Do they exist?

[the neurovore of Zur-En-Aargh]

I suppose it's different if you're writing in an existing universe where people have expectations and attachments to characters already, but I have zero attachment to doing that and almost zero to reading it (honourable exception being John M. Ford's two Star Trek novels, and The Final Reflection is an excellent Klingon historical novel with negligible connection to anything else Trek unless you count Bones McCoy appearing as a baby, and How Much for Just the Planet ? is "Well, Paramount fixed that loophole, but nothing in this here contract says a Trek novel can't be a musical comedy/farce ending in a pie-fight.. " )

If the characters are yours, their emotional significance is yours to control from day one, so setting up what your protag believes and cares about such that her death is the logical conclusion of plot and emotional arc should be workable; it would stroke me as a thing needing to be set up from the beginning, though.  Not flagged, but set up.

(One of the works I have out in the wild seeking a home features a protagonist for whom achieving the victory he has put his life into contains as an inevitable consequence rendering him totally obsolete and leaving him no place in the world; that was a lot of effort to set up and make work, though I think it does now.)

[the neurovore of Zur-En-Aargh]

And the above parentheses shows at least one reader's reaction to a poorly executed character.  

I saw what you did with that ambiguity there.

[the neurovore of Zur-En-Aargh]

I do know that if you try to be honest with your story and not force it into some particular desired shape or other, you'll probably be better off.  Or, conversely, be technically skilled enough to start with the perfect desired shape, and then mold the story into that shape from the beginning.  To me it seems the second option is a whole lot harder to manage, but it may depend on the author.

Sorry, for the double post; cut and past went odd there.

I was going to say, this seems to be an either/or based on ways of working that exclude a middle that has been feeling to work for me.

Which is, that I usually start with a key scene or scenes and know how they should play.  And the very first thing I ask of a character is "is this a person who will, absolutely utterly to the core of who they are, have to behave the way this scene needs when it arrives ?"  There's no forcing story into shape there, nor is there molding story to shape, because the shape of the story and of the people depend on each other so thoroughly that it can't be any other way. (Bits in between may flex, but the key scens don't.)

I strongly recommend Daniel Abraham's Long Price Quartet because they make this particular angle very visible.  They are set in a not-like-anything-else fantasy world with distinct and unique cultures and magic, and the people in it are really amazingly perfect products of culture and surroundings such that it's impossible to believe people like that arising in any other setting or being anyone else than who they are.

[library lasciel]

I saw what you did with that ambiguity there.

 

Thanks very much for the suggest.  I have the hardest time finding new stuff to read.  It's like a curse.

 

I suppose I was thinking more along the lines of a general story archetype stage for the second way of writing I mentioned.  Like - "I want to write a tragedy" or "I want to write a comedy of manners" and then finding themes and character types who would easily morph into those stories without losing their core ideas.

I can easily see it being more of a combined process during creation - I was only thinking about how I would do it myself if I had to try.  I can't seem to get past individual scenes anyway.   

[Kris_W]

If you give a manuscript to your beta readers and some of them send back brief e-mails or post-it notes on the hardcopy that say “Don’t kill off character X”, then you should not kill the character off.

If you give a manuscript to your beta readers and only one of them calls you as he / she is still reading the manuscript, crying or swearing at you, and follows up with incessant emails, phone calls and a stink bomb in your writing room cursing your name for killing the character off, well, that’s when the character must die.