved one.
• The woman who can no longer eat strawberries because he brought her strawberries every day and the sight or smell of strawberries fills her with sadness now, knowing he'll never bring her strawberries again.
• The man who plasters his wall with thousands of photos of his dead wife, and sits all night, every night, for years on end, playing her favorite song over and over again, sinking ever deeper into an inner madness he can not escape, yet to the rest of the world he seems unchanged, uncaring, almost as though unaffected by her death. The more he hides his pain from the world, the more pain you know he feels.
• The lover/spouse left behind. Standing in the kitchen, holding a plate. Time to cook dinner, it's almost time for him to come home from work, dinner is nearly finished, she's setting the table to have it ready before he gets home... and now she's holding the plate, staring at it, unable to set it on the table.... remembering he died last week. He's not coming home for dinner. Her brief lapse back into the daily routine, forgetting his death, going back to her normal life, and the sudden snap back to the reality of her situation... is horrifying.

My personal favourite....

• The man who goes back in time, again, and again, and again, and against, hundreds, perhaps thousands of times, trying everything he can think of to stop her death, but never able to do anything other the change the way in which she died.
• Rescue her from being hit by a car, only to watch her fall through thin ice.
• Rescue her from walking on the frozen lake, only to watch her die in a burning building.
• Rescue her from the burning building, only to watch her gunned down in a drive by shooting...
• He always saves her, every time, and just as he's about to go back to his own time, the last thing he sees, is her dying yet again. He can never save her, because it was her death that drove him to create a time machine, thus her death is now fixed in time and all he can change is how she died, because had she not died, he would never have gone back in time. He's now trapped in a time loop, driving himself mad trying to stop a death, that he can never stop, and now tortures himself watching her die not once, but hundreds of times in hundreds of ways

In each of these cases, it's not the death that strikes emotion, but rather, the emptiness the one left behind is experiencing. The reaction of the person left behind. Their lives torn apart. Their normacy shattered. Their desperate to make things right. They fight against a thing they can not change. Watching them struggle and fail to come to terms with the death. It's their failure to regain any ability to function normally that is heartbreaking. Watching them as they mentally and emotionally fall apart, is the thing that makes me feel for them. Seeing them suffer. Seeing their mind unable to go back to living a normal life. That's the thing that always gets to me. Seeing the person struggling to get through the small everyday tasks, while being reminded at every turn, the person who normally did those tasks with them, is never coming home. Watching them struggle to come to terms with the emptiness that now exists in their life. That to me, is far more powerful then the death itself.

The character death never affects me, but watching the survivor go mad in their attempts to adjust to life without someone they loved - that always affects me very strongly.

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After many years, this page gets an update... it's now 2021 and I have more to say on the topic of killing off characters...

>>>Was thinking about Game of Thrones (Song of ice and fire) and how the author (George RR Martin) kills off important characters quickly. This is pretty powerful since it sets the tone that no-one is safe, which makes the reader more alert and curious if they can get hints as to who dies next, and gives believability to a brutal world.

I do not know Game of Thrones or George RR Martin. I assume George RR Martin is the one who wrote Game of Thrones based on your wording, but this is Reddit after all, so I'm not I can go by that. 99% of the so called writers on the writing subreddit wouldn't know grammar if it hit them in the face, so it tends to be a toss up wither they actually mean the book and the author go together. But your post sounds like you mean he is the author of the book you mentioned so I will assume that he is. 

>>>It's a meta-stake of sorts, a stake the reader gets - which character should I avoid becoming invested in or care about? What if that person dies next?

What the fuck?

You would really avoid becoming invested in someone because they might die?

Go fucking shoot yourself you fucking cunt. People like you make me sick. You don't deserve to live. Go die! So we don't have to worry about caring about you.

How's it feel, to have no one care about you, because you might die?

You bastard out of hell.

People like you is what's wrong with the world.

People like you is why so many senior cats and dogs die in kennels... 14,000 of them every single day. because people like you don't want to take the time to be invested in someone that is going to die so.

Well, yay for fucking America, no longer home of the free, too busy being home of the me.

Selfish ass bastards that don't give a shit about no one is what's wrong with America.

>>>It's a meta-stake of sorts, a stake the reader gets - which character should I avoid becoming invested in or care about? What if that person dies next?

>>>The issue here is that it's dangerous too, I feel, because this can also make the reader averse to actually becoming invested in the story. So it's a risky gamble, isn't it?

Why? Because someone's feeling might get hurt?

No one ever gave a shit about my feelings.

Shit happens. Grow the fuck up. 

If readers can't take the death of a fictional character, well, than they are some real big deep shit when death comes rolling into their real life ain't they?

Death happens.

And the world is fucked up lately.

Have you seen how young people talk about death?

"My gran passed last night."

"Had to put my dog down."

"Put my cat to sleep."

Fucking pansies.

Your gran passed? Passed what? A Kidney stone? Did she drive passed the barn? You fucking retard. Learn how to use words. Your so used to every word out of your mouth being a lie that you can't even speak the truth when your grandmother died. Yeah, I said it. Your grandmother died, grow some balls and say it.

You murdered your dog and your cat. Stop lying about what you did and speak the truth for once in your life. Your a murderer. Admit it. Stop trying to make it sown nice, They ain't down stairs and they ain't sleeping.

Learn to fucking use words accurately.

Death isn't something to hide. But that's exactly what's happening.

No even has funerals any more. They shove dead bodies in a fucking stove and put the ashes in a jar.

So scared to face death, they can't even bury their dead.

What the fuck happened to this world.

We live in a society today, that hides from death. They only want to see the roses.

You all need a fucking reality check. This whole fucking planet needs a reality check.

And we authors, it's our job to show society for the fucked up place it is.

Far too many authors today, write for the market.

Not enough authors write from the heart.

Too many authors are far too worried they won't get sales, they won't make money, they won't get fame, if they upset anyone, make someone cry, break a poor little snowflake.

Fuck the snowflakes.

People don't want to feel anything any more.

Every thing must be sweet plumpkin lovey doveies.

Well I don't write what the world wants to see, I write the world for what t is.

We live in a dark world full of pain and suffering and no cares about any ne else. So that's what I write. I write pain. I write suffering. I write people hurting while surrounded by millions of other people who don't give a shit.

I write rape.

I write suicide.

I write death.

I write murder.

Why?

Because I write what I know.

I know pain.

I know suffering.

I know rape.

I know suicide.

I know death.

I know murder.

And I wrap it up in pretty pink covers to mock the word's rose colored glasses. To mock the reader who buys a book for it's cover, and thinks they will get pretty pink rose colored lovey dovys and than they read the words inside, and find it dripping with darkness, suicide, murder, rape, and all the evils that are humanity.

>>>It's a meta-stake of sorts, a stake the reader gets - which character should I avoid becoming invested in or care about? What if that person dies next?

>>>The issue here is that it's dangerous too, I feel, because this can also make the reader averse to actually becoming invested in the story. So it's a risky gamble, isn't it?

The world ain't nice.

The world ain't pretty.

The I write the world the way it is.

I don't write happy endings.

Characters die.

Characters are murdered.

Characters, main characters even, commit suicide.

Murderers walk free.

Families see no justice.

Look at Quaraun. He overdoses himself, slices his wrists, how many times has he tried to kill himself? I'm the author and I don't even know.

Look at BoomFuzzy, his suicide was detailed out line by line, step by step, the description of his death goes on for 8 pages in bloody detail.

I don't sugar coat anything.

Don't be fooled by the pink covers. The Quaraun series has won awards for being among the darkest novels ever published. It's one of the few series so dark, so disturbing, so gory, so bloody, so focused on putting suicide in your face that the American government issued a court order declaring I was required to put M18+ book rating on the cover.

And if the reader can't stomach it, will that's their problem, not mine.

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